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In Medias Res: Or, In the Middle of the Case Method
Introduction
There is a well-known technique of beginning a narrative or a story in the middle of
events; this technique is known as ‘in medias res’ (Abrams and Harpham, 2009).
While we might think that the notion of a line represents an ideal notion of structure
with a clearly demarcated beginning, middle, and an end, that is not what an
empirical study of literature reveals. Most literary texts actually begin in the middle
but subsequently find an opportunity to work out a causal sequence from which
literary critics reconstruct the analytic path of a beginning, the middle, and the end.
Even as important a text as Homer’s epic poem the Illiad begins in medias res.
Understanding how narratives begin is an important endeavor in literary criticism,
and anybody who tries to write a story will benefit by studying the range of
techniques that are available. So, for instance, a story might begin with the
description of an individual, a community, an idea, an event, or even a dream. There
is no pre-given generic specification on what constitutes an effective opening move;
it actually depends on the style of the writer. If there is no pre-given format in
writing a story, which is the genre that most of us are acquainted with in terms of
how events are organized in a sequence, or in time, what sort of conventions will
apply in writing up a case?
Conventions of Case Writing
Understanding these conventions is important since cases partake simultaneously of
the following genres: stories, narratives, and reports. This question is relevant not
only in the attempts to use literary genres as cases in courses on literature and
management, which is often the case in leadership training but also in case writing
workshops. In these case writing workshops, participants have specific questions on
how to start a case, how to develop a riveting narrative, and how to bring the case to
a close in terms of a decision-making situation. There is also some curiosity on the
relationship between stories and reports since the appendices and long stretches of
data within the case don’t always partake of the narrative dimension, but look like

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excerpts from technical or consultancy reports. This is especially a problem from the
point of view of compositional structure since the introduction of the report-like
element reduces the sense of flow in the case narrative. It is therefore a good idea to
introduce information that does not have a narrative form as a series of appendices
with different thematic heads. While some of the points discussed here are technical,
they are also observations that lay-readers might have made while going through a
case. The extent to which the narrative dimension is discussed in the context of an
actual case discussion however might vary depending on the interest, if any, in the
cognitive dimensions of narrativity in case analysis amongst the participants in a
case discussion. It is a good idea therefore to introduce the basic elements of a story
before making specific suggestions or giving tips on how to write a case. Though the
function of a case is different from that of a story, they have a generic resemblance
which should be obvious. Unless we find the time necessary to appreciate these
similarities, we will overlook the obvious (Srinivasan, 2010).
The Timeline Technique
The challenge of trying to understand a complex sequence of events as elements in a
timeline is a technique that is used not only in literary analysis, but also in
psychoanalysis. Here, just as a storyteller can begin in the middle, so can the patient.
The notion of beginning in the middle is all the more important in the case of
psychoanalysis since the basic problem for the patient is that he doesn’t know where
he is in the context of the timeline. The structure of the simple timeline presupposes
that an analytic model can show that the arrow of time necessarily flows forward
and rests at strategic intervals in order to punctuate the progress of the narrative.
But, in psychoanalysis, time can flow both forwards and backwards through a
psychic mechanism known as ‘retroactive causality’ (Forrester, 1992). It is therefore a
major challenge in psychoanalysis to construct a timeline which represents the strict,
chronological, flow of time. The technical term that Freud used in this context is
‘construction in analysis’ (Rycroft, 1995a). What this means is that interpretations, if
any, on the part of the psychoanalyst must wait until the patient is in a position to
construct a narrative which can then lead to a dialectical response from the analyst.

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Why is this important? This is important because the patient must take the lead in
interpreting his own symptom; interpretations in the absence of such patient-led
constructions are not therapeutic. It is not the analyst’s knowledge of the symptom
that is curative, but the patient’s own knowledge of his symptom. Since the arrow of
time can flow both forwards and backwards, the causal points in the hypothetical
timeline are subject to revision. That is why Freud argued that ‘later events in life
can be therapeutic.’ Psychoanalysis itself is an instance of such an event which
attempts to give a greater sense of coherence and consistency to the narrative of a
patient’s life by situating - however problematic that might seem – the patient’s life
in the context of this timeline.
The Age of the Neurosis
This timeline is also interesting for the following reason: the age of the patient is not
the same as the age of the neurosis. This was a discovery that helped in the
development of the techniques of analysis, and in determining whether or not the
analyst should explicitly interpret the transference, and, if so, how. So when analysts
were trying to decide whether to take in older patients for analysis, there were those
who suggested that older patients have too long a narrative to work-through in the
analytic situation, or were too-set in their ways, and that it is therefore not cost-
effective to do so (Valenstein, 2000). What they did not understand was the
difference between the ‘age of the patient’ and the ‘age of the neurosis.’ The process
of analysis is mainly dependent on coming to terms with the age of the neurosis and
not the age of the patient. So there are empirical instances of older patients who co-
operate and younger patients who don’t and vice-versa. In any case, it is not always
true that older patients have longer narratives to work-through because the notion of
temporality in psychoanalysis does not work with the notion of ‘chronological time,’
but with the notion of ‘logical time’ (Forrester, 1990, 1991). The former represents the
amount of time that the patient has actually lived through in his life while the latter
represents the strategic points of punctuation in the patient’s psychic development.
It is therefore not necessary for the patient to narrate every single event in his life to
the analyst, but must only report whatever comes to the ‘surface of his mind,’ and in

