In Chekhov, the “man in a case” is a kind of host to multiple containers of fixed categories corresponding to predetermined objects—a case for the umbrella, one for the watch, one for the penknife, even his face seems perpetually boxed in—the journey pre-packaged, immune to encounter. Medical language colloquially employs analogous categorizations: a patient under treatment may be referred to as “an ongoing case.” ‘The case in room 305 that hasn’t closed the diagnosis yet,’ ‘the typical textbook case of ADHD,’ or ‘the most difficult case’ are common metaphors in medical fiction or clinical practices, used even when, for the patient, the lightness of a ‘case’ is far less at stake than the weight of a life.

This reduction—the utilitarian metaphor of the patient as a case—does not participate in psychoanalytic ethics. The patient does not present themselves in the manner of a species/object that fits into a diagnostic genus/case. Psychoanalysis does not reduce the analysand to a case.

A psychoanalytic clinical case does not emerge from a model, but from an experience. An experience that implicates the specificities of a treatment, of a method of investigation, and of a formalizable trajectory.

The subject enters analysis. The case emerges.

The subject enters analysis. The case emerges from this crossing – not as prior containment, but as posterior construction; not as a case that precedes them, but as writing that succeeds them.