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Author Leventhal, Robert Scott.

Title Making the Case : Narrative Psychological Case Histories and the Invention of Individuality in Germany, 1750-1800 / Robert S. Leventhal.

Publication Info. Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2019]

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (XIV, 409 pages).
text file
PDF
Series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies ; 25
Interdisciplinary German cultural studies ; 25.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents 1. Historicizing the Psychological Case History -- 2. Theorizing the Psychological Case History -- 3. Disciplining the Human Soul: German Empirical Psychology in the Eighteenth Century from Christian Wolff to Kant -- 4. Ethnicity, Gender, Religion, and Madness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Germany: A Case History of Demonic Possession in Lower Saxony, 1744 -- 5. The First Modern Psychological Case History: Marcus Herz's Psychological Description of His Own Illness (1783) and the Construction of the Modern Soul -- 6. Friedrich Schiller: The Juridical-Psychological Case History as a Literary Work of Art -- 7. A Doctor's Worst Fear: Marcus Herz's Case History of Karl Philipp Moritz Etwas Psychologisch-Medizinisches. Moriz Krankengeschichte (1793) -- 8. The Case History, Therapeutics, and the Dietetics of the Soul: Aesthetics and Empirical Psychology in the Work of Karl Philipp Moritz -- 9. Towards an Epistemology of the Individual Case: Stance and Deviation in the Philosophy of Marcus Herz -- Conclusion: Becoming a Culture of Individual Cases.
Summary 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
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Language In English.
Subject Psychological literature.
Psychological literature.
Medical records.
Medical records.
Individuality.
Individuality.
Narrative medicine.
Narrative medicine.
Medicine -- History -- 18th century.
Medicine.
History.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Germany.
medical records.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Genre/Form History.
Other Form: Print version: 9783110642797
Print version: 9783110642674
ISBN 9783110643466 (electronic book)
3110643464 (electronic book)
3110642794 (electronic book)
9783110642797 (electronic book)
9783110642674 (hardcover)
3110642670
Standard No. 10.1515/9783110643466