Clinical Cases in Psychoanalysis: Epistemological, Methodological, and Operational Issues

This workshop aims to address and propose principles—epistemological, methodological, conceptual, and operational—for the development and presentation of clinical cases, so that the practice of social and individual care can use these cases as examples for articulating and resolving problems.

A further aim of the workshop is to open this framework explicitly to the perspectives and practices of Social Work, including, but not limited to those engaged in the Doctoral Research Center for Social Work. From this standpoint, clinical cases are not only sites of intrapsychic meaning-making but also intersections of institutional structures, social inequalities, and collective processes that shape developmental trajectories. For professionals and researchers in social work, the clinical case can thus function as a mediating tool between individual experience and social context, enabling a reflective analysis of how care practices are embedded in organizational, cultural, and policy-related frameworks.

By highlighting the characteristics of the clinical case in psychoanalysis (the subjective nature of the data, the work of constructing and interpreting meanings for a life history), it is proposed to consider them as examples of paradigmatic matrices (as Thomas Kuhn understands these terms): they serve to show how problems are formulated and resolved within the framework of a given system; considering psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic science, as Winnicott says, “an applied science based on a science.” This perspective makes it possible, in dialogue with the literature on this topic, to organize the descriptive and conceptual material necessary for the elaboration and construction of the case, differentiating the phenomena and the descriptions of the dynamic relationship between them; factual concepts, that is, those with an adequate empirical referent in phenomenal

reality; and metapsychological concepts, as speculative auxiliary constructs, which are metaphors and instruments used to explore phenomena and their relationships.

 

The second part will consist of a condensed lecture held by Prof. Leopoldo Fulgencio followed by discussion.

Both parts of the seminar can be attended independently.

 

 

Prof. Dr. Leopoldo Fulgencio, Associate Professor — Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. Visiting Researcher at Hochschule Darmstadt (h_da / EUt+), Darmstadt, Germany. Email: lfulgencio@usp.br

Prof. Dr. Katrin Luise Läzer, Professor of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Department of Social Work, Hochschule Darmstadt (h_da / EUt+), Email: katrin-luise.laezer@h-da.de