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The author suggests that in the psychological study of historical personalities, what historians most want from psychoanalysis is its method rather than its theory. He examines two recent books on Schreber (William G. Niederland's The
Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality and M. Schatzman's Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family), in order to investigate how psychoanalysis has been adapted to the study of this historical person. He notes that the principal focus of Niederland's book was the relationship between the mental illness of Schreber and the child-rearing theories of his father. Niederland drew the theoretical conclusion that Freud was right both in his diagnosis of Schreber and in his theory of paranoia. From the same information, Schatzman concluded that Freud was wrong and that Schreber's fear that his soul was being murdered by a god who used him as a passive female sex object was not so much the consequence of repressed homosexual love for his father as of the repressed fears of his father's very real persecution of him as a child. The author of this paper believes that this conclusion is a consequence of Schatzman's identification with Schreber and that the historian who sets out to explore the psychoanalytic aspects of any historical problem must be aware that there is almost certainly an unconscious dimension to his choice. Niederland's book illustrates how an analyst may continue to derive new insight from a finite quantity of written sources. Schreber's memoirs serve the function of providing primary "clinical" evidence, while his father's writings enable an objective reconstruction of Schreber's childhood experiences to be made which can then be correlated with Schreber's fantasies. The author concludes that when a significant amount of fantasy material is available, along with the possibility of acquiring information about the parents and intimate associates of the historical figure in question, the principal