You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Thomas Dalzell, a prominent Irish Catholic theologian and Lacanian psychoanalyst, has written a book (based on his dissertation) whose goal is to endorse the correctness of Freud's analysis of Schreber's immortal Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber 1903); to validate Lacan and Lacanian analysis; and to delve into the history of contemporaneous German psychiatry. It is a serious contribution, thoroughly researched and documented, to the still vibrant field of Schreber studies. This very readable book is particularly recommended to professionals interested in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
Given Dalzell's focus on Schreber's illness, here are some relevant facts. The Leipzig-born Judge Paul Schreber (son of Moritz Schreber, a pioneer of rehabilitation medicine) experienced various crises and losses that caused three depressive episodes and hospitalizations: moderate at forty-two, in 1884, after an electoral defeat; severe at fifty-one, in 1893, following his wife's repeated miscarriages and stillbirths (the last a boy, in 1892) and, paradoxically, his appointment as director of a five-judge panel at the supreme court of appeals of the Kingdom of Saxony; deadly in 1907, after the death of his mother and his wife's stroke. He functioned at a high level between the first and second bouts, while between the second and third he lived quietly in retirement, lovingly raising an adolescent girl he and his wife had adopted. Schreber was twice admitted voluntarily to Leipzig University psychiatric hospital by its director, Professor Paul Flechsig, a famed neuroscientist turned psychiatrist. Schreber recovered in 1885 but in 1894 was still doing poorly, which resulted in his being transferred, on Flechsig's orders, first to a private asylum and then to the Sonnenstein asylum in Pirna near Dresden, the latter a disgrace for a high-ranking judge. At Sonnenstein, director Guido Weber's diagnosis of chronic incurable paranoia resulted in the decision by a lower cou