Cases and History

At the heart of the transmission of psychoanalytic experience there surely lie two related but not identical models and vicissitudes: an oral form of knowledge and transmission, represented by the personal analysis, and a written form of knowledge and transmission — i.e. the theoretical form that is embodied in texts, in participation in scientific debate, and so on.1 So the question immediately arises whether clinical cases can be included only within the dimension of teaching or the demonstration of theory, or only in the sharing of an experience and a process of individual elaboration, or whether, instead — precisely because the analytic material thereby collected serves as a particular activator of our experiences on the couch — it does not ultimately assume willy-nilly a configuration half-way between the two.

One need merely consider what happens when a clinical case is presented, when the need to interpret immediately arises between the participants; this condition can of course be seen either in terms of the traumatic aspect, the irruption of unconscious material (even if transferred to the secondary level) and the requirement that it be confronted; or alternatively as an interesting example of the construction à plusieurs of the clinical case and its implications. A kind of primal scene from which one was excluded thus becomes a field into which our personal theories, our fantasies, the intersecting play of identifications, and the like are introduced. Is this in fact a mere theoretical discussion, or are we perhaps somehow influenced and driven towards a different, other, vision of things, which calls into question some of our personal assumptions? At the same time, and conversely, are we not almost automatically compelled to bend the clinical material presented to our need for consistency and our personal Weltanschauung, thus too promptly incorporating the event and neutralizing any possibility of questioning or revising our habitual ways of thinking in co