ABSTRACT
In Freud's consulting room, analyst and analysand were allowed to talk about Freud's cultural interests and to assess in psychoanalytic terms which cultural and historical interests could direct the patient. The psychiatrist Smiley Blanton writes that the founder of psychoanalysis used to loan and donate his books to his analysands. The anthropologist Abram remembers that one day, Freud took him to the room near his study to show him his eucalyptus trees. Winnicott describes Freud's clinical setting as, this work was to be done in a room, not a passage, a room that was quiet and not liable to sudden unpredictable sounds, yet not dead quiet and not free from ordinary house noises. The interiors of European studies are less illuminated than the American ones probably due to the old age of the buildings and to the historical necessity of having reduced spaces and little communication with the external world in order to conserve heat.