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the sequence, if possible, in which it does so through the process of free-association
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973a, 1988a; Rycroft, 1995b).
Situating Cases on a Timeline
What is the relevance of these ideas in understanding the structure of a case? Let us
begin with the notion of a timeline. Most cases will have a timeline at the end in the
form of an appendix which records the most important events in the life of a
company. The purpose of this timeline is to help the case discussants situate the case
in the context of a specific set of events which will now lead up to the problem of
making a crucial choice between options. This crucial choice will have strategic
implications for the company and the implicit understanding between the case
writer and the case discussants since cases are not written merely to choose between
trivial alternatives that will not affect the company as a whole. So even if the list of
options seems to represent a divisional matter, it will have crucial implications for
the strategic direction of the company as such. While not all cases are necessarily
written with strategic implications for the company, the case method in the strong
sense demands that the decision-maker appreciate that his decisions will have
systemic implications that are not reducible to either tactical questions or to a trivial
notion of merely practicing the art of decision-making. When the decision is finally
situated within the space of the timeline, it should have the kind of importance that
is attached to an important event in the life of the company.
Cases Without Strategic Import
This is often forgotten in cases which do not have an in-built opportunity for
strategic decision making either within the context of business policy, or within any
of the functional areas where an important decision has a strategic import for the
fortunes of the company as such. These cases are more like company profiles and
represent a simple narrativization of the timeline without demarcating any point on
the line as the locus of action. These sorts of cases use a simple ‘beginning, middle,
and end’ formula, and are not the type of cases that I have in mind. These are cases
written from the outside with publicly available information, and they are more a

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way of acquainting students with what a particular company is all about. There is no
work for the case discussants to do here. These cases function instead as a form of
background knowledge about the ‘who’s who’ and ‘what’s what’ of the world of
business or management. The challenge in writing, interpreting, discussing, and
making recommendations in the context of the case method is linked to cases that
are preceded by rigorous fieldwork within the company and in the industry before
they are written up. These cases are constructed in a style that permits the case
discussants to think-through the challenges of decision-making with a strategic
import for the future direction of the company as such. What such cases reveal is
that the timeline is the point of departure and not the point of arrival, since there is
no specific element within the line as such which can aid in the process of strategic
decision-making.
Strategic Options in the Timeline
It is highly unlikely therefore that a case writer will choose a decision-making
situation that represents merely a point in the timeline, but focus instead on what
form of linearity must be presupposed for the company to resolve the fundamental
questions of its own identity, and how that identity serves as both an opportunity
and as a necessary constraint in developing a strategic approach going forward into
the future. This is what the patient must do in analysis as well. He must decide in
the context of the timeline (i.e. the chronological life he has lived so far), what
options are open to him, and the intellectual and emotional wherewithal that is
required to move forward without merely repeating the old moves that do not add
value anymore; that is, the patient must learn to live without merely repeating
scenarios from his past. To bring these two narratives of the problem of method in
psychoanalysis and the case method together, we can now understand why the
process of arriving at strategic decisions has a neurotic dimension. It is neurotic
precisely because the decision-maker, like the patient at a crucial turn in the analysis,
must come to terms with the relationship between the resources available within the

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space of chronological time (including the amount of time left) and the constraints
imposed by a previous set of choices in the context of logical time. It is always logical
time that determines the strategic direction by ‘precipitating’ the need to make a
decision despite the impasse in which the patient or the company may find
themselves in (Lacan, 1988; Fink, 1996). This strategic impasse then is the point of
entry for the case writer since it is within this space or slot of time that he will have
to stage a conflict between the inertial pull of chronological time in which the
individual or company finds itself doing what it has always been doing and the
point of punctuation that precipitates the possibility of a strategic intervention by
making a decisive choice that involves some element of risk.
Conclusion
What the potential case writer wants to understand then in a case writing workshop
is how to develop and deploy the set of techniques necessary to stage precisely this
conflict at the point of convergence between chronological time and logical time
(Soler, 1996). The specific techniques of case writing, the sequence in which events
are arranged into a case narrative, the proportional division of concerns between the
main text and the appendices, the conflation of the strategic and tactical dimensions
as thematic problems in the text, and so forth then are but attempts to move a case
narrative to a locus within which the question of decision-making is addressed at its
strongest. This is also the point of convergence between decision-making that is
conceived as a problem of the rational and the irrational. A cognitive approach to
decision-making is based on the idea that there no symptomatic impediments to
decision-making. The role of psychoanalysis and management as a discourse
however is to demonstrate that decision making is not outside the ambit of the
unconscious, but is to some extent propelled by it. It is therefore important for
decision-makers to develop the habit of introspecting regularly on the underlying
modalities of compulsive behavior that prompts them to act-out in decision-making
situations. The case method is a unique opportunity to both identify and work-
through such unconscious mechanisms (Freud, 1914; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973b,

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1988b). But in order to make this process an intrinsic element of case analysis, it is
important for case writers to move the scope of strategic decision-making from the
realm of merely choosing between easily generated options in decision making loci
that, in turn, are simplistically reducible to a situation analysis. In order to make this
possible in the classroom, case writers must understand the need to develop
situations on the model of both psychic and social over-determination in the cases
that they write so that the case discussants can differentiate between the
chronological and logical elements in the time line of events that constitute the case.
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Terms (New Delhi: Cengage Learning), pp. 90-92
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Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture,
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Forrester, John (1990). ‘Dead on Time: Lacan’s Theory of Temporality,’ The Seductions
of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Forrester, John (1992). ‘In the Beginning Was Repetition: On Inversions and
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Lacan, Jacques (1988). ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A
New Sophism,’ translated by Bruce Fink, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 2:2, pp. 4-22.
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (1973a). ‘Free Association,’ The Language
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Rycroft, Charles (1995b). ‘Free Association,’ A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
(London, Penguin), pp. 59-60.
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SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN, IIM KOZHIKODE