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In 1911, Sigmund Freud published a long paper about a German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), who had been an inpatient in three psychiatric clinics from 1893 to 1902. A year after his release, Schreber (1903/1988) had published an account of his illness, and based on this memoir, Freud wrote at length on the subject of paranoia. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts began to give intensive attention to the life and illness of Schreber, an interest that has continued to the present day. In the 1970s, two authors, William G. Niederland (1974) and Morton Schatzman (1973), brought special notoriety to the role of Schreber's father in the illness of his son.
Now a Dutch sociologist, Han Israëls, has written a compelling and most unusual book about Schreber and his father. From one point of view it is a historical tour de force, bound to evoke admiration from any professional historian for its research and scholarship. From another vantage point, it is an example of historical overkill, a recitation of literally everything Israëls was able to find out about Judge Schreber and his family, but without bringing to bear the historian's usual attempts to organize and shape thematically his or her material.
What drove Israëls to try to discover everything he possibly could about Schreber and his family of origin? He hoped that information about Schreber's early life might shed some light on the deranged ideas of his later illness. This is an interest Israëls shares with many. But once Israëls realized that all his digging did not alter (and even confirmed) well-known theories of the connections between Schreber's upbringing and adult illness, he did not write an