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This book is a challenge to all Freud and Schreber scholars. In journalistic style the book's title would shout: “The Truth about Schreber!” But far from being a limelight seeking extravaganza, the book is thorough and guided by excellent scholarship. Schreber, indeed, needs a defense. The patients of Freud's dramatic vivid case histories, written to illustrate his psychoanalytic theories, have entered history to become familiar personages. Paul Schreber, a member of this illustrious group, became known as the prototype who demonstrates the dynamic link between paranoia and homosexuality. His “case history” has been of particular interest to Freud scholars as we share Freud's only evidence, namely the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness written by Schreber, while he was committed to a sanatorium, for the purpose of gaining his freedom through the legal act of being declared competent to handle his own affairs. This evidence invited reinterpretations and new research. Around 1950, psychiatry became interested in the traumatizing environment and individual family dynamics. Paul Schreber's father, too, could be studied. He gained his reputation as an advocate of character building through gymnastics and healthy living, a method he described in several books. W. G. Niederland, who was interested in evidence of a traumatic genesis of mental illness, researched the Schreber documents and wrote a landmark paper “Schreber and Son” announcing that he had found the key to Paul's illness. He interpreted the physical images and sensations described in Paul Schreber's psychosis as being derivative of the way his father tortured his son by means of posture-improving orthopedic appliances and other educative methods. This notion became the core theme of a widely read book by Morton Schatzman, published in 1973, called Soul Murder: Persecution of the Family dramatizing the sadism of the father. These ideas and images impressed an interested audience. Paul Schreber, thus became known as a