Introduction

‘Reconsidering Schreber: Contemporary Perspectives’ was the title of a Study Day held at the Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy in July 2005. The idea came from one of the Study Day Committee members, David Pocock, who wrote inviting two other SIP members, Sue Gottlieb and Paul Zeal, and myself to prepare short papers reconsidering Freud's paper, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’ (Freud 1911) which was based on Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber 1903), from a contemporary perspective.

The Study Day Committee had thought of using different psychoanalytical views on a single case, similar to the Journal's Clinical Commentary approach, but starting with Freud's paper as case material. It was hoped that the three speakers would cover a range of ideas from contemporary Freudian, Kleinian and Independent traditions, and we were invited to reappraise Freud's theorizing and go beyond his material, particularly into the biographical detail on Schreber now available.

The three invited speakers engaged with the task in very different ways, reflecting their different theoretical orientations but also drawing on their reading and on their clinical and life experience, to prepare papers which would open up the study topic. Sue Gottlieb followed Freud's recommendation that his readers ‘make themselves acquainted with the book by reading it through at least once beforehand’ (Freud 1911, p. 140). She became immersed in the Memoirs and decided to try to understand Schreber for herself, using only the same source material that he had. Paul Zeal also returned to source, and to Freud, and then considered Schreber's material in Lacanian and existential perspectives, reviewing the fate of devalued and misunderstood femininity. I found myself drawn to re-reading various other bits of Freud's own works, and biographies, as though getting alongside him, before turning to consider Schreber's predicament from an Independent view.

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