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When one attempts to take stock of the position of Freud's thought at this time, and to juxtapose it to the clinical data with which he was struggling, two basic factors present themselves. One is the residue of the ‘Project’, demanding restatement in terms of the new clinical phenomena; and at the other extreme there is evidence of the operation on his thought of the two masses of clinical data in his experience comprised in the ‘Wolf Man’ and in Schreber's extraordinary diary. One sees on the one hand his tendency to ‘take the citadel by storm’ and this by means to reduce the mysteries of nature to academic order and obedience; and on the other, his respect for an apparent galaxy of clinical phenomena thrown up by the psychoanalytical method, which defied such tyranny.
What were these phenomena? Schreber's hypochondria and persecutory delusions had revealed the world of narcissism, which Freud was seeing primarily in terms of the ego taking its own body as sexual object. By withdrawing cathexis from external objects on to the ego, early types of identification processes were invoked which antedated object relations. These could later be regressed to as fixation points (the stage of narcissism which followed auto-erotism in the baby's development). Then Schreber's ‘world destruction’ phantasy revealed the fact that in the mind a ‘subjective world’ is built up during development, from the ‘sublimations and identifications’ of the ego. The crumbling of this world was viewed by Freud as a relatively slow, non-violent process, resulting from the withdrawal of the libido from objects in the outside world. Just why this should produce a catastrophe in dementia or schizophrenia and not in melancholia he could not say, for he viewed the withdrawal of libido to be the primary operation in both situations. In any case, Freud saw this crumbling of the world of the mind as the event underlying the chaotic confusion of the dementia, from which a type of recovery was effected by