This course will examine Sigmund Freud’s five major case studies (colloquially called “The Wolfman,” “The Rat Man,” “Dora,” “Schreber,” and “Little Hans”) as well as two smaller works that may be considered case studies--"The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," and the case of Elisabeth von R in his early Studies in Hysteria--as pieces of both theory and literature, and as texts that raise the question of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and literature. Psychoanalysis is an endeavor that puts to question the stories we tell or have long told about ourselves, with the understanding that other narratives—or perhaps something that lies beyond narrative per se—might be uncovered. At the same time, the psychoanalytic encounter, especially in Freud’s hands, is itself a kind of story, and thus Freud’s case studies may be read as works of literature at the same time that doing so may put to question both what a “case study” and what “literature” is. Thus in this class, we will read Freud’s case studies to ask both what they provide us about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and how they are formed as texts. We will attend throughout to the various genres (the short story, the Victorian novel, the memoir) that Freud was drawing on as a writer, and also to the ethical questions evoked by the practice of writing about patients. We will further read various post-Freudian commentaries (by Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Jane Gallop, Peter Brooks, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and others) on Freud’s cases as a way of refining these questions; and we will read more contemporary, experimental case studies in order to explore other possible narrative methods of transmitting the psychoanalytic encounter and the human story.