The legend of Anna O.’s hysterical childbirth is a typical example of the psychoanalytic rewriting of history. Here, as elsewhere, Freud applied to the history of psychoanalysis (and later to history itself, if we consider Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Woodrow Wilson) the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to ‘reconstruct’ his patients’ forgotten and repressed memories. From this point of view, there is little difference between the ‘case’ of Anna O. and the Breuer ‘case’, the Schreber ‘case’, the Fliess ‘case’, the ‘case’ of the Wolf Man and the ‘cases’ of Jung, Rank or Ferenczi. Everyone – colleague or patient, sane or raving mad, dead or alive – was subjected to the same deciphering from the same hermeneutics of unconscious desire. In this sense, we can well say that Freud’s ‘case histories’ (Krankengeschichten) are no less mythical than the fabulous ‘history of the psychoanalytic movement’ narrated in his autobiographical writings or the history of humanity described in his phylogenetic and anthropological fictions. No matter where we look, we find the same rewriting of history, the same narrativising of arbitrary interpretations, the same transformation of hypotheses into facts.

One may object that there is, nevertheless, a difference between Freud’s polemical fictions and his case histories, a difference that we emphasised several times in the previous chapter: the vicious analyses of opponents, which completely disregard the protests of those concerned, are merely interprefactions; while the case histories and clinical observations record the results of an analytic deciphering to which the patients have, if not actively participated in, at least given their consent. As today’s psychoanalysts freely admit, in the end what matters in analysis is not so much the ‘historical truth’ of the construction proposed by the analyst, but its ‘narrative truth’; that is, the fact that patients make use of it to rewrite their histories in a way that ‘makes sense’ for them. In other words, it matters little that this construction is a fiction; it only matters that the patients accept and understand this fiction as their history and their truth.

We could say a lot about these reformulated versions (‘structuralist’, ‘hermeneutical’, ‘narrativist’) of psychoanalysis – and especially about the fact that they continue to present themselves as being psychoanalysis, even as they seem to disregard Freud’s pretensions of revealing the objective truth of the psyche. If the final criterion for the fiction proposed by the therapist is that the patient accept (veri-fy) it, why insist on perpetrating Freudian fictions in accordance with psychoanalytic theory as opposed to any others? Why the inevitable interpretation of the patient’s biography in terms of desire, repression, resistance or transference – and not, let’s say, in terms of class struggle, astrological constellations, the evil eye, diet or psychopharmacology? And in what way is the psychoanalytic account superior to others, especially if its truth value comes not from what it recounts, but only from its assimilation by the one to whom it is recounted?

The truth is that, despite appeals for collaboration with the patients (designated as ‘analysands’, to better emphasise their active participation), psychoanalytic theory always provides the framework for the stories to be recounted on the couch, and later in the case history. There is nothing inherently wrong with this (after all, the therapist has to start from somewhere), but we at least need to recognise that little has fundamentally changed since Freud’s more authoritarian and ‘suggestive’ psychoanalysis, in which the patient was indoctrinated.

Whether the patient chooses to collaborate with the analyst or, on the contrary, resist his interpretations, the fact remains that everything originates from the theory informing these interpretations – no matter if it be the ‘ready-made’ theory inherited by Freud’s successors or else, as in the case of the founder himself, hypotheses and speculations tried out on patients. We thus have the right to wonder, as Albert Moll was already doing in 1909, if the case histories are actually at the core of the theory or if it isn’t rather the inverse. In the end, what do these case histories tell us? What the patient says or does? Or rather what the analyst reconstructs of what transpired, filling gaps and discontinuities with interpretive connections – that is, what the analyst interprefacts?