Daniel Paul Schreber - Freud's Interpretation and Its Criticisms

Freud's Interpretation and Its Criticisms

Although Freud never interviewed Schreber himself, he read his Memoirs and drew his own conclusions from it. 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 outside world and led to intense hallucinations which were first centred around his physician Dr. Flechsig (projection of his feelings towards brother), and then around God (who represented Schreber's father, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber). During first phase of his illnes Schreber was certain that Dr. Flechsig persecutes him, and makes direct attempts to murder his soul and change him into a woman (he had Emasculation hallucinations). In the next period of ailment he was convinced, that God and the order of things demands of him, that he must be turned into a woman so that he could be the sole object of sexual desire of God. 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.

Freud's interpretation has been contested by a number of subsequent 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 closing chapters of his theoretical magnum opus Crowds and Power to a reading of Schreber. Finally (though by no means exhaustively), Jacques Lacan's Seminar on the Psychoses and one of his ecrits "On a Question prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" are predominantly concerned with reading and evaluating Schreber's text over-against Freud's original and originating interpretation.