Article
Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)
Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von 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.
Main ideas
- A paranoiac's published self-account can substitute for personal analysis, because paranoiacs reveal, in distorted form, what other neurotics keep secret, and say only what they choose to say.
- The delusion began as sexual persecution, the threat of being turned into a woman and abused, and was only afterwards recast as religious megalomania, Schreber's mission as redeemer and God's wife.
- The exciting cause of the illness was a surge of homosexual libido directed at the physician Flechsig, a transference from Schreber's brother and father; defence against it turned the longed-for person into the persecutor.
- Paranoia decomposes where hysteria condenses: the split of the persecutor into Flechsig and God shows that they belong to one series, with God and the sun standing for the father.
- Schreber's relation to God repeats the infantile mixture of submission and revolt toward the father; the fear of castration and his childlessness fed the fantasy of becoming a woman.
- The disposition to paranoia lies in a fixation at narcissism, a stage between autoerotism and object love; a surge of libido can resexualise the homosexual strivings that had been sublimated into social feeling.
- Delusions of persecution, erotomania, jealousy and megalomania are the possible ways of contradicting the single sentence "I (a man) love him (a man)": by its verb, its object, its subject, or as a whole.
- Projection turns a suppressed inner perception into an outer one; in persecution, love becomes hate and returns as "he hates me". Freud declines to treat projection as specific to paranoia.
- Repression proceeds in three phases: fixation, repression proper, and the failure of repression with the return of the repressed from the point of fixation.
- The end of the world in the delusion projects an inner catastrophe, the withdrawal of libido from people and things; the delusion is an attempt at recovery, a reconstruction that brings libido back to its objects, and what was abolished within returns from without.
- Dementia praecox, which Freud proposes to call paraphrenia, shares the detachment of libido but regresses further, to autoerotism, and recovers by hallucination rather than projection.
- The 1912 postscript reads Schreber's boast that he could look into the sun through the myth of the eagle testing its young, linking the delusion to totemism and claiming that neurosis preserves primitive humanity as dreams preserve the child.
What it shows
- 1915
Sigmund Freud introduced Primal repression
Freud named primal repression (Urverdrängung) in 'Repression' (1915) as a first phase in which a drive's psychical representative is denied entry into consciousness, an idea foreshadowed in the Schreber case (1911) as fixation. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he returns to it as his own earlier concept, presupposed by later repressions.
Cited in
External links
In English
- Penguin Random House(opens the store’s page in a new tab)
- Penguin Random House(opens the store’s page in a new tab)