Daniel Paul Schreber: From Male Into Female

Daniel Paul Schreber was one of that very small number of persons to suffer a severe and incapacitating psychosis, recover, and write an account of the experience. (His book, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, was published in 1903 and translated into English by Macalpine and Hunter, in 1955, as Memoirs of My Mental Illness. It will be referred to hereafter as the Memoirs.) Freud, used the Memoirs as the basis for the psychoanalytic study of Schreber that he published in 1911, an analysis in which he develops his well-known thoery concerning the relationship of “latent homosexuality” and paranoia. In recent years a wealth of new material has become available about Schreber's family and early life which, along with new models and evidence on the genesis of psychosis and advances in psychoanalytic and related theories, has led to several reformulations of the case.

In this paper I will attempt to bring these various strands together to form an integrated understanding of Schreber's life. Freud's original analysis alerts us to the role of unconscious sexual conflicts though, as we will see, certain of his own biases led to a one-sided version of these conflicts. In addition, there is much to be learned from the case about male and female identity and their maintenance in a rigid patriarchal society; about the intergenerational transmission of conflict within family and social systems; about the therapeutic potential of painful and frightening delusions and hallucinations and the realization of this potential in a form of self-therapy; and, finally, about the broader social-historical