Psychoanalysis, Narrative Psychology, and the Meaning of “Science”

Drawing especially on an important essay by Martin Heidegger, entitled “Science and Reflection” (1977), this article argues that case reports can, and should, be written for scientific use. This issue was brought to the fore early on in Freud's career, upon his realization that his own case studies read like short stories and that they lacked “the serious stamp of science.” Consoled by the fact that “the nature of the subject” was responsible for this and that more traditional scientific procedures “[led] nowhere,” he would continue with such writing and, through it, continue to fashion and refashion psychoanalytic theory. Freud, therefore, arrived at something of a paradox: even though by traditional standards—including, on some level, his own—his case studies seemed questionable in regard to their scientific utility, it was precisely these studies that yielded the desired insight. Knowingly or not, Freud abided by what is, arguably, the first and most fundamental responsibility of the scientific enterprise: fidelity to the phenomena. Given the clear and obvious value of case reports, it follows that the meaning of “science,” as customarily conceived, is problematically restrictive and that it ought to be reconceived in such a way as to include, rather than exclude, the kinds of literary pursuits that psychoanalysts and narrative psychologists more generally have found to be so central to their efforts to understand and explain the movement of human lives.