Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair

Abstract

The author explores the concept of comfort in relation to the setting. The concept of comfort, an unusual word in the psychoanalytic lexicon, describes the intuitive and complex experience of patient and analyst being together in the analytic office. The couch and the chair are not the only tools of the setting, but they are potential instruments with which to study the therapeutic process, both in high-frequency therapy and in lower-frequency treatments. To describe the transformations that an alternative experience of comfort can promote, the author looks at the intersection of this concept with the body–mind relationship and with the Bionian concept of binocular vision.

• Analytic relationship
• therapeutic process
• Bionian theory
• body–mind relationship
• binocular vision