Narrative and the Textual Configuration of Cases in Late Nineteenth-Century Psychology

How do textual practices function to make sense out of large data sets, when that “data” is not “given,” but rather narrated in extended prose form? Known as “cases,” “observations,” or “facts,” extended textual chunks formed a key currency of the human sciences into the twentieth century. Just how to structure such particularised units in order to produce generalised knowledge has been the subject of much recent scholarly enquiry. Medical cases might be synthesised into some ideal disease profile, or psychiatric observations ordered through paper technologies like the table. But generalisations of this kind were usually accompanied by (some) of their constituent cases, and often enough, collections of observations almost stood alone—like those added by Hippolyte Bernheim to his major works on (hypnotic) suggestion (1888, 1891). Focusing on emerging scientific psychology in nineteenth-century France, this paper considers individual observations as textual knowledge-making entities in their own right. It explores how narrative form and literary techniques articulate with the way psychological cases were generalised—as series, collections, syntheses. It traces conditions under which narrative elements—range of narrative voices, level of detail, temporal organisation—could work to destabilise the categorisation of a given observation. Conversely, some literary techniques generated larger narrative arcs out of groups of observations, thereby reinforcing the epistemic or ontological weight of their sequencing, while diversity in narrative form could also hold observations apart. Ultimately, mapping textual practices against knowledge-making functions provides insight into the ways psychological forms of case-writing evolved out of older disciplinary traditions.