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Ever since Freud's (1911) epochal interpretation of Daniel Paul Schreber's (1903) immortal book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Schreber has been the subject of many a (mis)reading, with meanings read into the text rather than from it. Indeed, Schreber's text has become a pretext for the most diverse doctrines. Few Schreber interpreters have focused on the person versus the prototype or paradigm, the historic man Schreber versus the assorted ahistorical myths about Schreber. In Freud's myth, Schreber was the paradigm of repressed homosexuality causing paranoid delusions of persecution. In Niederland's (1984) fiction, the delusions proved tortures by the father's sadistic “machines,” later topped by a hair-raising extrapolation of deMause (1987) alleging that the father forced fellatio on the son.
In this scholarly and well-written book, the author seeks to reinterpret Schreber by means of the following idiosyncratic syllogism: the doctrine of solipsism is central in Wittgenstein; solipsism is an explanation of schizophrenia; solipsism is an explanation of Schreber. Sass admits to having taken “some liberties.”
Sass and I disagree about the central issue of method. Sass's way is to deny history and the historical Schreber in the name of a dated, static psychiatric phenomenology, promulgated by Jaspers in 1913, superseded by the dynamic, psychoanalytically inspired phenomenology of Otto Binswanger in 1942, but revived in the organicist and ahistorical phenomenology of Kurt Schneider in the