Psychoanalytic Case Records

For the past six years, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis has introduced extensive record taking. In general, psychoanalysts have not been in the habit of making extensive records although occasionally analysts have done so. This is probably due to several reasons. In the first place, psychoanalysis in its earlier years opened up an observational field of such richness, that it sufficed to delineate and describe the more significant phenomena in the gross without concern for too much detail. These observations could be made quite adequately without extensive records. Then also, the making of notes or records was of no help in achieving therapeutic results and Freud had advised against note taking during treatment.1 This whole attitude of concentrating upon the clinical observation of real psychological phenomena in real human beings stood in healthy contrast to much of the old sterile psychiatric record taking. Now however, we have found psychoanalytic case records to be valuable in many ways and it may be worth while to publish this note on our experience with them.

At present the Institute has over one hundred rather complete records. We have found them extremely valuable in several ways. In the first place, although the general clinical features of a case are readily delineated without records, a precise detailed study of the material is possible only if it is preserved and can be reviewed at leisure. The fundamentals of the gross clinical descriptions are now established to such a degree that although many problems remain, it has become desirable and necessary to study the material in greater detail. In the second place, analysts have so far leaned over backwards