470
PARTISAN REVIEW
clinical interpretations, they often get into the minute details and circum–
stances of Freud's and his followers ' assumptions and conclusions.
Basically, the separation of psychoanalysis into various intellectual realms
has proven to be no more than a heuristic device, an indeterminate and
temporary conclusion.
Inevitably, Freud's own prolific output dominates this reevaluation
industry. Now, some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who begin by re–
flecting on a case of Freud's (or of Sandor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Melanie
Klein, etc.) while treating a patient, often get bitten by the researcher's
bug and end up writing histories. Others, while pondering the impact of
their patients' general environments on their symptoms, or the impact of
the intellectual climate on the dynamics of their patients' neuroses, start
by focusing on philosophical and metaphysical problems and then explore
the relation of pathology to culture. Although Freud did all of these
things, he did so at a time when belief in positivism was at its height. The
current contributions, however, tend to separate and discredit the posi–
tivistic elements - along with earlier credos - in order to "update" spe–
cific ideas.
The two books under review marvelously exemplify these disparate
approaches. They demonstrate also that even though general history has
turned into an unpopular subject, the history of cases and of diagnoses
over time still fire the imagination. Readers' interest in these efforts, I
believe, indicate the success of the Annales School of radical history
which elevated the previously neglected history of the underside and un–
derclass, and these studies make up for the general history that no longer
gets taught. In addition, the search for the "me" tends to trigger questions
about the structures it is embedded in - which leads back to the Freudian
unconscious. Both Louis A. Sass and Zvi Lothane are practicing psycho–
analysts and professors. The former tackles the slippery and complex con–
nections that are said to exist between madness and modernism; the later
dissects Freud's and his followers' assessments of the Schreber case.
Why would anyone want to bother to research a case of Freud's -
one which most American psychoanalysts have considered unimportant in
view of the fact that Freud had never met Schreber and was speculating
on his brilliant, though admittedly delusional,
Memoir oj
My
Nervous
fllness?
Was it because this memoir led to the author's release at the end of
the second of three institutionalizations? Are Schreber studies yet another
new discipline, I asked myself, as I - reluctantly - picked up Lothane's
heavy book. Apparently, they are not.
According to Lothane, "modern debate on this study broke out
all
over when the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst W. G. Niederland
... created a sensation in 1959 . .. [with his] mind-capturing thesis . . .
