Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)

Freud's study of the paranoia of Daniel Paul Schreber, a former presiding judge of the Saxon appeal court, written entirely from Schreber's published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903); Freud never met him. He argues that, since paranoiacs say only what they choose to say, a printed self-account can stand in for personal acquaintance. The first part retells the case: a hypochondriacal illness in 1884–85 treated by the Leipzig psychiatrist Paul Flechsig, then, after a half-waking fantasy of how fine it would be to be a woman submitting to intercourse, a second illness from 1893 in which Schreber believed Flechsig, and later God, sought his "soul murder" and his transformation into a woman, until he accepted that transformation as the world order's demand, to be fertilised by divine rays and bear a new race. The second part interprets this: a surge of homosexual libido directed at Flechsig, standing for Schreber's brother and above all his father, the physician D. G. M. Schreber, was warded off by turning love into persecution; the replacement of Flechsig by God and the sun, both father figures, let the wish be accepted. The third part proposes the mechanism of paranoia: a fixation at the stage of narcissism, between autoerotism and object love; the derivation of persecution, erotomania, jealousy and megalomania as ways of contradicting the sentence "I (a man) love him (a man)"; repression in three phases; and the withdrawal of libido from the world, felt as its end, with the delusion as an attempt at recovery that rebuilds it. A postscript of 1912 reads Schreber's boast that he could gaze at the sun through the myth of the eagle that tests its young, and links neurosis to myth and totemism.