You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Running through all the discussions in this issue is the question of the relation between analytic interpretations and veridical truth. Rousseaux-Mosettig confronts this issue more directly, perhaps,
than some of the other authors, by asking what sort of narrative the psychoanalytic case history consists in.
The author cites Freud's many comments on the difficulties that he encounters in communicating a case and in presenting his analytic concepts, his humorous complaints about not achieving what he was trying to do, and his laments about his poor literary talents. Sometimes a case history begins to sound like a novel or fictional stories, and sometimes he reports direct observations not influenced by theoretical expectations. Even though Freud uses the word report, he lets it be understood that he is not reporting what is present directly before his eyes, the facts and nothing but the facts, as a historian might. And yet, on the other hand, Freud is haunted by a concern about giving a literal and complete account that will permit the reader to form his own verifiable conviction.
Taking notes and using other memory aids might help, but these can hinder as well. The patient might not like to know that he is the object of a scientific study and may be the subject of an eventual publication. But more important, the analytic material itself would be lacking. The analyst, preoccupied by the need to retain what his patient tells him and led by theoretical expectations, will eliminate the chaotic elements that are as yet without connection—new elements that arise without effort in memory when the patient brings new facts. The analyst would not hear anything but what he has known in advance. There is thus an obvious divergence of method between research and treatment. Even if their results converge, the technique that is acceptable for one is contrary to that of the other.
Freud takes up a comparison between the analytic narrative and the historical account in his Introduct