Thinking in Cases

A couple of years ago I chanced upon John Forrester’s Thinking in Cases. I found the title intriguing — I wrote my first HBS case study 1978 and have taught by the case method since 1988.
Unfortunately, Forrester is fuzzy about what the distinguishing features of Thinking in Cases might be. Worse he practices the scholarship of interminable sentences. Nonetheless his book had engaging stories, especially about the history of case research and teaching at Harvard.
A few months ago I discovered a special issue of the History of the Human Sciences devoted to Forrester’s book. I hoped it might help me better understand what Forrester was trying to say.
In fact Forrester’s own writing is a model of clarity compared to the impenetrable rubbish in the special issue:
Here’s a representative para from the Introduction to the special issue.
“Julie Walsh’s article, ‘Confusing Cases: Forrester, Stoller, Agnes, Woman’ , argues that there is a ‘structural affinity’ or ‘formal alliance’ between issues of gendered identity and the methodological questions raised by the psychoanalytic case study. Walsh show us how the psychoanalytic case is based around ideas of development and becoming: of negotiation, performance, interruption, and subversion. Using Forrester’s analysis of Robert Stoller’s case of Agnes (whose gender identity is complicated and revealing), Walsh draws out a fundamental characteristic of case-thinking: ‘To think in cases is to practise those lines of movement – the transitions, transferences, and interruptions – that characterize the non-linear temporalities of becoming’ (ibid.: 29). This flexibility, the fluidity that a psychoanalytic case demands, is expanded through close engagement with a group of feminists influenced by psychoanalysis (including Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Judith Butler, and Denise Riley), who focus on how woman is a category marked by negotiation, performance, interruption. Psychoanalytic case logic shows how womanhood is mutable, provisional, and achieved in context – rather than relying on any essence or ideal. The article revivifies Forrester’s insistence, across his oeuvre, that the psychoanalytic case study raises a ‘fundamental ambiguity regarding who or what is being framed as the case’ (ibid.: 20; emphasis in original): such an argument, Walsh makes clear, has much to contribute to contemporary debates around the nature of sex and gender identity.”
Right on Editors ! Bravo Julia Walsh! And shame on those who stopped with first part of the first sentence.