problem of the case

Prolegomena

Abstract

The text underlines that although the transmission of psychoanalysis requires writing «clinical cases» because it is there that we can find the knowledge of the analytical practice, it is important to wonder how to write them after the famous and inaugural Freud’s «cases». The paper questions the scope of the adjective «clinical» as applied to the psychoanalytic, where the signs «do
not offer themselves» and where there is a singular relation of transferential bond between the analyst and the analysand. The writer develops its criticism from the field of logic, examining universal and particular propositions in logical charts. He points out to the difference between giving priority to the universal (Aristoteles and scientific law) or to the particular (Brunschwig and
Lacan’s formulas of sexuation) and he distinguishes two types of vignettes: those that seek to illustrate a point of the analytic theory serving a university and theoretical knowledge that is at the service of strengthening analytic groups. The forms in which the analytic institution understands the training of analysts based on the model that it is the analyst who holds unlawfully the
knowledge under the label «clinical» are also questioned. The other kind of vignette that does not develop a «goal» knowledge such as the psychopathological one, describes a singular situation with its characteristics, which are not taken as evidence (clinical monographs); in this case the enunciation itself, where the narration reveals the one who talks and his relation with
knowledge, can imply the «contingency», the opposite of what happened could have happened. Without considering it as a narcissistic bubble. The loneliness of the analyst in the face of his knowledge is underscored, at the same time as it is sustained that analysts do not form a community, but rather each analyst would be the only member of the transferential class within
which he is behaving with his patient, which qualifies him far better than a degree. Analytic theory does not apply to any subject just as language does not apply to the world. The paper underlines that the articulation of a subject and a world in a thirdness that dissolves the binarism of the concept and reestablishes the uncertain thread of the word as the «treasure» that Freud
exhumed through his invention of the fundamental rule and which is what an analytical clinic should give testimony of.