Prologue

The Case Report Remains One of the Most Important Sources of psychoanalytic data. Every analyst from the beginning of his or her training has relied on the case report to learn, communicate, and to teach the technique and theory of psychoanalysis. Freud's case reports remain a pillar of psychoanalytic knowledge.

Yet the legitimacy of the case report as a source of data for research is not secure in psychoanalysis, because the data from a case report is derived from a narrative and does not conform to the empirical data used in the physical sciences. The narrative of a case report is phenominogical, involving a self that embraces the center of experience and an agency that embraces the center of action. A narrative is the result of experience, and is subjective. The cannons of science are directed towards the elimination of subjectivity and the influence of rhetoric on objective observation.

Historically, one approach to this incongruity was to minimize it. Freud described psychoanalysis as a science and wrote in accord with the cannons of science of the 19th and 20th centuries. He emphasized an objective perspective in his conceptualizations because of the patient's free associations that reflect the workings of the mind which the analyst is able to objectively observe.

Actually, an objective analyst observing the objective data of free association does not portray the source of data in a case report. Rather than objectivity that corresponds to a fixed reality that could be replicated or falsified, the case report is a subjective narrative where validity rests on its coherence.

In the 1970s, considerable attention was devoted to clarifying the place of psychoanalysis in physical and social sciences. Arguments were presented that psychoanalysis was devoted to the exploration of meanings, similar to hermeneutics, unlike physical science, which is devoted to causes. It was argued by some that the metapsychological systems of psychoanalysis had no relevance to clinical psyc