Can (Should) Case Reports Be Written for Research Use?

Abstract

The case report plays an invaluable role in providing psychoanalytic data for research purposes. Although case reports are limited by multiple methodological difficulties, including the selection of particular cases, the editorial choices made in selecting and arranging data, the problems of confidentiality and disguise, and the overarching issue of theoretical orientation as an inescapable aspect of the construction of a case report, these unavoidable issues can serve as additional sources of data as long as they are made explicit in the case report itself. Moreover, the very awareness of the problematic nature of the case report is connected to historical developments in psychoanalysis that have led to the current focus on the process of analysis and a particular attention to the transference–countertransference relationship. Case reports are increasingly recognized as problematic because we are now asking different questions of them, questions that highlight their distance from objective facts. At the same time, however, no other method of studying psychoanalysis can give us this same information, fragmented and distorted as it inevitably is, about the psychoanalytic process. Case reports play an important role in facilitating scholarship and research.