Please join the Van Hunnick History Department for a guest lecture by Andreas Mayer, the 2025–26 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor.

Location: SOS 250

Naked Souls: The Libertine Past of the Psychoanalytic Couch
Freud’s couch counts today undoubtedly as one of the most famous pieces of furniture in the world and has come to represent the practice of psychoanalysis tout court. In contrast, the longue durée history of this emblematic therapeutic vehicle has not yet been explored in full depth. Whereas Freud himself gestured toward hypnosis as the initial context from which he derived the key elements of the psychoanalytic setting, the virtues and vices associated with reclining furniture point to a more complex genealogy leading to the beginning of the 18th century. In my presentation, I will demonstrate to what extent the sofa figured in the libertine literature already as an emblematic vehicle for moral and psychological analysis and discuss how the history of the psychoanalytic couch can be written from a very different perspective.

Andreas Mayer is a historian of science and research professor (directeur de recherche) at the CNRS teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2025–2026 he serves as the Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor hosted by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Recent awards and fellowships include the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2019-2020) and the Villa I Tatti in Florence (2024-2025). His research focuses on the historyof the human sciences since 1750 and their multiple relations to literature and the arts. He is the author of several monographs, notably Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013), and most recently La Marche. Histoire d’une fascination savante (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2025). His current work as an editor and translator includes a new French and German annotated edition of the ‘Analytical Studies’ of Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy.

The USC Dornsife-EHESS Partnership is a multi-year scholarly cooperation agreement with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Housed in the Levan Institute for the Humanities, the partnership aims to build ties between scholars at the two institutions and to support collaborations in research and teaching.