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This book is the translation of the author's 1980 doctoral thesis in sociology for the University of Amsterdam. It is a handsomely bound edition in which the inside flap quotes Janet Malcolm praising the work as "brilliant" and gives Peter Gay's approval as well. The author thanks Kurt Eissler, among others, in his Acknowledgments. This impressive and promising start is, unfortunately, not sustained in the body of the book. The text is filled with well-researched but essentially trivial facts about the Schrebers. The tone the author uses is at times startlingly similar to that of a sarcastic adolescent taunting a schoolmate with what he believes to be a devastating truth. The author contends that his carefully researched sociological focus has exposed analytic and psychiatric hypocrisy, sloppy methodology, and unfounded speculation. The sting of this criticism dissipates as the analyst-reader quickly becomes aware that Israëls is analytically uninformed. What is more disturbing is the possibility that the general public might receive this work as proof of the author's viewpoint that analytic thinking is silly, shallow, and unproven.
In explaining how he chose the topic for his thesis, Israëls notes how prominent the Schreber case has been in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. He further notes that in Schreber's Memoirs, Freud "detected latent psychoanalytic insights," but that "the psychiatrist Morton Schatzman, too, found he could discern the true significance of Paul Schreber's book" (p. xiii) and that Schatzman used this to attack Freud's views. After reviewing the many authors who have felt that their differing viewpoints were confirmed