The construction of the clinical case in Psychoanalysis: from the impossible to writing

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point the specificities of psychoanalytic research, with emphasis on the method of constructing the clinical case and its implications for the formulation of knowledge in Psychoanalysis. It seeks to elucidate what can be extracted as most singular from the case and its effects of transmission, as well as what can be gathered from its writing. This is a theoretical study, essayistic in nature, based on a bibliographic review of classic and contemporary authors of Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Figueiredo, Dunker, etc.). In this sense, the question of method in Psychoanalysis has long been relegated to a secondary discussion, in which methodological rigor was often conflated with the very notion of style, resulting in the inadvertent development of research with little or no concern for presenting the steps followed by the researcher throughout the process. The clinical case, in turn, is the product of what is extracted from the interventions of the psychoanalyst in the conduct of treatment and of what is distilled from its report. It is, par excellence, the clinical method that advances theory and the formulation of psychoanalytic concepts. Its construction points to a path that conceives the singular in its radicality and, for this reason, delineates a non-total relationship to knowledge, which, for Lacan, is always on the side of the subject. Finally, the construction of the clinical case, and its effects of transmission, calls for a writing that marks the analyst’s style, singularizing and formalizing the traversal of their path as an analyst.