The Seba library treats Couch in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Samuels, Andrew, Grof, Stanislav, Campbell, Joseph).
What is central is the attitude to transferences of infantile origin, and to regression. Those who use the couch work with these at length; those who use the chair may seek to dissolve them.
Samuels argues that the couch/chair controversy encodes a fundamental theoretical split about infantile transference and regression, not merely a preference about physical arrangement.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
In the first therapeutic LSD sessions I conducted I asked the patients to lie on a couch, and I sat in an armchair situated near the head of the couch so that they could not easily see me.
Grof records how the classical couch arrangement, borrowed directly from psychoanalytic convention, proved structurally incompatible with LSD-assisted psychotherapy and had to be abandoned.
, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980thesis
It soon became obvious that this arrangement was not appropriate for LSD psychotherapy and I was not able to maintain it for more than a few sessions. The nature of the experience and of the process seemed to be incompatib
A parallel account confirms Grof’s finding that the couch-and-invisible-analyst configuration was structurally at odds with the phenomenology of psychedelic therapeutic process.
, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980supporting
Fierz (1977) pointed out the paradox in analysis by which formalised structure serves as the background to a release of elusive and fluid psychic contents.
This passage contextualizes the couch debate within the broader paradox of analytic structure — formal setting as the necessary container for the release of fluid psychic material.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
When the Prince of the Lonesome Island had remained six nights and days on the golden couch with the sleeping Queen of Tubber Tintye, the couch resting on wheels of gold and the wheels turning continually
Campbell cites a mythic golden couch as a symbol of enchanted stasis and otherworldly liaison, tangentially illustrating the couch’s ancient archetypal resonance as a site of liminal encounter.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015aside
Here she is pictured as a golden-haired matron in a flowered robe, seated on a red velvet couch in the midst of a lush garden.
The Empress archetype is depicted enthroned on a velvet couch, invoking the couch as an iconographic seat of fertile, maternal authority in archetypal imagery.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside