Mea Culpa

San Franciso Peep Show (photo: Nick Grifton)

What the confessional and the psychoanalytic couch have in common is that the patient or penitent does not see the doctor or priest who's the repository of their memories and thoughts. In its early years psychoanalysis went to great pains to separate itself from religious and spiritual activities. As Freud’s treatment sought to establish itself it participated in what Max Weber would call “disenchantment”—in which transcendence deferred to scientism. In Freud and Man’s Soul, Bruno Bettelheim described the profession making landfall in the United States and immediately attempting to rid the German of its spiritual connotations. The word “parapraxis” is one of the examples Bettelheim used to demonstrate how clinical terms replaced their more poetic German antecedents. Still a famous analyst Robert Coles would write The Spiritual Life of Children. Peep shows were enormously prevalent in Times Square during the 70s and 80s, when New York was a wide-open city. The basic choreography of the peep show involves a token being inserted and a blind going up revealing a woman, usually attired in lingerie. The customer and model pickup up phones on which they talk to each other. Afterwards, an attendant mops up the floor of the booth with disinfectant. As farfetched as it may seem, the peep show, the confessional and the psychoanalytic couch all have something in common. In each an solitary soul is disburdening themselves of sins, memories or in the case of the peep show, semen. 

read "Sperm Count: Talk Dirty to Me" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

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