112
PARTISAN REVIEW
Freud's analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's delusion, published
in 1911 as
Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of
a Case
of
Paranoia,
is not a case study in the same sense as the others inasmuch
as Freud had no personal contact with Schreber, nor did Schreber
himself have any experience with psychoanalytic theory (as even
Little Hans had). Schreber had, however, written an elaborate
account of his mental illness and published it as his
Memoirs
of
a
Mental Patient.
Freud used these published memoirs as the basis of his
analysis, and again presented it primarily to psychoanalysts rather
than to the medical world at large.
Freud's general aim in writing his account of Schreber's illness
was to establish the nature of paranoia and its location among other
psychoanalytically understood mental disorders. As he had been at
pains to distinguish obsessional neuroses from hysteria in his
account of the analysis of the Rat Man, he now wanted to establish
paranoia as a diagnostic category. This reminds us of his original
anticipation in
Studies on Hysteria,
of the "directing hand which shall
set up boundary marks" among the various mental disorders. But
the difficulties in the area of paranoia were particularly grievous and
are reflected in the fact that Freud was compelled to base his
discussion of this disorder upon a written account rather than an anal–
ysis. People suffering from paranoid delusions were not apt to
submit to psychoanalysis, a process which would naturally elicit all
their fears of persecution and cause them to ascribe their
persecutions to the psychoanalyst. Having virtually no paranoid
patients, therefore, Freud found himself forced to rely upon
Schreber's account. In view of these difficulties, it is all the more
interesting and revealing that Freud should have chosen to convey
his insights on paranoia in the form of a case history.
Freud may have done this because no other mode of reporting
constituted a plausible alternative. Or perhaps because of the unusu–
ally florid nature of the pathology of this particular case. But
whatever the mixture of motives, Freud's report on the Schreber case
has remained the cornerstone of psychoanalytic thinking on
paranoia to this day.
The Schreber case had consequences in the developing history
of the psychoanalytic community. Ernest Jones and others have
suggested that Freud's remarks in the Schreber case sowed the seeds
of the soon-to-be-accomplished dissociation of Carl J ung and his
followers from Freud, and the eventual disaffection of Sandor
