Introduction

Abstract

In his narrative case study, ‘Fräulein Elizabeth Von R.’, in the 1895 collection Studies on Hysteria, Freud expresses anxiety about his use of the techniques of fictional narrative in developing the case study method. These techniques are necessary, he argues, to explain the process of uncovering the aetiology of hysterical symptoms. The implication is that hysterical symptoms themselves deploy the human impulse for mediating trauma and anxiety through narrative:

Like other neuro-pathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.

(Freud, 1895b, p. 160)