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John Forrester died in November 2015, and was working on Thinking in Cases until near the end of his life. In her preface to the book, his widow, Lisa Appignanesi, mentions that she compiled the final chapter from a lecture and his notes. “The sources he brought to bear were always vast,” she writes. “Mimicking his agility in argument, let alone imagining a position he might arrive at, is a little like playing chess with a master when you barely know the rules of the game” (p. x). Adam Phillips comments in his introduction that Forrester “seemed to have read everything” (p. xiii). Forrester was indeed a polymath, and the scope of his erudition presented a challenge for me, as I imagine it will for many readers. This is a book that requires careful reading.
The initial challenge the reader faces is that, with the exception of Forrester's opening chapter, each essay in the book deals with a particular “case,” with extensive reference to a background text. Some of these texts I had read, and some I had not. For example, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the central text cited in chapter 2, “On Kuhn's Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm.” My own reading of Kuhn's classic work was too far in the past to fully inform a present reading of Forrester's chapter. Should I then first read or re-read these background texts, or press on without doing so? Of necessity I pressed on. Although acquaintance