Making the Case (2010-2015)

The Case Study Genre in Sexology, Psychoanalysis and Literature

Assoc. Professor Birgit Lang, Dr Katie Sutton and Professor Joy Damousi
ARC Discovery Project DP1093819

"Making the Case" provided the first genre-based history of the case study by analysing the changing relationship between medical, psychoanalytic, and literary case studies. The project employed an interdisciplinary and transnational framework to investigate how the case study shaped 19th and 20th century notions of the sexual self. Up until this date there had been no full-scale scholarly investigation of the evolution of the case study across the various disciplines. The research team argued that the case study was the means of an interdisciplinary debate through which sexologists, writers, and psychoanalysts collectively engaged in the construction of knowledge.