Freud's Case Studies and the Locus of Psychoanalytic Knowledge

Reading through Sigmund Freud's case studies in chronological order is a most instructive experience for anyone interested in the intellectual history of psychoanalysis. One quickly sees, for example, how Freud's technique evolved from the methodical and rather intrusive attempts to dispel particular symptoms that we observe in Studies on Hystem'a ( 1 895) to the method of free association that he describes in his report on the case of Dora (1905). Or one sees how Freud's conception of the transference developed, from the primitive notion of transference as something to be avoided or dispelled, to the mature conception of transference as the invaluable center of analysis, the very phenomenon that has to be analyzed (again in the analysis of Dora). In this paper 1 shall review Freud's case studies with still another trajectory in mind: how Freud's sense of the significance of his written case studies themselves evolved. 1 shall show how his inital embarrassment over the necessity of describing his cases in great detail was eventually supplanted by a confidence that his case studies were important vehicles of psychoanalytic knowledge. As his attitude changed, his initial anxiety about how other medical and natural scientific readers would adjudicate his cases was displaced by a willingness to assert delicate, tenuous hypotheses in his cases, largely for the benefit of the psychoanalytic community itself. And on a more abstract and perhaps less conscious level, the positivistic belief in the importante of theory and the objective verifiability of hypotheses that Freud had subscribed to from the time he had decided to study medicine was at least temporarily challenged by another view of knowledge, a view that 1 shall try to clarify in this paper.