Freud Although
Sigmund Freud never interviewed Schreber himself, he read his
Memoirs and drew his own conclusions from it in an essay entitled "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" (1911). Freud thought that Schreber's disturbances resulted from repressed homosexual desires, which in infancy were oriented at his father and brother. Repressed inner drives were projected onto the outside world and led to intense hallucinations which were first centred on his physician Flechsig (projection of his feelings towards his brother), and then around God (who represented Schreber's father,
Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber). During the first phase of his illness Schreber was certain that Flechsig persecuted him and made direct attempts to murder his soul and change him into a woman (he had what Freud thought to be
emasculation hallucinations, which were in fact, according to Schreber's words an "unmanning" (
Entmannung) experience). In the next period of his ailment he was convinced that God and the order of things demanded of him that he must be turned into a woman so that he could be the sole object of sexual desire of God. Schreber indicates November 1895 as the period in which the connection between the fantasy of "unmanning" and the idea of having been invested by God with the role of redeemer of corrupt humanity was established. Sex change is justified by Schreber as the necessary means that God used to allow him to create new men. Consideration of the Schreber case led Freud to revise received classification of mental disturbances. He argued that the difference between
paranoia and
dementia praecox is not at all clear, since symptoms of both ailments may be combined in any proportion, as in Schreber's case. Therefore, Freud concluded, it may be necessary to introduce a new diagnostic notion: paranoid dementia, which does justice to polymorphous mental disturbances such as those exhibited by the judge.
Criticism Freud's interpretation has been contested by a number of theorists, most notably
Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari in their work
Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere. Their reading of Schreber's
Memoirs is a part of their wider criticism of familial orientation of psychoanalysis and it foregrounds the political and racial elements of the text; they see Schreber's written experience of reality abnormal only in its honesty about the experience of power in late capitalism.
Elias Canetti also devoted the eleventh chapter of his theoretical magnum opus
Crowds and Power, and the essay
Power and Survival to a reading of Schreber, claiming that Freud took into consideration only a small part of Schreber's text and that his interpretation was completely wrong. According to Canetti, Schreber's description of his own paranoia is "by far the most important document about the One... in the entire psychiatric literature." Schreber fantasized that he was the only man to have survived the plague and leprosy epidemics, thanks to "divine rays", and this, for Canetti, is "the extreme and final stage of power". Finally,
Jacques Lacan's
Seminar on the Psychoses and one of his
écrits "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" are predominantly concerned with reading and evaluating Schreber's text over and against Freud's original and originating interpretation. According to Thomas Dalzell (2011, 2018), Freud's etiology for Schreber's paranoia has not been fully accepted by anglophone psychoanalysts, even those who claim to side with Freud and his interpretation of the Schreber case. However, Dalzell argues that the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has accepted Freud's etiology more fully, in that he adheres not only to the Freudian association between castration and the father, although he relates them in a symbolic dialectic (the foreclosure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father) instead of Freud's imaginary one (the loss of the integrity of Schreber's body in his relationship with his father), but understands Schreber's psychotic world as his inability to move beyond the narcissism of what Lacan calls "the mirror stage". Where most anglophone commentators have concentrated on the homosexual component of Freud's etiology, Lacan sees it as only a symptom, preferring to stress Freud's positing a narcissism fixation as the cause. Hence Schreber's relationships with his imaginary "fleetingly improvised men," with his doctor, Flechsig, and even with God, reduced to a little other, and hence his behavior in front of the mirror, adorning himself with ribbons and feminine accessories, as well as Schreber's remarks about himself as a "leprous corpse leading another leprous corpse," the description of a reduction, as Lacan puts it, to the confrontation with "his psychical double".
Schatzman In 1974, Morton Schatzman published
Soul Murder, in which he gave his own interpretation of Schreber's psychosis. Schatzman's interpretation was based on
W. G. Niederland's research from the 1950s. (Niederland had previously worked with survivors of
Nazi concentration camps.) Schatzman had found child-rearing pamphlets written by Moritz Schreber, Daniel Paul Schreber's father, which stressed the necessity of taming the rebellious savage beast in the child and turning him into a productive citizen. Many of the techniques recommended by Moritz Schreber were mirrored in Daniel Schreber's psychotic experiences. For example, one of the "miracles" described by Daniel Schreber was that of chest compression, of tightening and tightening. This can be seen as analogous to one of Moritz Schreber's techniques of using an elaborate contraption that confined the child's body, forcing him to have a "correct" posture at the dinner table. Similarly, the "freezing miracle" might mirror Moritz Schreber's recommendation of placing the infant in a bath of ice cubes beginning at age three months. Daniel Paul Schreber's older brother, Daniel Gustav Schreber, committed suicide in his thirties. In his 1989 book
Schreber: Father and Son, Han Israëls argued against the interpretations of Niederland and Schatzman, claiming that Schreber's father had been unfairly criticized in the literature. In a subsequent interview, Israëls said that the fact that Schreber's childhood events came back in his delirium "doesn't necessarily mean that they are the cause of the mental illness".
Lothane Henry Zvi Lothane argued against the interpretations of Niederland and Schatzman in his 1992 book,
In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. Lothane's Schreber research included the study of archival records concerning the relationship between Schreber and the other significant people in his life, including his wife and his doctors. On Lothane's account, the existing literature on Schreber as a rule (1) leaves substantial gaps in the historical records, which careful archival research could in some measure fill, (2) leaves out psychoanalytically significant relationships, such as that between Schreber and his wife, and (3) overstates the purportedly sadistic elements in Schreber's father's child-rearing techniques. Lothane's interpretation of Schreber also differs from previous texts in that he considers Schreber a worthwhile thinker. ==In popular culture==