In Defense of Schreber

Soul Murder and Psychiatry

Henry Zvi Lothane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138872295
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317737209
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schreber's illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schreber's troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schreber's illness.

Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schreber's two psychiatrists, Paul Flechsig and Guido Weber, Zvi Lothane offers a stunning reappraisal of the Schreber case that overturns virtually all previous opinion. Lothane examines both the man and his milieu in a way that allows the reader
fresh access not only to the tragedy of Schreber's illness but also to his heroic, if doomed, attempts to come to terms with his condition through writing. In the process, he persuasively demonstrates that important issues of both psychiatric diagnosis and psychoanalytic interpretation have heretofore been compromised by a failure to pay sufficient attention to Schreber's interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts.

1

MAN IN SEARCH OF A SOUL

And so I believe I am not mistaken in expecting that a very special palm of victory will be mine. … I close in the hope that favorable stars will watch over the success of my labour.

D. P. Schreber, 1903

It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusions than other people are as yet prepared to believe.

Freud, 1911a

He who wants to understand the poet must travel to the land of the poet.

Goethe, West-East Divan

WHY READ SCHREBER?

It is now a century and a half since Daniel Paul Schreber J.D. was born in 1842. It is but one year short of a century since he was admitted as a patient to the Hospital for Psychiatric and Nervous Diseases of Leipzig University¹ for what was to be a prolonged confinement during which he wrote the memoirs of his experience, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, published in 1903. The title means: “the great thoughts of a nervous patient”—that is how Schreber meant it. However, the title Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,² is the one that persists.

Schreber’s book can be viewed on many levels: as an autobiography; as an account of his mental illness, involuntary hospitalization, and the legal battle to regain his civil liberties; as a document about psychiatry in Germany; and as a commentary on contemporary culture. It is also a work of art, a uniquely crafted narrative. Taking its place beside Clifford Beers’s The Mind that Found Itself (1908) and Perceval’s Narrative (1838-40), Schreber’s tome shines as one of the most glorious books ever written by a psychiatric patient. After all, nervous illness, madness, madhouses and mad doctors are forever fascinating.

Among Schreber’s meditations were thoughts about the soul. It was already clear to Heraclitus (Fragment 45) that one cannot find the boundaries of the soul, no matter which path one follows, for it is so profound. The very words soul, spirit, and God, owing to their metaphysical and theological accretions down the ages, are no longer respectable concepts in scientific and philosophical discourse, as they were in the generation of Schreber’s father and his own. This is especially so in modern English, but less so in German. For example, whereas Freud still used the term seelisches Apparat (mental apparatus), in modern English, soul and spirit have been replaced with mind and mental. To the modern reader God and soul may suggest a proximity to suspect occult preoccupations and pathology, especially in a text primarily identified as psychotic, such as the Memoirs. However, we are well advised to remember the two basic pragmatic meanings of soul, both still in German and English usage: Soul means a person, and it means the feeling, thinking, moral, and acting center of the person. Otherwise, we will not be able to understand one of Schreber’s central concepts, that of soul murder. Schreber’s soul murder is not a psychotic neologism but a term with a long history, used for a specific purpose. God, spirit, soul and immortality will always fascinate.³

In 1911 Freud, inspired by Jung,⁴ published his epochal analysis of the Memoirs in his essay, “Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia paranoides).”⁵ Since then Schreber and Freud are indissolubly conjoined in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Freud’s essay made history because of the causal connection between paranoia and repressed homosexuality, which became the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to psychosis. On this view, the sexual desire of the child for the parent of the same gender, repressed and sublimated in the course of development, can break through in adulthood as a transference toward a significant other. The overt sexual desire in the present, conflictual and unacceptable, leads to two consequences: a detachment of libido from people and the world, with regression to a more primitive state of withdrawal, and a projection of the desire onto the other, with a secondary turning of love into hate, that is, a complete delusion of persecution. While the generality and universality of this theory has since been challenged, the essay is rich in many other, even more important, insights.

Were it not for Freud, Schreber’s would have been a forgotten book, collecting dust in a library. In the Memoirs⁶ Schreber expresses the belief that great fame would be his “surpassing that of thousands of other people much better mentally endowed,” owing to the spread of his religious ideas, which would “lead to a fundamental revolution in mankind’s religious views unequalled in history” (M, pp. 293-294). But it is sex and psychosis, not religion, that have made Schreber—and Freud—famous. Sex is a most important ingredient in any succès de scandale.

It is therefore not surprising that even today the Schreber story and Freud’s essay retain a remarkable vitality, attracting an ever-increasing interest among professionals, scholars and the reading public. In addition to its many interesting ideas, articulated with intelligence and style, the story has drama and poignancy. It touches on some perennial themes in psychiatry, including the nature of mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, and methods of treatment. Today, as one hundred years ago, psychiatrists are still grappling with the same problems: competing concepts of cause and cure of mental illness; the importance of psychological versus biological and the cultural versus constitutional factors; the doctor-patient relationship; involuntary hospitalization and the abuses of the civil rights of institutionalized patients; the boundary between the normal and the abnormal. Similarly, the psychoanalytic interpretations that sprung up around Schreber, both in Freud’s time and thereafter, are as passionate today as they were then.

