Introduction

Our theme in this issue is the psychoanalytic case report. The articles by Dufresne, Leonoff, Levet, Levin, Movahedi, Palacios-Boix, Rocha Barros, Steinberg, and Vasta each focus on a singular case experience. In addition, we have included an excellent discussion of da Rocha Barros's paper by Coleen Gold. Her response stands on its own as a contribution. We also include the excellent film discussion by Palacios-Boix in this list of clinical articles because, while it is technically an exception (not about a live patient), it does in a way “prove the rule,” that there is an intimate relationship between narrative form and the conceptual activities that contribute to the psychoanalytic process and the formation of psychoanalytic hypotheses and theories.

Many psychoanalysts would still like to believe that our various theories of the mind, psychological development, and analytic technique are based directly on “clinical data,” and only clinical data. Whether we conceptualize this in terms of inductive or deductive processes of verification, it oversimplifies the relationship between our clinical impressions, our clinical training, our theoretical constructions, and our own personalities.

In the 1890s and beyond, Freud somehow managed to straddle the great divide between the romantic expressionism of humanistic culture and the reductionism of disciplined inquiry typical in the science of his day. As he obsessed over finding a causal explanation of hysteria, he also noticed the associative non-linearity of mental activity, including his own. He made beautiful efforts to organize the chaos he was actually observing, in the spirit of providing some kind of guide for clinicians. He would make intriguing statements like “The logical chain corresponds not only to a zig-zag, twisted line, but rather to a ramifying system of lines” (1893-1895, p. 290). He formulated the concept of overdetermination: “The idea … selected for the production of a symptom … has been called up by a co