| Abstract: | ![]()
In response to the recent tendency to discard Freud's contributions as anachronistic and reductionistic, this article critically examines D. P. Spence's (1982, 1987) contention that the Freudian style of case reporting is ensnared in an outdated positivistic tradition. Spence mistakenly reduces Freud's method of historical construction to a form of naive commitment to the Sherlock Holmes detective story genre. By employing J. Lacan's (1952 [1982]) rereading of Dora's case history, the article conversely demonstrates that in the psychoanalytic situation the analysand's past unfolds in a series of dialectical reversals yielding not a linear, detective-like story with a single solution, but an ever-unfolding and subversive narrative, a life story that stubbornly resists premature closure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
