Hello friends,
It’s been a while! How have you been? I’ve been between creative urges, extremely stressed out by the pending renovation of my office space and also taking a sunny vacation. I notice every time I have any extended break that in the space from my day-to-day thoughts and obligations, I am naturally and obsessively drawn to my studies of human design, so I think I will be writing a little more about this soon as I integrate some new beautiful learnings about variable. However, in the meantime, we should finish our discussion of consulting rooms. Let’s talk about Freud.
Sigmund Freud
The idea of the analyst’s office tends to conjure one image - that of Sigmund Freud’s famous consulting room, preserved in his home in London, where he spent his final days after being forced to flee the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938.
Freud’s room - with its couch, oriental rugs, maximalist approach to the display of artwork and a vast collection of books, antiques and figurines - is unquestionably iconic, and many analysts all over the world have mirrored its style in their own consulting spaces.
In Freud’s wake, how should we place our images of his ever-so-idiosyncratic consulting room when we are faced with the question of creating our own? Each must answer this question for themselves, but here’s my best attempt.
Tools of the trade
To start, Freud’s consulting room contains what one might consider the essential (or non-essential) trade tools of the profession. At the most banal baseline, we need somewhere to sit, our patients need somewhere to sit or lie, etc etc. Freud’s youngest son, Ernst L. Freud, was a successful design architect who was responsible for the creation of many private and public clinic psychoanalytic consulting spaces in Berlin and London in the 1920s and 30s. While many people have commented on the contrast between the younger Freud’s designs, with their minimalist features and sleek lines, and the fussy clutter of his father’s rooms, “on further inspection, the consulting rooms show that despite all the stylistic differences, Freud had studied closely the setting of his father’s consulting room and adapted those elements that the elder Freud had identified as essential for the psychoanalytic space” (Welter, for Cabinet Magazine). We might seek to emulate the younger Freud by keeping what is essential, but making it new again for the current time and our own preferences.
Community of saints
I also have a feeling that emulating aspects of the design of Freud’s consulting room offers us the opportunity to embed ourselves in his lineage in a way that might provide a sense of holding similar to that of a church or a spiritual place, connecting us to what Martin Sheen refers to as our “community of saints”. If we nod to our founding father in the design of our consulting space, we may offer ourselves feelings of belonging, pride, containment, grounding, safety and confidence that come of this cultural, emotional and intellectual connection through time. There is something in the atmosphere created by the signature analyst’s consulting room that says “we are here, in this special space, for a special reason”, that can also empower the work and strengthens its edges.
The individual therapist
But there is also the question of individual identity. Freud created his consulting room not as a fashion statement, culture icon or a blueprint for others, but primarily in service of his own particular aesthetic preferences, interests, and emotional and physical needs. It is hard for us to imagine, having marinated in the cultural imagery of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy for generations, but the now-iconic symbolism of his consulting room was once a new invention, and one born of an individual man’s interest in creating a work space that suited his own proclivities, so that he might optimise his productivity and success.
He used furniture (including the couch, and a custom-designed, one-of-a-kind desk chair commissioned for him by his daughter Mathilde to accommodate his idiosyncratic reading posture) that supported his personal comfort, energy and longevity, and surrounded himself with a collection of antiques and art that he loved. If there is one way we should seek to emulate him, it is in this process, not its product.
When investigated in all its parts, Freud’s office serves to remind us that the consulting room is firstly and primarily for the therapist, even more so than for the patient. While we often centre our focus around how therapeutic spaces cultivate comfort, safety and openness for our patients, it is also a reality that the therapist is the one living and dying within those four walls. In our offices, we listen, invite, come forward and move back; we eat, cry, write, fight, wonder, plan, work and recover. We exercise extraordinary restraint. We close the door behind patient after patient, sometimes pausing to close our eyes in relief, or grief, or both. We take off our shoes and lie down on the couch at the end of a long day. Given all this, I feel a deep desire that we accept what I see as the clearest invitation our founding father extends to us with his unapologetically strange and personalised office: to create a space for our work that supports us, with our own individual bodies, energies, nature and sensibilities.
In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate