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It is now widely acknowledged that Freud was, among many other things, a master story-teller, and that psychoanalysis is, by and large, a discipline in which “one achieves a narrative redescription of reality” (Schafer, 1980, p. 50). But the resonance between literary and psychoanalytic discourse does not end here; for, as scholars have noted, yet another order of narrative activity is entailed when the analyst seeks to redescribe this redescription by writing a psychoanalytic case history—a particular kind of story capable of reframing and reconstructing the patient's account of his illness together with the analyst's interpretation and retelling of it. The originator of this genre was, of course, Freud; in his hands, as Steven Marcus (1974) notes, the case history “became something that it never was before” (p. 264). Inevitably, Marcus's observation prompts the question of what, in fact, the case history was before Freud took it in hand. How were patients with mental disorders, particularly those with hysteria, conceptualized and constructed as “cases”? What traditions of inquiry, representation, and authorship did Freud inherit from psychiatrists and neurologists, and how indeed did he depart from them?
As we will see, these traditions were informed by the construct of the “disease picture,” and to a much lesser extent, by that of the “life