Birgit Lang (Lecturer) - A History of the Case Study: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Sexology, psychoanalysis, literature

Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi
and Alison Lewis

Manchester University Press

Copyright Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis 2017

The rights of Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0719 09943 4

First published 2017

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Introduction
Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis

1 The shifting case of masochism: Leopold von Sacher-Masochs Venus im Pelz (1870)
Birgit Lang

2 Fin-de-sicle investigations of the creative genius in psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Birgit Lang

3 Writing back: literary satire and Oskar Panizzas Psichopatia criminalis (1898)
Birgit Lang

4 Erich Wulffen and the case of the criminal
Birgit Lang

5 Alfred Dblins literary cases about women and crime in Weimar Germany
Alison Lewis

6 Viola Bernard and the case study of race in post-war America
Joy Damousi

Conclusion
Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi and Alison Lewis

This volume was made possible by the Australian Research Council (ARC), which funded the Discovery Project titled Making the Case: The Case Study Genre in Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature led by Birgit Lang and Joy Damousi. The authors acknowledge the vital importance of the ARC in providing generous support for the project.

Thank you to the unfailingly helpful staff of the following archives and libraries (in alphabetical order): Bavarian State Archives Munich; German Literary Archive (Marbach); Monacensia, Literary Archive of the City of Munich; Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the A. C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University (New York); Saxon State and University Library (Dresden); Wellcome Library (London).

Warmest thanks to Katie Sutton, the former Australian Postdoctoral Fellow attached to the ARC project, for commenting on the manuscript. We acknowledge Jana Verhoeven and Mary Tomsic for their outstanding research assistance in Melbourne and New York respectively. The authors extend special thanks to Cynthia Troup, who has managed the editorial process, and prepared and polished all aspects of the manuscript with extraordinary thoroughness and diligence.

We owe much to Emma Brennan, Commissioning Editor and Editorial Director at Manchester University Press. Also at Manchester University Press we sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers and editorial board, and Paul Clarke, Assistant Editor, and Ralph Footring, freelance production editor, for their expertise, efficiency and responsiveness.

Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi, Alison Lewis

A History of the Case Study represents a critical intervention into contemporary debate concerning the construction of knowledge which after Michel Foucaults elaborations on modern discourses of power considers the medical case study in particular as an expression of new forms of disciplinary authority. This volume scrutinises the changing status of the human case study, that is, the medical, legal or literary case study that places an individual at its centre. With close reference to the dawning of sexual modernity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to ideas about sexual identity in the period immediately before and after the fin de sicle, the following chapters examine the case writing practices of selected pioneers of the case study genre. Alertness to the exchange of ideas between the empirical life sciences and the humanities is key to A History of the Case Study.

Defined by desire to unravel the mystery of human sexuality and the depths of the human condition, the case study can be linked to the modernist project itself. Indeed, the case study can be defined as one of modernitys vital narrative forms and means of explanation. A History of the Case Study builds on our earlier edited collection, Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge, and outlines how case knowledge actively contributed to the construction of the sexed subject. The present volume tells the story of the medical case study genre in a historically and geographically contingent manner, with a focus on Central Europe, extended also to the USA. The lives of individual brokers of case knowledge are pivotal to this book, as is the task of mapping their agency and interventions. Brokers of case knowledge, however, can be shown to include newly emerging sexual publics, as well as members of professional elites (psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and jurists) and creative writers.

These practitioners took up case studies as a representational practice so as to demonstrate or classify a new phenomenon or pathology; to register a deviation from existing knowledge; to raise questions concerning the meaning of a given example (and by implication its explanatory framework); and to disseminate specialist knowledge to reading publics. In this context, case studies regularly became sites of reinterpretation and translation, sometimes of resistance. There resulted a range of case modalities. Such incarnations of case studies across different social and disciplinary contexts came to encompass published psychiatric, sexological and psychoanalytic case studies of individuals, as well as case study compilations; unpublished medical notes and juridical case files; autobiographical or journalistic case studies; and fictionalised or fictional case studies (case stories). All of these iterations of the case study are inseparable from the history of three fields or kinds of knowledge: sexology, psychoanalysis and literature.

The case study pioneers at the centre of our investigation all participated and were actively involved in discourses connected to the disciplinary sphere of medicine, and especially to the psychiatric realm: Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing embraced patient narratives in an attempt to quantify what he could not measure the sexual paradigm he presupposed. Psychoanalysts, the majority of whom were trained physicians, used the case study genre to reconceptualise the role of creative genius in the light of new scientific and medical insights, or to explore newly urgent socio-political questions, as did Viola Bernard in her analysis of race. State prosecutor Erich Wulffen was able to revitalise the judicial case study genre through the new field of forensics, an imbrication of legal and medical discourse. Physician-writers Oskar Panizza and Alfred Dblin developed new literary cases that incisively commented on specific case writing practices. Each of these writers exemplifies a new language and paradigm, often in competition with other case writers, through which to explore challenges that presented themselves in their time and in their respective fields. An aim of this volume is to chart the emergence and development of the case study in historical terms, and through the medium of biography.