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mode of knowing itself. The view of knowledge implied in Freud's
increasing reliance upon case studies never fully triumphed over
Freud's commitment to theory, but it represents the more radical
departure from the tradition of positivistic scientific discourse in
Freud's oeuvre, and must thus be regarded as a distinguishing
feature of psychoanalysis.
Thus the data of nervous disorder forced Freud to this view of
his case studies as the locus of peculiarly psychoanalytic knowledge.
For data were patients, their dreams, their slips of the tongue, and
ultimately their transferences and Freud's counter-transferences. He
found himself organizing a community of investigators who
experienced transference in their own analyses (often with Freud)
and in their analyses of patients. For this community, the case study
proved the ideal genre of communication. Thus Freud was forced to
his novel view of knowledge by two strictly social configurations: his
relationships with his patients and with the scientific communities,
first of medicine and physiology and later of psychoanalysis.
This brings us back to the question of psychoanalytic knowl–
edge as one of discourse. For the two relationships that pulled Freud
toward his view of psychoanalysis as personal, exemplary knowledge
in the case studies turn out to be the irreducible axes of psycho–
analytic discourse. The discourse of analyst and patient is
psychoanalysis in practice, and the discourse of analyst and fellow
analysts is psychoanalysis as a discipline. Every other discourse of
psychoanalysis derives ultimately from one or both of these.
Freud's case studies (and the case studies published since) are of
course not identical with these two levels of discourse. But of all the
writings by Freud and his early followers, it is in the case studies that
both discourses are most fully precipitated. The evolution of Freud's
attitude as he wrote the case studies reveals that his awareness of the
significance of the case study emerged hand in hand with his
realization that psychoanalysis constituted a new kind of knowledge.
The case studies lead us not only to an appreciation of an important
fissure in psychoanalysis - the distinction between knowledge for
psychoanalysts and the knowledge of psychoanalysis - they lead to
questions about the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge. Early in his
career Freud's highest ambition had been to make his mark as a
natural scientist and to formulate his beliefs in theoretical terms.
The role of such scientific ambition is especially clear in
The
Interpretation
of
Dreams,
where he put forward such pseudo-theories as
