You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Starting with Freud's 1911 interpretation of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,1 interpreters have been reading meanings into Schreber's text rather than from it. Thus Schreber was read, or misread, as illustrating preformed hermeneutic theories, formulas,
and prejudices. On the basis of fragments of the Memoirs rather than on the whole story of Schreber, the most disparate opinions were formed about Schreber's diagnosis and dynamics. Whereas a historically grounded and psychoanalytically informed longitudinal case study method is a requirement for a clinical understanding of Schreber, selective readings have been used to advantage as spring- boards for illustrating, or formulating, the most diverse theoretical constructions. For example, while Freud was ignorant of the specific historical circumstances of Schreber and admitted the possibility of error, he nevertheless found fertile ground in the Memoirs to adumbrate his theories of ego psychology, narcissism, and developmental dynamics.
Selectivity is also manifest in the latest reading of Schreber by Sass. This is his theory: in the philosophic system of Wittgenstein solipsism is a pivotal premise; solipsism is an explanation of schizophrenia; solipsism is an explanation of Schreber. The book is scholarly and well written; but its premise reflects an idiosyncratic approach to Wittgenstein, to schizophrenia, and to Schreber.
Sass addresses an artifically circumscribed facet of the multifaceted Schreber, and he admits to having taken “some liberties.” On his own showing, Sass's method denies history and the longitudinal view of Schreber in favor of a dated, static, psychiatric phenomenology, promulgated by Jaspers in 1913 and superseded by the dynamic psychoanalytically inspired phenomenology of Ludwig Binswanger in 1942. This is turning the clock back, for his