ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the mid twentieth century psychoanalytic case study through the notes of New York psychoanalyst Viola Wertheim Bernard. It considers the form, structure, and dynamics of the psychoanalytic case study in relation to sexuality. The approach adopted within the psychoanalytic case study differed from case studies adopted in other fields during the mid twentieth century. The psychoanalytic case study is the way in which it explores the individual subjective experience, thereby opening up new knowledge about sexuality. The 1940s to the early 1960s in the United States was an extraordinary period when literary, medical, journalistic, and psychoanalytic case studies opened new perspectives on the links between the case study form, sexuality, and public culture. The case of Grace Hamilton demonstrates a fluid engagement with the self and the social with internal and external experience framed around the confidential and the confessional procedure of analysis.
