Freud’s Famous Couch During psychoanalytic sessions, Freud’s patients would lie on the couch. Freud himself sat at the head of the couch, out of the patient’s view. Freud believed that this arrangement encouraged the patient’s free flow of thoughts, feelings, and images. Although some traditional psychoanalysts still have the patient lie on a couch, many psychoanalysts today favor comfortable chairs on which analyst and patient sit, facing each other.
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