This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 1889, Sigmund Freud was still relatively new in his field. He's what we'd call a pre-Froidian

Freud. He was 33 years old and he was working as an assistant to another psychiatrist.

And he hadn't had any of his big ideas yet. But he was about to. That's producer Anne Heperman.

Freud was mostly practicing hypnosis at the time. It was cutting edge, though still kind of a

controversial treatment. So one day Freud gets a new patient. A very wealthy woman,

Fannie Moser. That's Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, and a Freud historian.

Freud's new patient was struggling from all kinds of ailments, hysteria, sleeplessness,

pain, and odd ticks. Fannie Moser had lots of doctors.

So Fannie Moser would come in and Freud would have her lay down on the couch, just like he did with

his other patients. Freud wasn't the only person using a couch during hypnosis, but he particularly

needed it to get people into a more relaxed state. But he wasn't a very good hypnotist. He was

kind of a clumsy hypnotist. So once Moser was on the couch,

Freud would be saying, you know, you're getting sleep, you're getting sleep, and she'd be saying,

no, I'm not. I'm not sleeping at all. So while Fannie is laying there, not getting sleepy,

she talked. At first, Freud would interrupt her with his theories, but Fannie just wasn't having it.

She wanted to talk. First, let me tell you my stories. And then, uh, being the light goes on,

Freud has a revelation. If you just let patients talk and don't say anything, they will let down

their defenses, and the unconscious will be revealed. This is the moment when the pre-Froody

and Freud becomes the Freudian Freud. And the Freudian Freud's new techniques and theories for

therapy would come to be called psychoanalysis. Most new theories in the world do not get assigned

their own piece of furniture, but this one ultimately inexorably did the couch. If psychoanalysis had

...