ABSTRACT
In “The Temptation of the Plot in Freud’s Early Case Studies,” Isabelle Alfandary examines the narrative models of the first psychoanalytic case studies, Studies on Hysteria (1895) co-signed by Breuer and Freud. The writing of these case studies borrows extensively from literary schemas. These early case studies shaped the manner in which psychoanalysis invented itself as clinic and theory. The writing of Studies on Hysteria was a first attempt at transmitting the experience of the unconscious, and it resorted to models inherited from the detective novel and the romance. Later, Freud renounced this schema and also wrote less and less case studies. Freud had found himself resorting to emplotment in earlier case studies but then perceived this mode of writing led to dead ends, rejecting a method felt to be too linear and teleological. After Dora, Freud’s case studies evince different stylistic features: they imply more cautious narrative strategies. The facts of the unconscious were addressed via methods that were less readable, more polyphonic, vertical, and knotted. Once Freud had rejected the temptation of a linear plot, he was led to question the possibility of interpreting the unconscious in simple narrative terms.
