Further Remarks about Schreber's Hallucinations1

This paper is a sequel to one which I read two years ago at the Congress in Zürich (Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 31, 1950). Let me state some of the conclusions reached in that first paper before commencing my present one.

Schreber, in the period preceding his psychotic delusional state, tried to ward off the demands of his unconscious homosexual urge. Yet one night his defences broke down and he experienced an outburst of six emissions. The castration danger involved in these orgasms caused him to sever his relations with reality, whereupon his psychosis began.

It should not be assumed that Schreber's contact with reality was now completely broken. A large part of his personality still remained in contact with reality. Only if a danger arises with which the ego cannot cope by reality means is contact with reality relinquished and a psychotic symptom formed instead.

During the early stage of Schreber's psychosis, every time that the non -psychotic part of his personality anticipated a situation in which his homosexual feelings would gain the upper hand and would lead to an orgasm, his ego did not wait until such a situation had fully developed, but set up an interference. With regard to the complicated process which then followed and which I have described in my previous paper, I wish to emphasize only that the cathexis of the dangerous homosexual urge is withdrawn and that this withdrawn energy is used in forming the hallucination. In this psychotic process a very primitive form of projection is employed. What was originally part of the id appears now, in a distorted form, to come from the outside.

We may say that the energy which was withdrawn from the dangerous urge evaporates in forming the hallucination. The hallucination, therefore, is a discharge phenomenon! The amount of energy which would lead to the development of danger is discharged, and the conflict is temporarily resolved. New stimuli—either from within or from without—will again cause an increase of