The Schreber Case

Description

Freud rarely treated psychotic patients or psychoanalyzed people just from their writings, but he had a powerful and imaginative understanding of their condition—revealed, most notably, in this analysis of a remarkable memoir. In 1903, Judge Daniel Schreber, a highly intelligent and cultured man, produced a vivid account of his nervous illness dominated by the desire to become a woman, terrifying delusions about his doctor, and a belief in his own special relationship with God. Eight years later, Freud’s penetrating insight uncovered the impulses and feelings Schreber had about his father, which underlay his extravagant symptoms.

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Translator’s Preface

The Schreber Case (Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides))

[Introduction]
I. Case History
II. Attempts at Interpretation
III. On the Paranoid Mechanism
Postscript

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Moravia and lived in Vienna between the ages of four and eighty-two. In 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died the following year. Freud’s career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation: psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half-century.

Andrew Webber is a senior lecturer in the department of German at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Churchill College. He has published widely on German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.US

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