On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

782 A preliminary draft of this paper was prepared for a colloquium at Princeton University entitled ‘Model Systems, Cases, and Exemplary Narratives’, 11 December 1999. I would like to thank Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise for the invitation to contribute and for the reflections of my commentator, Carl Schorske, as well as incisive comments by Anthony Grafton and the late Gerry Geison. Since then, it has benefited from the responses of Lauren Berlant, Martin Kusch, and John Burnham, to whom I’m very grateful. I learned much from a recent conference at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, entitled ‘Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, March 2006, organized by Ipek Demir and Kusch, in particular the contributions of Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Kusch, and Simon Schaffer. In the final stages of preparation I received very useful advice from Berlant and the coeditors of Critical Inquiry and an extensive detailed commentary from and email exchange with Kuhn’s son Nathaniel Kuhn (who also shared with me his mother’s, Kay Kuhn’s, memories), for which I’m extremely grateful; late and crucial clarifications I owe to Adam Phillips. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Kassler (1951–2002), with whom I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm