Like novellas: On the psychoanalytic case
In 1895, writing up the case of Elisabeth von R., Freud paused to confess that “it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.” He consoled himself that “the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.”¹ More than a century later the strangeness has not worn off, whether for anyone who has read Freud’s cases closely or for the analyst who sits down to write one. Given that strangeness, it is all the more peculiar that psychoanalysis should transmit itself through cases more than through any other medium.
Freud handed on the discipline less by metapsychology than by a handful of histories — Dora, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man — and he handed the first of them on, by his own description, as a fragment. Metapsychology gives the concepts their system; the case is where they were worked out, and where they must answer, each time, to a particular history: the force of transference learned from Dora’s breaking off the treatment, the logic of obsession from the Rat Man’s tangle of debts, the primal scene, Freud’s most notorious construction, arrived at by way of a dream of wolves. Psychoanalytic training still proceeds by cases, brought to supervision or presented to a seminar, the case is how one’s work comes before others to be evaluated. In psychoanalysis the case does not illustrate a knowledge held elsewhere; it is clinical knowledge itself, in the form in which it can be written and passed on. What, then, is a case? And why should it play such a central role in the transmission of psychoanalysis?
The case is a form psychoanalysis did not invent. It belongs first to law and to medicine, where it names the juridical weighing of an act against a norm and the clinical weighing of a patient against a syndrome; historians have traced how psychoanalysis took it over from them. The legal case is decided, and the medical case is filed; the analytic case, as Freud confessed, reads like a story. It is, more explicitly than the others, a form of writing; literature is the neighbour it cannot disown. Freud’s two admissions name what I want to draw from the form: that it reads like a story, and that it lacks the stamp of science. Neither, I think, is the deficiency he half-took it for.
Take the first, that the case reads like a story. In André Jolles’s account of the elementary verbal forms, the case, the Kasus, is the one whose disposition is weighing: actions are measured against norms, and norms against one another, until a case can expose “a hole in the law.”² Its special character, Jolles writes, is that “it asks the question, but cannot give the answer.” It presents the weighing and leaves the judgment to us. Jolles also notices where the form tends: the case, he writes, “has a tendency to expand into an art form,” to become, as he adds, a novella. For Jolles, the novella tells its event for its own sake and no longer weighs it, and once a decision is given, “the case ceased to be a case.” The case lives at the border of literature, and yet crossing that border entirely would close it. Freud’s German is exact on this point: his case histories, he wrote, read wie Novellen, like novellas; not, that is, als Novellen, as novellas.
Steven Marcus, in a 1974 essay on Dora, shows the same pull at work in Freud’s writing. Freud titled the case a Fragment and insisted on its incompleteness, yet Marcus finds it “more complete and coherent than the fullest case studies of anyone else,” and calls Freud’s case histories “a new form of literature.” The coherence is not incidental. Freud, as Marcus reads him, took illness to be in part an incoherent story and cure the coming into possession of a coherent one, so the case history leans toward the novella. What keeps it from arriving is its material, as Freud sets it down, which, Marcus writes, “is always richer than the original analysis and interpretation that accompany it.”³ It is that surplus, rather than the polish of the writing, that brings us back to Freud’s cases, to read them again and to offer new readings of them, when the nosologies of his contemporaries have become documents for historians.
Take the second, that the case lacks the serious stamp of science. It lacks the stamp of one kind of science, the kind that subsumes the particular under a law, yet bears the stamp of another. Whatever psychoanalysis is as a science, it knows by way of the particular: the case is the form that holds a particular history without dissolving it into a universal it would merely instantiate.⁴ John Forrester proposed reasoning in cases as a style of reasoning in its own right, the one dominant in psychoanalysis: a style that, as John Stuart Mill had it, concludes “from particulars to particulars directly,” and whose knowledge, like that of a scientific exemplar, “cannot be rendered into propositional and thence universal form.”⁵ The medical case runs the other way. In descriptive psychiatry, that estranged cousin of psychoanalysis, the patient confirms the syndrome and appears only as the criteria they satisfy. The analytic case refuses that subsumption; it is not evidence for a rule but the thing itself.
The second admission produces the first. Because the case must hold to the particular, it cannot resolve, either into a general truth or into a finished story; it stays open, on the border of the literary, irreducible to a science of laws. The tension Marcus found is, then, the case’s own: it leans toward a coherent story and yet must refuse that coherence for the particular’s sake. The refusal, though, is not the case’s alone. Lacan, for his part, never made coherence the aim of analysis: early on he could describe it as the subject’s assumption of their own history, a history restored in speech rather than a story made to cohere; later, as an encounter with what, at the kernel of the symptom, cannot be said. A case that will not close into a story is, in this sense, faithful to the analysis it reports.⁶ Freud’s consolation, read again, is less an apology than a thesis: it is the nature of the subject, and not the writer’s preference, that gives the case its form. The case cannot be closed because the subject itself is divided; the task of the case is to preserve that division, not to resolve it.
Notes
1. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 2.
2. André Jolles, Simple Forms (1930), trans. Peter J. Schwartz (Verso, 2017).
3. Steven Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History” (1974), in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd ed. (Columbia University Press, 1990).
4. A finer distinction, between the particular and the singular, is drawn by Luis Izcovich in The Clinical Case in Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective (Routledge, 2025); here the coarser opposition, the particular against the universal, is enough.
5. John Forrester, Thinking in Cases (Polity, 2017).
6. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (Norton, 2006); and The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII (1975–76), trans. A. R. Price (Polity, 2016).