Prado de Oliveira LE, ed.: Schreber et la parano;ïa. Le meurtre de l'âme. Paris:  L'Harmattan. 1996.  319 pp. ISBN 2-7384-4780-5.: Prado de Oliveira LE: Freud et Schreber. Les sources écrites du délire, entre psychose et culture. Ramonville Saint-Agne:  Érès. 1997.  142 pp. ISBN 2-86586-479-0.

Ever since Freud's seminal paper on Daniel Paul Schreber (1), the “Schreber case”, as it became known in psychoanalytic literature, continued to attract attention. This continuing attraction is again exemplified by two new French volumes on Schreber, one edited and the other written by Prado de Oliveira, a French-Brasilian psychoanalyst. Prado de Oliveira is certainly not a newcomer to the study of the Schreber case. Besides being the author of several papers on Schreber, he also edited and co-edited two volumes on the Schreber case. In 1979 he edited Les cas Schreber. Contributions psychanalytiques de langue anglaise (2), which contained French translations of several important English and American papers on Schreber, and in 1988, he co-edited Psychosis and sexual identity: Toward a post-analytic view of the Schreber case (3).

In Schreber et la paranoïa. Le meurtre de l'âme [Schreber and paranoia. Soul murder], Prado de Oliveira brings together a wide variety of contributions on Schreber by scholars from many different disciplines. Unfortunately however, not only the scope, but also the quality of the papers in this volume varies widely. For example, Gillibert, a French psychoanalyst and author, presents in the first chapter, after a short general introduction by Prado de Oliveira, the text for a play on Schreber. However interesting this may be for some, I do not see the point of including this long and often monotonous text in this volume. The same is true of chapter 3, by O'Neill, and chapter 4, which contains excerpts of the correspondence on the Schreber case between Azouri, a French psychoanalyst, and Prado de Oliveira. These chapters hardly contain any new contributions to the Schreber case and the reader finds himself often immersed in farfetched speculations, without knowing where all these speculations will lead to.

However, this volume also contains some excellent papers on Schreber, notably by Devreese, Kemple, Lothane, and Prado de Oliveira himself. Dani