Making the Case: Narrative Psychological Case Histories and the Invention of Individuality in Germany, 1750-1800

Robert Leventhal

Published by De Gruyter 2019

Making the Case

Narrative Psychological Case Histories and the Invention of Individuality in Germany, 1750-1800

Robert Leventhal

Volume 25 in the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643466

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Robert Leventhal, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, USA

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	XI
A Note on Translations Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Historicizing the Psychological Case History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2. Theorizing the Psychological Case History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
3. Disciplining the Human Soul: German Empirical Psychology in the Eighteenth Century from Christian Wolff to Kant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
4. Ethnicity, Gender, Religion, and Madness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Germany: A Case History of Demonic Possession in Lower Saxony, 1744 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
5. The First Modern Psychological Case History: Marcus Herz’s Psychological Description of His Own Illness (1783) and the Construction of the Modern Soul Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
6. Friedrich Schiller: The Juridical-Psychological Case History as a Literary Work of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
7. A Doctor’s Worst Fear: Marcus Herz’s Case History of Karl Philipp Moritz Etwas Psychologisch-Medizinisches. Moriz Krankengeschichte (1793) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
8. The Case History, Therapeutics, and the Dietetics of the Soul: Aesthetics and Empirical Psychology in the Work of Karl Philipp Moritz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
9. Towards an Epistemology of the Individual Case: Stance and Deviation in the Philosophy of Marcus Herz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Conclusion: Becoming a Culture of Individual Cases Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	339
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	363
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	391
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	409

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Scholars interested in German cultural studies, the history of medicine and psychology.
Pages
- Front matter: 14
- Main content: 409
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 10
Keywords: Case-history; bio-politics; Germany; 18th century; psychology

eBook

Published: November 18, 2019
ISBN: 9783110643466

Hardcover

Published: November 18, 2019
ISBN: 9783110642674

Paperback

Published: September 20, 2021
ISBN: 9783110763430