Case Histories

While Freud often resorted to the case history to support his thinking and confirm his views, he also drew support from literary examples. He was convinced that the psychic truth of fictional characters was no less real than that observed in analysis: the profound and fruitful intuition of certain creators makes it possible to portray immediately what psychoanalysts often take longer to understand. In substance, psychic truth and novelistic fiction are necessarily entwined.

Whereas for weeks a young woman had been recounting nothing but nightmares that paralysed her and the analyst alike, on this day she recounted a dream, a real dream, which began just after her experience of anguish, as if the nightmare had taken place before. The dream began at the moment when the person who had abducted her let her go. She felt relieved, especially as he had not wanted to hurt her. He just wanted to give her a lesson! In the dream, she was nonetheless shocked and wanted to take revenge. The police confirmed that the villain was in reality the prosecutor: he led a double life, but there was insufficient proof to foil him. She decided, therefore, to take the matter in hand herself and went to provoke him, to taunt him, in a public library. The situation was once again coloured by a sense of disquiet: the villain had become invisible; she felt she was in danger and fled the library before realising that her child was still in there. This could have ended badly again, but she found her safe and sound, and then woke up, feeling relieved.

Here we have a dream that could provide the fabric for a detective story, but the most surprising thing was that the patient associated to it spontaneously. She named the protagonists: in the prosecutor she saw her father who had mistreated her in her childhood and who, above all, had abandoned her. The police made her think of her mother (the analyst had not immediately thought of this), who had not intervened sufficiently to protect her from her fath