In response to the recent tendency to discard Freud's contributions as anachronistic and reductionistic this article critically examines Donald Spence's contention that the Freudian style of case reporting is ensnared in an outdated positivistic tradition. Spence, I argue, mistakenly reduces Freud's method of historical construction to a form of naive commitment to the Sherlock Holmes detective story genre. By employing Lacan's rereading of Dora's case history, I conversely demonstrate that in the psychoanalytic situation the analysand's past unfolds in a series of dialectical reversals yielding not a linear, detective-like story with a single solution, but an ever-unfolding and subversive narrative, a life story which stubbornly resists premature closure.