Literary genre and form

considerations about the fictional structure of clinical cases in psychoanalysis

Abstract

In the face of the many criticisms aimed at the clinical case reports, either internal or external to the psychoanalytical field, directed at what those reports lack in terms of a scientific methodology of testing, describing and evidencing, imported by psychology from other branches of science, we propose to retake the problem by distinguishing two different approach levels: the examination “in extension” of the literary genre category as a metadiscursive model that brings clinical cases reports close to crime novels; and the examination “in intension”, delimitating the literary form that gives a specific structure to the clinical case report, analyzing how it mobilizes discursive properties of that form, and, specially, the strategies of inclusion of the strange related to de clinical practice.