THREE CASE HISTORIES by SIGMUND FREUD & PHILIP RIEFF

Author:SIGMUND FREUD & PHILIP RIEFF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TOUCHSTONE
Published: 1963-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Postscript 1

In dealing with the case history of Senatspräsident Schreber I purposely restricted myself to a minimum of interpretation; and I feel confident that every reader with a knowledge of psychoanalysis will have learned from the material which I presented more than was explicitly stated by me, and that he will have found no difficulty in drawing the threads closer and in reaching conclusions at which I no more than hinted. By a happy chance the same issue of this periodical as that in which my own paper appeared showed that the attention of some other contributors had been directed to Schreber’s autobiography, and made it easy to guess how much more material remains to be gathered from the symbolic content of the phantasies and delusions of the gifted paranoiac. 2

Since I published my work upon Schreber, a chance acquisition of knowledge has put me in a position to appreciate one of his delusional beliefs more adequately, and to recognize its weath of associations with mythology. I mentioned on p. 129 the patient’s peculiar relation to the sun, and I felt obliged to explain the sun as a sublimated “father-symbol.” The sun used to speak to him in human language and thus revealed itself to him as a living being. Schreber was in the habit of abusing it and shouting threats at it; he declares, moreover, that when he stood facing it and spoke aloud its rays would turn pale before him. After his “recovery” he boasts that he can gaze at it without any difficulty and without being more than slightly dazzled by it, a thing which had naturally been impossible for him formerly. 3

It is out of this delusional privilege of being able to gaze at the sun without being dazzled that the mythological interest arises. We read in Reinach 4 that the natural historians of antiquity attributed this power only to the eagle, who, as a dweller in the highest regions of the air, was brought into especially intimate relation with the heavens, with the sun, and with lightning. 5 We learn from the same sources, moreover, that the eagle puts his young to a test before recognizing them as his legitimate offspring. Unless they can succeed in looking into the sun without blinking, they are cast out from the eyrie.

There can be no doubt about the meaning of this animal myth. It is certain that what is here ascribed to animals is nothing more than a hallowed custom among men. The procedure gone through by the eagle with his young is an ordeal, a test of lineage, such as is reported of the most various races of antiquity. Thus the Celts living upon the banks of the Rhine used to entrust their new-born babies to the waters of the river, in order to ascertain whether they were truly of their own blood. The clan of Psylli, who inhabited what is now Tripoli, boasted that they were descended from snakes, and used to expose their infants to

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