Schreber and Freud: The Colonizing of Taboo

My associate Dale Van Atta has been ferreting out the jigsaw pieces of the invasion plan for three months. He has seen documents so secret that the code word used to classify them is itself classified.

The facts of the Schreber case are well known. Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), son of a distinguished physician-educator, during his stay in a mental hospital, composed an account of his experiences. His major purpose in this writing, known in its English translation as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,1 was to explain and justify his behavior as a patient and to demonstrate that he was sufficiently improved to be discharged. He pursued his campaign of appeals with great diligence and evident ability, and he was discharged from the hospital in 1902. Thereafter he lived quietly with his wife until she suffered a stroke and his mother died. He was then readmitted to the hospital, where he died at the age of 68.

He was not, of course, a well-known figure. Subsequent generations might never have heard of his case had not Freud chosen to write an analysis of the Memoirs, thereby beginning a discussion which is still not finished. Freud used Schreber's book as the basis for a theory concerning the genesis of paranoid psychosis: that the condition arises as a defense against the eruption of passive homosexual wishes.2 Some 40 years after Freud's analysis of Schreber's Memoirs, when a sizeable literature on the Schreber case had been produced by psychoanalytic writers, two British psychiatric historians, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, produced the first English translation of the Schreber Memoirs, together with a lengthy critique of Freud's monograph and a reevaluation of the Schreber text.1 A few years later an American analyst, William Niederland, began a series of papers based on extensive research into the Schreber family and the personal history of the patient's life.3 As a result of his efforts, a great deal is now known about