The Schism between Freud and Jung over Schreber: Its Implications for Method and Doctrine

Freud's interest in Schreber's famous Memoirs was not to examine Schreber, a life, in all its historicity, but to use the book as case material to illustrate a specific theory he had formulated in 1908: the causal connection between repressed homosexual libido and the paranoid syndrome. While of undoubted heuristic value, this causal connection has not stood the test of time as a universal clinical formulation. In singling out this combined drive and developmental explanatory theory, Freud left untapped many descriptive, diagnostic and dynamic aspects in the story of Schreber.

This formulation also illustrates the perennial tension in psychoanalysis between the breadth of method and the narrowness of theory, or doctrine. Whereas method addresses such general issues as the creation of meaning in health and disease, of meaning as mediated by language, memory, perception and imagination, trauma and transference, theory is concerned with the role of specific etiological forces and factors. The theory in question, the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses, has been variously contested during Freud's lifetime and thereafter.

The debates about the privileged role of sexuality were important in the history of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic movement, the various Freudian and non-Freudian schools, and the Freud-Jung relationship. The differences between Freud and Jung concerning the libido theory and Schreber led to their fateful clash and final parting of the ways.