How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.

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? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.

This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, the rhetoric of the legal case, and novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.