Word.ws English Dictionary

on the couch

on the couch prepositional phrase: undergoing psychological therapy or analysis.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Undergoing psychological therapy or analysis.
    • French: Did that background growing up in the American West, your time serving as a judge in the West, did that inform your approach to administrative law and your approach to these labyrinth of laws? / Gorsuch: David, I don’t know. I can’t put myself on the couch. I don’t know.2024 August 4, David French, “‘I Just Have Some Questions’: An Interview With Justice Gorsuch”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 22 Aug 2024

Origin of on the couch

From the trope of a mental health patient lying down on a couch before a therapist or psychologist.

Questions about on the couch

What does on the couch mean?
On the couch means undergoing psychological therapy or analysis.
What part of speech is on the couch?
On the couch is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the couch in the dictionary

  1. on the cheap
  2. on the clock
  3. on the club
  4. on the come
  5. on the contrary
  6. on the couch
  7. on the count of
  8. on the critical list
  9. on the crook
  10. on the cross
  11. on the cuff

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the couch (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “on the couch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_the_couch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.