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[[Case ]] histories are a classic [[form ]] of documentation in [[psychopathology ]] [[literature]]. They range from [[clinical ]] sketches to highly detailed and extended accounts, as in the Madeleine case, which occupies both volumes of Pierre Janet's De l'angoisseà l'extase (1926-1928).

[[Psychoanalysis ]] caused the form to drift toward what might more properly be called a "report on [[analysis]]." With a view to publication, [[analysts ]] elaborate written accounts based on everything they have heard from a [[patient]], in [[order ]] to reconstitute the [[sense ]] and [[significance ]] of the patient's [[psychic ]] and symptomatic functioning, as well as the progressive unfolding of the [[cure ]] itself in the [[transference]]/counter-transference [[exchange]].

Sigmund [[Freud ]] evokes his [[patients ]] in his early writings (Studies on [[Hysteria]], 1895d), but it is in dealing with the analysis of the [[Rat Man ]] that he expresses the difficulty of giving an account of an analysis, in a [[letter ]] to [[Jung ]] dated June 30, 1909: "How [[bungled ]] our reproductions are, how wretchedly we dissect the great art works of psychic [[nature]]! Unfortunately this paper in turn is becoming too bulky. It just pours out of me, and even so it's inadequate, incomplete and therefore untrue. A wretched business." (1974, p. 238).

Reports are difficult to write because where previously the [[analyst ]] disentangled the elements in the flow of [[associations]], in order to allow the interpretable [[meaning ]] to organize itself, in the report, the analyst instead must dismantle and take apart in order to reproduce. Between [[communication ]] in the analysis and the communication of the analysis, the transformation is as radical as that which [[exists ]] between the [[logic ]] of primary and secondary [[processes]].

The heuristic [[necessity ]] of the report on the analysis is nevertheless obvious because it is this reflective [[phase ]] that enables us to focus on any given point of [[theory]], thus breaking not with clinical [[practice ]] but with the rule of not initially selecting anything in order to afford equally-distributed attention to the associational [[material]]. As a transmission of [[knowledge ]] without a prescriptive target, and relating equally to theory and to clinical practice, the analysis report belongs in the [[theoretical ]] [[domain ]] (Laplanche, 1980).

The [[desire ]] to give an account of the analysis derives from the analyst's [[counter-transference]]. The [[disturbance ]] then becomes the [[object ]] of [[thought ]] and the motive for communication and may even remobilize the analyst's questions [[about ]] his own non-[[analyzed ]] [[past]]. But the report also has an institutional, more or less codified [[role ]] and forms a part of exchanges that contribute to [[progress ]] and [[recognition]].

Freud stressed the [[ethical ]] and [[moral ]] problems posed by the analysis report: "It is certain that the patients would never have spoken if it had occurred to [[them ]] that their admissions might possibly be put to [[scientific ]] uses: and it is equally certain that to ask them themselves for leave to publish their case would be quite unavailing" (1905e [1901]). But he nevertheless [[defends ]] the necessity for it in a letter to Oskar Pfister (June 5, 1910): "Thus discretion is incompatible with a satisfactory description of an analysis; to describe the latter one would have to be unscrupulous, give away, betray, behave like an [[artist ]] who buys paints with his wife's house-keeping [[money ]] or uses the furniture as firewood to warm the studio for his [[model]]. Without a trace of that kind of unscrupulousness the job cannot be done" (1963, p. 38).

The models for dreaming and [[jokes ]] shed light on the respective methodologies used for the situations of dialogue and transcription (Mijolla-Mellor, 1985). While commenting on the difficulties relative to reports on analysis, Freud highlights the necessity for them and also their [[power ]] of [[seduction]], commenting that his [[case histories ]] read "like novels" (as in the case of Katharina, 1895), a fair turning of the tables on someone who never hesitated to see novels as the equivalent of case histories.

See also: "A. Z."; "From the [[History ]] of an [[Infantile ]] [[Neurosis]]" ([[Wolf Man]]); [[Aimée]], case of; "Analysis of a [[Phobia ]] in a Five-year-old Boy" (Little [[Hans]]); [[Anna O]]., case of; Cäcilie M., case of; Eckstein, Emma; Elisabeth von R., case of; Emmy von N., case of; "[[Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria]]" ([[Dora]]/Ida Bauer); Hirschfeld, Elfriede; Katharina, case of; Little Arpåd, the boy pecked by a cock; Lucy R., case of; [[Mathilde]], case of; "[[Notes ]] upon a Case of [[Obsessional ]] Neurosis" (Rat Man); Richard, case of; [[Studies on Hysteria]].[[Bibliography]]