by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

Psychoanalytic case writing is a genre unto itself. The Raymond Carvers of the case vignette exist alongside our Freudian novellas. Autotheory, recently, is de rigueur. Ordinarily, however, case writing resists consideration until an author arrives resisting “illustration.” Frustration ensues: “Bring it down to earth! Examples, please!” What follows describes some issues encountered translating psychotherapeutic experience into narrative form.

The range of colors that film records is limited by its chemical composition and narrower than the eye can see. When a shade of red, for example, falls outside the range of a given film stock, that particular shade collapses into the closest reproducible red. Consequently, shade-substitutions cause distortions in tonal gradation and saturation, leading to the appearance of flattening and two-dimensionality in photographs. Problems of verisimilitude arise, along with concerns about technical skill and artistry. Can this distorted photograph here equal that apple there?

Then again, can a photograph here or there ever equal an apple anywhere? Questions regarding film’s indexicality have long been a concern for cultural criticism, additionally highlighting the paradoxical nature of the medium itself. Insofar as film’s reproducibility allows the film “still” to circulate in ever wider contexts, so does the materiality of the captured moment (its physio-chemical record) become increasingly delinked from its originary context; reprinted, the photograph lives multiple lives while simultaneously retaining the kernel of its concrete historicity. With AI-generated “photography,” however, the associative mobility of the image’s origins has reached its psychotic breaking point, the hallucination of the hallucination of our idea of the past overriding our need for the present tense.

In contrast, Marina Abramoviç’s (1991) Shoes for Departure features a 155-pound pair of amethyst shoes beside directions for the viewer to wear them, close their eyes, and “depart.” The work requires an experience of what Henri Bergson (1889) calls “real duration” over the scientized notion of time as a succession of spatialized units—e.g., film stills—soldered together via abstraction. Abramoviç’s shoe-wearer departs, not expressly to imagine, but to move while immobile, an impossibility that forces confrontation with the possible. Movement implies a future, immobility, a past. The contradiction erases diachronicity, saturating the present as such. But what allows for the work’s power, its suspension of what for in favor of ____, is not the cleverness of Abramoviç’s conceit, but something the viewer brings, or not—their negative capability.

Psychoanalytic case writing suffers when we regard it as fact—exposition is a choice among choices. Vignettes, accordingly, convey as much of an author’s subjectivity as does theory, raising the question, why case write at all? What do we learn from it? Klein (1928) discovers learning’s raison d’être in our desire, holiest of motors, which runs per individual specification, revealing that motivation, so often externally located, is most often internally derived. Learning (cf. reading) therefore locates not the object of our study, but the cause of our desire, slippery specter—seductive, hallucinatory—searchingly familiar. Our inadequacies, our wanting we find in reading. Also: Contempt, envy, joy. Hopefully, departure. Light, life, fire (picnics, lightning).