Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber translated and edited by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988,  liv + 416 pp., $12.95 paper Psychosis and Sexual Identity: Toward a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case edited by David B. Allison, Prado de Oliveira, Mark S. Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1988,  xii + 343 pp., $44.50

The story of Daniel Paul Schreber is still amazingly alive and the subject of a growing literature 148 years after his birth and 79 years after his death. Why is Schreber still so popular? Why do people find the story so fascinating? What universal emotions has he touched in people? For we are seeing the fulfillment of Schreber's prophecy at the end of the Memoirs that the palm of victory will be his and that favorable stars will watch over the success of his labor.

We are fortunate to see Harvard University's Press reissue of the first complete English translation (originally published in ) of the Memoirs. All the commentaries by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter are there and one more: the preface to the 1973 Ullstein German edition of the Memoirs, written by Samuel Weber, a professor of comparative literature and a follower of Lacan's school of interpretation. The focus of this preface raises some issues about methods of interpretation which I will discuss later. However, the reissuing of the Memoirs will, one hopes, encourage the reading of Schreber by an increasing number of people.

Freud rightly insisted that anyone who wanted to spend time reading his essay on Schreber—that essay which made Schreber a topic of conversation among analysts for years to come—should first read Schreber. Having heeded Freud's