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kept him confined after his mental health seemed to have been regained.
In any event, Schreber was lucid enough to recast the meaning of his
madness in the forensic terms that finally, in an appeals court, won his re–
lease. Unquestionably, Schreber was a casualty of changing and opposing
beliefs on the treatment of mental illness at a time when legal codes and
existing mores were being challenged. He had to play David to his psy–
chiatrists' Goliath. And he stood out because he produced a memoir
while diagnosed as insane, an activity the trial judges found only a sane
individual could undertake. Had Freud not made of him a
cause celebre
to
"promote" psychoanalysis, he would not be remembered.
Lothane aptly concludes that casting Schreber as a paradigm has ob–
scured him as a person. Since Freud never met Schreber, he could only
analyze his
Memoirs
-
by a
"hermeneutic
method of decoding universal
symbols, or applying assumptions and generalizations derived from psy–
choanalytic theories." Among psychoanalysts, this practice has fallen into
disrepute, mostly because current academic reading of "texts" has often
been confused with psychoanalysis proper - even though it is totally di–
vorced from therapy. However, this literature also has highlighted the in–
ordinate power over life and death held by authorities such as Drs.
Aeschig and Weber. By adding the intrapsychic, clinical dimension which
this type of textual criticism leaves out, Lothane not only has shown that
some of Paul Schreber's ideas were based on those of his father - his
concern with evolution and spontaneous generation, the importance of
truthfulness, some of the prescriptions for health - but also that interper–
sonal, dynamic psychoanalysis is superior to ego psychology.
Whereas Lothane neither employs Michel Foucault's so-called discur–
sive method nor his textual strategies, his historical analysis of Paul
Schreber's fate in the context of his surroundings is reminiscent of
I, Pierre
Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother .
..
(1975) and
of
Herculine Barbin
(1980). Foucault, too, was fascinated by the impact of
the new knowledge and diagnoses in medicine, on their legal repercus–
sions, and on the way these were being played out in individuals' lives.
But he always ended up focusing on the impact of the dominating power
and knowledge. Louis Sass follows in Foucault's footsteps. The similarity
is
already evident in the Prologue to
Madness and Modernism:
The madman is a protean figure in the Western imagination, yet there
is a sameness to his many masks. He has been thought of as a wildman
and a beast, as a child and a simpleton, as a waking dreamer, and as a
prophet in the grip of demonic forces. He is associated with insight
and vitality but also with blindness, disease, and death; and so he
evokes awe as well as contempt, fear as well as condescension and
