The Schreber Case by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141970486
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1942-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

[And his prescribèd journey he finishes with thunder-tread.]

Every year his father would follow medical advice and visit the spa resort of Marienbad. In this patient the infantile disposition towards his father had taken hold in two phases. As long as the father was alive, it took the form of total resistance and open combat, immediately after his death, a neurosis that was based upon slavish submission and retroactive obedience towards his father.

In the case of Schreber, then, we once more find ourselves on the distinctly familiar ground of the father complex.25 If the struggle with Flechsig reveals itself to the patient as a conflict with God, we must translate the same into an infantile conflict with his beloved father, the elements of which, unknown to us, have determined the content of the delusion. None of the material that is usually uncovered by analysis in such cases is absent here; everything is represented by some hint or other. In these childhood experiences the father appears to disrupt the generally auto-erotic satisfaction that the child seeks and that is often later replaced in fantasies by a less ignoble kind.26 In the final stage of Schreber’s delusion the infantile sexual urge can celebrate a famous triumph: voluptuousness becomes God-fearing, and God Himself (the father) ceaselessly asks it of the patient. The father’s most dread threat, that of castration, has furnished the material for the wishful fantasy (initially resisted and then accepted) of being transformed into a woman. The allusion to an offence, which is covered by the surrogate formation ‘soul-murder’, is more than clear. His chief orderly is found to be identical with his housemate, von W., who, according to the voices, falsely accused him of masturbation (p. 108). The voices say, as though in justification for the threat of castration: ‘Because you are said to be represented as in thrall to voluptuous excesses’ (pp. 127–8).27 Finally, the compulsion to think (p. 47), to which the patient submits because he assumes that, if he stops thinking for a moment, God will believe him to have become stupid and so withdraw from him, is the reaction, familiar to us from elsewhere, against the threat or the fear that sexual activity, specifically masturbation, will lead to the loss of reason.28 Given the extraordinary number of hypochondriac delusional ideas that the patient develops,29 we should probably not attribute too great an importance to the fact that some of the same coincide word for word with the hypochondriac fears of masturbators.30

For anybody prepared to be bolder than I or who, through connections to the Schreber family, might know more of the people concerned, of the milieu, and of minor occurrences, it would be an easy task to trace countless details of Schreber’s delusion back to their sources and so to recognize their significance, this in spite of the censorship to which the Memoirs are subjected. We have no choice but to be content with this shadowy sketch of the infantile material, through which the paranoid condition has represented the current conflict.

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