Thinking in cases: fiction, law, and the case history

"What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a "case" that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? In this book, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks explores what it is to think in cases-to take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection about psychoanalytic case history, the rhetoric of the legal case, and novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history emergence in the late nineteenth century, when it sparked a reformist movement in the study of law and medicine and provided a new discourse of the individual in psychoanalysis and in many fictional texts. He begins by examining how Henry James's narrative technique parallels case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Conan Doyle's detective fiction to a lurid legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud's most speculative work, especially Moses and Monotheism.