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PARTISAN REVIEW
If
Freud's case studies are not only psychoanalytic exemplars ,
but a particular sort of "personal knowledge" as well, then Freud's
tortuous thinking is an advantage, deepening the conviction and
insight of those who wished to follow him further in psychoanalysis .
For the psychoanalysts willing to study Freud's cases as exemplary
analyses ; the Wolf man led them once again beyond the frontier.
His two additional case studies, published in 1915 and 1920
however, do not advance his thinking in this genre . Several factors
may help explain why Freud wrote so few case studies after he had
come to his conclusions about their value in 1914-1915 . By the time he
published his analysis of the Wolf Man , the psychoanalytic
movement was definitely established as a discipline . Freud's
followers also had begun to present and publish their own case
studies in psychoanalytic journals, and Freud devoted considerable
energy to criticizing and commenting on their work . The boundaries
of psychoanalysis were set and the major psychoanalytic apostates
definitively separated from the movement . Freud himself, relaxing
in this atmosphere of long-awaited security, turned to projects
designed to secure wider recognition of psychoanalysis . The case
study was now established as the methodological anchor which
united psychoanalysts in their scientific community .
By the time psychoanalysis became an organized discipline of
research , Freud's case studies had acquired the status of psycho–
analytic knowledge par excellence , although not the only kind of
psychoanalytic knowledge, for one must distinguish this knowledge
for psychoanalysts from the knowledge of psychoanalysis Freud
purveyed in his more expository and theoretical works . Further dis–
tinctions may be made based upon differences in the ways in which
psychoanalytic knowledge is transmitted and the uses to which it is
put. There are, in other words, many discourses of psychoanalysis,
but for clinical purposes case studies form the kernel of knowledge ,
and thus are central to the description of psychoanalytic knowledge.
Freud's oeuvre both opened the discourse of psychoanalysis and
prefigured the fissures that have developed in psychoanalytic
discourse. I have traced only one of these fissures, showing that
behind the explicit difference between the genres of Freud's writing
intended for different audiences lay a tension between the positivistic
notions of science that Freud had imbibed with his medical
education , in which theory predominated, and another notion of
knowledge that arose from or was produced by the psychoanalytic
