IRWGS, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
The Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
In this presentation, Professor Isabelle Alfandry will examine the narrative and dramatic models that presided over the writing of the first case studies of psychoanalysis in Studies on Hysteria, which appeared in 1895, and were signed by Breuer and Freud. The writing of these case studies is the first writing of psychoanalysis: with Studies on Hysteria, psychoanalysis shares for the first time its clinical experience and founds a theoretical base. She will attempt to show that the writing of case studies is not neutral, that it does not come out of nowhere, that it borrows from certain schemas—especially literary—whose determinations, whose epistemological unthought (l’impensé), even, is far from being indifferent to the production of knowledge that accompanies it. The writing of case studies fashions the manner in which psychoanalysis invents itself as both, clinic and theory; it shapes the manner that psychoanalysis has of articulating theory and clinic of the unconscious.
