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"Wer Kennt schon den Dr. Schreber?" (Who, after all, knows Dr. Schreber?), as Niederland informs us, was the scornful headline with which a Saxony newspaper greeted Daniel Paul Schreber's candidacy for the Reichstag in 1884. This eminent jurist lost the election and was subsequently hospitalized for six months for a serious mental breakdown. After he was promoted to presiding judge, Court of Appeals, in 1893, he became even more severely disabled by mental illness. While his legal and political achievements have been blurred by the passage of time, he remains deservedly well recognized in psychoanalysis and psychiatry because of the scientific value of the Memoirs of his mental illness (1903).1 Those times were ripe for a redefinition of mental illness, and the openness and explicit detail of Schreber's report foreshadowed the impressive advances of psychiatry in this century. However, the Memoirs would hardly be known today had not Freud used them in 1911 for his most important contribution to the psychoanalytic exploration of paranoid states and schizophrenia: "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia."
Freud's work is best known outside of psychoanalysis because it provided a means of understanding the hitherto enigmatic delusional thinking of psychotics in psychodynamic terms. Within the psychoanalytic community, Freud's Schreber study is even more significant because it marked a turning point in the early development of psychoanalysis. It is basic to the two principal theories of schizophrenia in contemporary psychoanalysis.2 Even more significant for our field, the Schreber "Notes" mark the origin of Freud's formulation and study of narcissism and object relations. He extended his psychic energy/libido hypotheses in order to organize these new findings, and revisions of these theories constitute a major issue for psychoanalysis today.
The core of The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a