Commentary

In this discussion I will elaborate three general points: (1) psychoanalytic writing on the case study, to its detriment, has heretofore overlooked the stream of thought called pragmatism; (2) the case history is the vehicle par excellence for approaching and solving problems inherent in clinical work, and this is true for psychoanalysis as well as other applied disciplines, such as law (see Bromley 1986); (3) this plenary address by Michels is virtually a manifesto of pragmatism, though it does not identify itself as such.

Psychoanalysts have productively tackled the implications of several prevailing trends in current thought, such as postmodernism, the linguistic turn in the social sciences, and the rise of cognitive neuroscience. It is puzzling why the remarkable revival of pragmatism has escaped our notice, since this movement has become something of a cause célèbre. There is at least one proposal on the table suggesting that contemporary pragmatism can be an integrative alternative to two rather loud voices raised in the ongoing culture wars. The proposal, briefly stated, is that we combine the epistemological insights and value awareness of certain threads of postmodernism with the methodological and conceptual achievements of the positivist paradigm (Fishman 1999). The turn to pragmatism may also help untangle a tension in certain psychoanalytic writings on the case study prior to Michel's paper. Those writings, by no accident, stem from these same seemingly diametrical poles. On the one hand, Edelson's bid (1988) to find in the “fairly” written case study the possibility of classical Popperian hypothesis testing never found great currency in the analytic world of ideas, in part because it sought an epistemology that swept