Introduction

Carlo Ginzburg’s essay ‘Clues. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, first published in 1979, has been widely celebrated and debated both as a historiographical manifesto of the microhistorical approach and as a seminal contribution to the history of the human sciences (Ginzburg, 1989[1979]). At the core of what Ginzburg identified as an epistemological model based on conjectures starting from seemingly insignificant details was a surprising reading of Freud, placed here in the footsteps of anatomist and connoisseur Giovanni Morelli. A few years later, another essay was devoted to one of the most famous of Freud’s cases, the Wolf-Man case, proposing a bold reinterpretation by inserting the patient’s dream within the context of ancient folk beliefs about witches, werewolves and shamans (Ginzburg, 1989[1985]). The original terrain of Ginzburg’s microhistorical research then expanded into a highly ambitious work of comparative historical anthropology (Ginzburg, 1991[1989]). Although these often cited texts have marked our recent understanding of psychoanalysis, their more precise historiographical contribution and the specific problems which they brought to the fore for thinking its history and practice have rarely been spelled out in more general terms.1 This lack may be striking in the case of a historian who has declared that Freud’s work has always been an important model for his own work. One reason is