Reading through Sigmund Freud's case studies in chronological
order is a most instructive experience for anyone interested in the
intellectual history of psychoanalysis. One quickly sees, for example,
how Freud's technique evolved from the methodical and rather intrusive
attempts to dispel particular symptoms that we observe in Studies on
Hystem'a ( 1 895) to the method of free association that he describes in his
report on the case of Dora (1905). Or one sees how Freud's conception
of the transference developed, from the primitive notion of transference
as something to be avoided or dispelled, to the mature conception of
transference as the invaluable center of analysis, the very phenomenon
that has to be analyzed (again in the analysis of Dora). In this paper 1
shall review Freud's case studies with still another trajectory in mind:
how Freud's sense of the significance of his written case studies
themselves evolved. 1 shall show how his inital embarrassment over the
necessity of describing his cases in great detail was eventually supplanted
by a confidence that his case studies were important vehicles of
psychoanalytic knowledge. As his attitude changed, his initial anxiety
about how other medical and natural scientific readers would adjudicate
his cases was displaced by a willingness to assert delicate, tenuous
hypotheses in his cases, largely for the benefit of the psychoanalytic
community itself. And on a more abstract and perhaps less conscious
level, the positivistic belief in the importante of theory and the objective
verifiability of hypotheses that Freud had subscribed to from the time he had decided to study medicine was at least temporarily challenged by
another view of knowledge, a view that 1 shall try to clarify in this paper
