It’s a punchline in and of itself: a mobster walks into a psychiatrists office. So goes the opening scene in The Sopranos, a black polo’d Tony Soprano sitting inside a timber veneer’d and vertical blind’d psychiatrists’ office stylised within an inch of International Style. Tony observes of himself “I’ve been thinking… It’s good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end, and the best is over.” It’s 1999 in this office. 9/11 hasn’t happened yet, mass mobilization of capital markets through neo-liberalism is peaking, the Cold War has thawed, and Carolyn Bessette is still alive. Camera pans and between the patient and the doctor, in the centre of the frame, there it is: the divan.
Divan’s, Chaise’s Daybed’s, Settee’s, whatever the nomenclature, they’re not really the most usable piece of furniture. They don’t really slot into the domestic landscape as other pieces do, they don’t have the same practical profile of a table, a chair, or a bed. Their scale is large, yet only have the application for a single-person’s use, they don’t look seamless when placed in a parallel line to a wall, yet at a perpendicular or angled placement they take up too much room. They’re more of a nod, a wink, a signifier of style and status. Is that a Mies? A Le Corb?? A XVII e siècle French Daybed??? I asked my dad about the chaise lounge my grandmother had in her bedroom when she was alive, and he called it a dog bed covered in so much dust you needed an antihistamine to sit on it.
The motif of the therapist sitting behind the patient lying on a divan, the linchpin to pretty much every single Woody Allen joke and New Yorker cartoon ever created, was birthed, along with psychoanalysis itself, by Sigmund Freud. Originally gifted to him from a patient, its original form of what we now know as the prototypical therapy-divan was actually a simpler Biedermeier sofa, a fashionable beige linen staple in the late 19th century. Freud appropriated the beige by laying a Persian wool carpet over it with jewel-coloured chenille pillows to create the object we now know. It’s an object which doesn’t necessarily pertain so much to the “epitome of ‘Oriental’ hedonism” as historian Marina Warmer wrote (also, can we please stop using the term ‘Oriental’?), but rather something you might see in a decades-established grungy sharehouse, or a listing for a free sofa on Facebook Marketplace. Like a lived-in, aging human body, or the formation of a million-year-old rock, the sofa has a creased, terrestrial quality to it. Its folds, lumps, and textures are imprints of experiences and revelations. To lie in it would be to bite into Isaac Newton’s apple, and I love to dance with the devil.
Freud had used divans before the days of psychotherapy, experimenting with everything from electrotherapy to massage and therapeutic baths, and eventually abandoning those techniques due to their little evidence of success in his patients. It wasn’t until his postulation of ‘free association’ taking hold within his practice that the divan really took its place in the spotlight. Freud believed that the technique of asking a patient to lie down, without making any eye contact, to say what readily came to mind, could provide new insights for the analyst. The divan helped create an environment that was both clinical yet intimate, allowing for the patient to unravel the skeins from their unconscious mind -- while Freud could beat a chenille cushion with his fist in the background. When Freud had to flee the Nazi’s in Austria in 1938 and moved his family and his practice to the UK, the divan fled with him too.
The carpet that was placed over the divan, a 19th century Persian Qashqa'i wool rug that was also gifted to Freud, sows seeds in other cultural references. Like the pre-Disney trope of the Magic Carpet. From the Middle Eastern folk tales One Thousand and One Nights, it is written of the fantastical carpet that Whoever sitteth on this carpet and willeth in thought to be taken up and set down upon other site will, in the twinkling of an eye, be borne thither, be that place nearhand or distant many a day's journey and difficult to reach – a little wordy, yes, but which ostensibly reads as whoever sits on this carpet (and for arguments sake, Freud’s couch) and wants/wills to be transported elsewhere will be taken to that place no matter how far or difficult it is to get to. There is a certain symmetry between a magic carpet taking you wherever you desire in the world, gravity-free, and desire’s dominion over time and space in the practice of free association in psychoanalysis, no? Thinking about Freud’s theories and how they celebrated the meaningfulness of the slip of the lip, the pun, and the double entrendre, it’s perhaps ironic, intentionally or not, that far from sweeping things under the carpet, Sigmund Freud lifted his carpet off the ground and into the hotseat.
Gertrude Stein wrote that a rose is a rose is a rose, as in, things are what they are. And that might be true for flora, but I tend to disagree when it comes to the interior space. Is a couch is a sofa is a daybed is a chaise is a divan? It’s certainly not as poetic, but pieces of furniture can have loaded symbolism and simulacrum from what we may first assign them to be, reality and representation don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Years ago, I bought off ebay a lovely brown leather chaise for about $200. It’s the most comfortable thing to sit in, and yet, I never use it. It sits delinquently next to the television in my apartment, orphaned of a proper place for it to sit and be used. I find that for a piece of furniture, it demands too much of me. It asks me to recline my entire body in its embrace and divorce me of my ability to achieve most other tasks, except for perhaps, looking up into the ceiling and thinking. I found out years later that it was designed by Tord Björklund for IKEA in the 80s, and its vintage value these days is much higher than what I paid for it. I wondered why they’re being sold for upwards of a couple thousand dollars when they’re pretty unusable in a day-to-day spectrum. But then again, like outdoor furniture, I suspect they can demand a higher price, because you can assume that the person who buys it has the square meterage and the money, or the garden, to accommodate it. I would always joke that I owned the archetypal psychoanalysis chair, but I think the joke’s on me.
Freudian psychotherapy remained the prevailing wisdom in psychiatric treatment until the 1970s, but the profession experienced a pivotal change as cheaper and shorter methods arrived, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, and as those pivots took place, backs were turned to the divan, which has mostly fallen into disuse. Sort of like the chaise I have sitting in the apartment I live in, disused, displaced, and as I write this, staring at me.
-Antonia
—————Alongside this newsletter, I made a very rudimentary IG filter. Try it if you like:
