Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester

Abstract

We consider the influence that John Forrester’s work has had on thinking in, with, and from cases in multiple disciplines. Forrester’s essay ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ was published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996 and transformed understandings of what a case was, and how case-based thinking worked in numerous human sciences (including, centrally, psychoanalysis). Forrester’s collection of essays Thinking in Cases was published posthumously, after his untimely death in 2015, and is the inspiration for the special issue we introduce. This comprises new research from authors working in and across the history of science and medicine, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy of science, semiotics, film studies, literary studies and comparative literature, psychoanalytic studies, medical humanities, and sociology. This research addresses what it means to reason in cases in particular temporal, spatial, or genre-focused contexts; introduces new figures (e.g. Eugène Azam, C. S. Peirce, Michael Balint) into lineages of case-based reasoning; emphasizes the unfinished and unfinishable character of some case reading and autobiographical accounts; and shows the frequency with which certain kinds of reasoning attempted with cases fail (often in instructive ways). The special issue opens up new directions for thinking and working with cases and case-based reasoning in the humanities and human sciences.

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“…However, scholars have also complicated the assumption that sexologists automatically and consistently associated non-procreative sex with deviance, perversion, or degeneration. Evidence from sexological case studies reveals that, when confronted with a diversity of individual expressions of sexual desire, sexual scientists struggled to hold onto neat taxonomic schemes that would allow them to classify behaviours as either healthy or pathological, normal or perverse (Crozier, 2008b;Damousi, Lang, and Sutton, 2019;Doan, 2013;Downing, 2011;Lang, Damousi, and Lewis, 2017;Millard and Callard, 2020;Oosterhuis, 2000). As a result, concepts of the 'healthy', 'normal', and 'natural' were inconsistently applied and widely discussed (Cryle and Stephens, 2017;Doan, 2013).…”

Freud in Cambridge Review Symposium

“…The symposium marks our ongoing commitment in this journal to the history of psychoanalysis, and its place in the historiography of the sciences. (And here it extends the journal’s interest in articulating the multiple legacies of John Forrester’s thought and writings: see the special issue ‘Thinking From Cases’, including the framing introduction [Millard and Callard, 2020], which finds its inspiration in Forrester’s last sole-authored book, Thinking in Cases [Forrester, 2017]. ) But the symposium also celebrates and addresses the work of cross- and interdisciplinary collaboration.…”

Closure and the Critical Epidemic Ending

“… 18 See Forrester (1996) , on what happens when we try to extrapolate from a case study, or, in Forrester’s provocative formulation, “if P, then what?” See also the Special Issue of History of the Human Sciences , reappraising Forrester’s essay, Millard & Callard (2020) , in particular the contributions by Flexer (2020) and Morgan (2020) . …”