Freud rarely treated psychotic patients (or, indeed, psychoanalysed people from their writings), but he had a powerful and imaginative understanding of their condition - revealed, most notably, in this analysis of a memoir.
In 1903, Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, a highly intelligent and cultured man, produced a vivid account of a 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 unacceptable impulses and feelings Schreber had about his father, which underlay his extravagant symptoms. Yet he also demonstrated the link with more normal patterns of psychosexual development - and the human tendency to transform love into hate.
Schreber was a judge and doctor of law who lived according to a strict set of principles. His nervous illness first manifested itself as hypochondria and insomnia - which he put down to his excessive workload - but gradually deteriorated into pathological delusion. This book analyses his illness.
The Schreber Case is distinctive from the other case histories in that it's based on the memoirs of a conjectural patient. Schreber was a judge and doctor of law who lived according to a strict set of principles. His nervous illness first manifested itself as hypochondria and insomnia - which he put down to his excessive workload - but gradually deteriorated into pathological delusion. Believing himself to be dead and rotting, Schreber attempted suicide, and then went on to experience bizarre delusional epsiodes whereby he belived he was being turned into a woman. The course of this extraordinary illness is analysed by Freud in his search for a root cause - could it have been caused by homesexual impulses that Schreber tried to repress?
