Scientific thinking styles: The different ways of thinking in psychoanalytic case studies

Historian and philosopher John Forrester argues that psychoanalysis is characterized by a style of scientific thinking and reasoning that he coins “thinking in cases”. Since Freud, case studies have been used as a medium for sharing, demonstrating, discovering, expanding, consolidating and “thinking” psychoanalytic knowledge. In this paper, we seek to clarify and enrich Forrester’s idea of thinking in cases. We first attend to issues around the lack of definition for thinking styles, and we propose a more detailed description for what might constitute a scientific thinking style. Second, we outline how thinking in cases differs from other kinds of thinking styles. In doing so, we argue that some of the criticisms directed at case studies are the result of a confusion between statistical and experimental thinking styles and thinking in cases. Finally, we propose that there is more than one way of thinking in cases. We distinguish between cases as exemplars for analytic generalization, cases as exemplars for analogical learning, and cases in the service of empirical generalization. By making these implicit thinking styles explicit, we seek to demonstrate the importance of case studies at all levels of psychoanalysis: clinical, research, training and teaching.