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homosexual phantasy] -- denial, reversal, and projection -- in relation
to any desires it forbids itself." That is to say, in Schatzman's view, it is a
good deal more likely that most people who reveal paranoid tendencies
are responding not to homosexual love of an improper sort, but to
hatred pure and simple, hatred of a terrible and castrating father,
perhaps ; not, consequently, to feelings of persecution, but to a real
persecution so awful that it must be transformed by symptom formation
in order truly to be experienced.
Schatzman's case is a very strong one, taken as an attempt to revise
standard views of paranoia and to understand the dynamics of particular
families. Moreover it is extremely persuasive in pointing out the limita–
tions in Freud's entire manner of therapeutic inquiry. Essentially,
Schatzman contends that Freud had available to h im in the Schreber case
a variety of materials of which he was aware but that he chose not to
consider, because without them he could provide an explanation of the
patient Schreber that was altogether consistent with theories Freud had
already developed . More, these theories themselves reflect an unwilling–
ness, on the part of Freud and most other people, to consider the pos–
sibility that those who are ill may have been forced into strategies of
withdrawal and denial by others who have at least as much to do with
the case as the patient. Obviously one's first concern will be for the
individual who cannot cope, who has sought help in the first place, but
Schatzman argues that we may not assume the central agent in the
generation of the patient's misery is the patient. That Freud refused to
acknowledge this possibility is all the more distressing in the Schreber
case, since Schreber was not an actual patient of Freud's, but a figure
whom Freud analyzed through a volume of pub lished memoirs. Why,
Schatzman wonders, though the answers are implicit in the very putting
of the question, did Freud not also analyze the many books written by
Schreber's father, a famous German physician, whose works on child
rearing were very widely read and admired in the nineteenth century and
which retain some influence even today.
Now this is not the place to rehearse the details of the Schreber
case, though the details arc fascinating, to be sure. What is unmistakable
in
Schatzman's representation of it, however, is that the patient Schreber
experienced all manner of delusion, that these delusions were crude
transformations of experiences actually suffered by Schreber in the
course of his childhood, and that h is father, the esteemed German author
and physician, very deliberately brutalized his son in the interests of cor–
rect discipline and the achievement of healthy habits. The brutalizing
procedures are described in meticulous detail in the father's books,
