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The author bases his approach to Freud's Schreber case-history on the tenuous argument that, since Freud never met Schreber but merely read the latter's autobiographical account of his illness, Freud's own account is essentially a work of literary criticism. This seems to be about as sensible as arguing that, if historians rely on written records, as most do, then history is literary criticism also! Indeed, the author might even assent to this surprising claim since it is a major part of his argument that, in psychoanalysis at least, historical reconstructions which try to find causes for things only lead to an infinite regress. ('Infinite'? surely not; but then, the author, like many literary critics is not careful with his use of words.) Such causal reductionism is allegedly an interpretive vice called originology in Erickson's ugly coinage (and which our critic quotes without demur but which, I must admit, makes most Schreberisms seem positively poetic and nerve-language decidely preferable to the pretentious intellectualism which characterizes Chabot's writing-down-system). Originology then saves the author from even mentioning many, and ignoring most of the import of most recent researches on Schreber. The writing-down-system has nothing to do with the nursery black-board on which the infant Schreber's misdemeanours were inscribed at the instigation of his tyrannical and omnipotent father and psychoanalytic interpretation, apparently, has no right to look for determinitive causes of adult psychopathology in childhood.
Following such a radical departure from the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, the reader may wonder what, if anything of it remains in Chabot's approach. Indeed, in a fleeting moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness the author actually admits that 'a reader could construe my arguments as emasculating the explanatory power of psychoanalysis quite as relentlessly as Schreber believes his situation unmans him' (p. 62). Soul-murder certainly s