The Psychoanalytic Setting: A Genealogy

Abstract

The so-called psychoanalytic setting counts today as a familiar ritual, forming a set of conventions that are weil known, if not from first-hand experience, then at least from popular novels and films. Adopting an historical-anthropological viewpoint, this article unfolds a genealogy of Freud's famous invention. A genealogical approach of this kind has to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which psychoanalysis emerged at the end of the 19th century. lt is argued that Freud's conception of a certain spatial distribution of patient and doctor in the consulting room was not governed by either technical or theoretical necessity, but was rather the result of social and material reconfigurations which can be trac- ed back to the history of experimental hypnotism.