Causal Explanation in Science and in Psychoanalysis—Implications for Writing a Case Study

IN RESPONSE TO THOSE WHO DEMAND EPIDEMIOLOGIC AND EXPERImental tests of psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Grunbaum, 1984), I have argued that the case study, now held in disrepute, is nevertheless necessary to test psychoanalytic hypotheses and, if properly formulated, can indeed test, not merely generate, hypotheses (Edelson, 1984). I have in addition described various kinds of scientific arguments relating hypothesis and data that can be used in case studies to provide support for the credibility of psychoanalytic propositions (Edelson, 1985).

In this paper I do not take for granted, as I have previously, the current standard paradigm of explanation and hypothesis testing. Instead I take as a starting point Freud's own view of what science is all about and the strategy of explanation he used in his case study of the Wolf-Man (1918). There he tells a causal story. He makes use of a causal pattern rather than a covering law model of explanation. He makes use of both etiological explanations, in which a cause is external to its effect, and constitutive explanations, in which a cause is a relation among internal