Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act. C. Barry Chabot. Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.  173 pp.

This volume represents a sophisticated effort to demonstrate the relevance of literary criticism to the type of intervention that psychoanalysts use with patients. Chabot eschews the direct relevance of historical reconstruction to interpretation, insisting that historical chains are forever endless, one event always traceable to one before. He states that lives have an undeniable coherence and unity that can best be understood through the concept of personal identity, which should be applied to an understanding of current life relationships, including the transference. Freud's ideas about the homosexual origin of Schreber's paranoia is considered by Chabot to be secondary to an injured sense of identity, his “struggle to undo a wounded sense of worth, to soothe anguish at expectations left unfulfilled” (p. 143)

This sketchy summary does not do justice to Chabot's intricate philosophical and literary disquisitions. He recognizes that he is presenting merely one avenue of approach among many to Schreber. His concept of the unity of the coherent life identity is central to his own literary approach to the interpretation of the patient's conscious awareness. Chabot recognizes that dissonance and inconsistency of the human mind are equally relevant, although he does not explore this avenue to interpretation that leads more directly to the unconscious. Nevertheless, Chabot uses the concept of dissociation to describe Schreber's chaotically ambivalent relationship to his psychiatrist Flechsig (p. 112).

The major thrust of the volume, aside from these propositions, is Chabot's belief that literary people are better equipped than are psychoanalysts to apply interpretation to an analysand's free associations. They are so qualified, he says, through their training to deal with literary metaphor. Analysts, on the other hand, are equipped through their training in psychoanalytic theory. However, psychoanalysis should now turn to literary theory to help extend its realm.

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