The picture above shows Sigmund Freud’s famous couch. Notice his chair is behind the couch. Freud reportedly told friends that the chair was strategically placed because he couldn’t imagine being stared at for 8 hours. Now, it seems, the couch is in need of repair. The UK Guardian reported that the couch, which is at the Freud Museum, is falling apart and needs a facelift. The couch was given to Freud by as a gift from one of his patients, Madame Benvenisti, in about 1890. It went with him from Vienna to London when he fled the Nazis with his family in 1938. The couch is still to be found in what was his consulting room in his last home in Hampstead, which has become a museum in his memory.
Sigmund Freud had been living and practicing for nearly 47 years in the same apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. He saw patients 8 or more hours every working day. In his early days as a physician, Freud did not earn a lot of money. He was a neurologist and he relied on referrals from other physicians. Eventually Freud started to get get patients that physicians couldn’t handle, the “hysterics”. Freud would consult with patients for one hour and try to get to the root of the problem. It was definitely weird stuff at that time. By 1925 (about 14 years before his death) Freud was very popular amongst society’s elite who could afford the $25 an hour he charged (that’s about $4000 an hour in today’s world). Needless to say, the rest is history.
The Therapist's Couch 