One hundred years before Freud's striking psychoanalytic case-histories the narrative
psychological case-history emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany as
an epistemic genre (Gianna Pomata) that cut across the disciplines of medicine philosophy law
psychology anthropology and literature. It differed significantly from its predecessors in
theology jurisprudence and medicine. Rather than subsuming the individual under an
established classification moral precept category or type the narrative psychological
case-history endeavored to articulate the individual in its very individuality thereby
constructing a 'self' in its irreducible singularity. The presentation and analysis of several
significant psychological case-histories their theory and practice as well as the
controversies surrounding their utility validity and function for an envisioned 'science of
the soul' constitutes the core of the book. Close and 'distant' (F. Moretti) readings of key
texts and figures in the discussion regarding 'empirical psychology' (psychologia empirica)
experiential psychology (Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and 'medical psychology' (medizinische
Psychologie) such as Christian Wolff J.C. Krüger J.C. Bolton Ernst Nicolai J.A. Unzer J.G.
Sulzer J.G. Herder Friedrich Schiller Jacob Friedrich Abel Marcus Herz Karl Philipp Moritz
J.C. Reil Ernst Platner and Immanuel Kant provide the disciplinary historical-scientific
context within which this genre comes to the fore. As the first systematic argument concerning
the early history of this genre my thesis is that the psychological case-history evolved as
part of a pastoral apparatus of care concern guidance and direction for what it fashioned as
the 'unique' individual as the discursive medium in a process by which the soul became a
'self'. The narrative psychological case-history was in fact a meta-genre that transcended
traditional boundaries of history and fiction medicine and philosophy psychology and
anthropology and sought for the first time to explicitly link the experience history
memory fantasy previous trauma or suffering of a unique individual to illness deviance
aberration and crime. In a word it demonstrated as Freud later said of his own case-histories
in Studies on Hysteria the intimate relation between the history of suffering and the symptoms
of illness (die innige Beziehung zwischen Leidensgeschichte und Krankheitssymptome). This genre
not only had a profound and far-reaching effect on the evolution of German and European
literature - one thinks of the rich traditions of the Novella and the Fallgeschichte from
Goethe Büchner R. L Stevenson Edgar Allen Poe and Chekhov to Kafka and beyond - but in
shaping modern literature the clinical sciences and even popular culture. The book should
therefore be of interest not merely to Germanists modern European cultural historians
historians of science and literary historians but also those interested in the history of
medicine and psychology the origins of psychoanalysis the history of anthropology cultural
studies and more generally the history of ideas.
