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The patient’s history has always been a central part of psychoanalysis. Freud wrote several case histories where he illustrated his psychoanalytic understanding of the clinical material. In 1937, Freud wrote: “What we are in search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike, trustworthy and in all respects, complete” (p. 258). To achieve this goal, Freud emphasized the rôle of the repressed memory, childhood experiences, free association, analysis of dreams and so on.
How can we understand this search for a “complete picture” that Freud promotes? Did Freud expect us to try and find some facts in the patient’s history that could explain the present illness with the past context, and try to make a coherent, chronological story of the patient’s life, or is it possible to understand Freud’s concept of a “complete picture” in a different way?
If Freud in 1937 meant that it was possible to construct a complete picture of the patient’s life, he seemed to argue for the opposite in other works. The case history of Dora is called Fragment of a case of hysteria (Freud, 1905). What we get there is not a coherent picture, but something that is fragmented and unfinished. He mentions two reasons for the incompleteness of the case history. The first reason was that the analysis was prematurely broken off. The second reason, and the most important one here, is connected to the psychological material: “…the material which elucidated the case was grouped around two dreams” (p. 10). Thus, in this case, the central part of the case history was not based on historical facts but on two dreams.
Given this context, in psychoanalysis, one does not primarily search for facts but for unconscious images in the patient’s history. This emphasis on unconscious images seems similar to that which Andersson (2014) writes about the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. In the article Salvaging images, Andersson states that: “…Benjamin suggests that we turn to images in order to un