Le style c’est l’homme, style is the man himself. Just prior to publication of the Memoirs Schreber realized that he “might perhaps have formulated some passages of [the] Memoirs differently.” But he resisted the impulse to rewrite: “Nevertheless I have left them mainly in the form in which they were written originally. To change certain points now would only prejudice the freshness of the original descriptions” (M, p. iv). His instinct was right. The bane of madness turned into the boon of magic: it is the poetic power of his writing in the Memoirs that has made it into a profound text, inviting exegetes and interpreters to ponder its mysteries.

Thanks to Freud Schreber became a paradigmatic case and passed into the writings of other psychoanalysts.⁷ Modern debate broke out all over when the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst W. G. Niederland (1974), the doyen of Schreber studies in our time, created a sensation in 1959 by publishing his landmark paper, “Schreber: father and son,” which, he believed, contained the key to the puzzle, that is, the key to explaining the content of Schreber’s famous hallucinations and delusions. Niederlande’s (1959) mind-capturing thesis, which earned him a succès d’estime among his colleagues, was that the images and sensations in Paul Schreber’s psychosis were derivatives of the way his father, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, M.D., tortured his son by means of posture-improving orthopedic appliances and other educational methods, described in Moritz Schreber’s books on child rearing, notably the Kallipädie (1858a). Like sex, sadism is a fascinating subject. Niederlande’s writings revolutionized Schreber studies. Before them and under the influence of Freud there were scattered contributions on the Schreber case to the literature. After Niederland the interest in Schreber mushroomed and is still growing. The important consequence of Niederlande’s conception for received psychoanalytic theory (such as structural ego psychology with its focus on intrapsychic id-ego conflicts), was his emphasis that adult psychopathology is determined by childhood trauma, be it sexual or sadistic. Niederlande’s trauma perspective both challenged the structural theory and, when it became as exclusionary as the genetic fallacy, it tended to deemphasize historical, social and current reality factors.

While Niederland published in the professional literature, it was another American psychiatrist, Morton Schatzman, whose book achieved best-seller status. Schatzman (1973) used all of Niederlande’s ideas but claimed to have presented a radically new theory in his book, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family.⁸ However, the innovation was only terminological: persecution was the new word for trauma. The book, however, was impassioned and made Schatzman famous and Schreber a popular subject. This is to Schatzman’s credit, even though his claim of an original theory about Schreber is not justified. Appearing in 1973, in the aftermath of the youth revolt of the late sixties against a generation of fathers and the Vietnam War, it seemed to hit a nerve. Mix together the idea of parental sadism, rename it persecution, add a dash of Freud bashing (the perception was that Schatzman was attacking Freud for not reading his books before attempting an analysis of the son’s Memoirs, an “omission” already made evident by Niederland, even though Freud actually knew some of Moritz Schreber’s ideas), and you have the recipe for a succès de scandale. Schatzman’s perspective became the popular one, and Niederlande’s reputation suffered as a result. One can now read papers and books about the victimization of Paul Schreber by his allegedly sadistic father based solely on the authority of Schatzman, either misrepresenting Niederland’s contribution or without even mentioning Niederland at all.⁹ Compared with Niederland, Schatzman had no interest in the contemporaneous background to Schreber’s story. Even though billed as anti-Freudian and anti-psychiatric, Schatzman’s idea of sadistic parental persecution was not only derived from Niederland but, ironically, from Freudian geneticism as well. Schatzman invoked interpersonal dynamics, but hrnited them to the childhood trauma only.

A recent biographical contribution is the doctoral thesis of Han Israels in 1980, published in book form in English and German in 1989. It bears Niederland’s title: Schreber: Father and Son and is a detailed documentary, bibliographic and archival study about the Schreber family. It sheds no new light on the actual father-son relationship, for the simple reason that no documents directly bearing on their relation have survived. Israëls did not formulate a method of interpretation. I both respect his work as an important source book and take issue with his misleading interpretations and arguments (Lothane, 1991b).

MY APPROACH TO SCHREBER

For years Schreber was for me mostly a matter of hearsay, one of those classics much quoted but never read. I was acquainted with Freud’s essay and found Niederland’s papers convincing when I first read them; I did not see Schatzman’s book until the summer of 1988.

In the summer of 1987 I wrote a methodological analysis of the concept of self and searched for the occurrence of self in Freud. There are only three or four places where Freud uses the word Selbst. One of these rare times is in a quotation from Schreber. Finding this quotation stimulated me to read on. I was inspired by Freud’s (1911a) recommendation to his readers in the introductory remarks preceding his case history of Paul Schreber “to make themselves acquainted with the book [by Schreber] by reading it through at least once beforehand” (p. 10).

When I finally immersed myself in Schreber’s Memoirs, both in German and English, and then compared what Schreber said with what Freud said, I came to question Freud’s reading of Schreber. First, I approached Schreber at eye level, so to speak, as if I had entered into a dialogue with a friend. I was also mindful of the historiographie method advocated by R. G.. Collingwood (1946), which is in consonance with the psychoanalytic method. I was putting mental questions to my protagonist, trying to put myself in his shoes, thinking his thoughts, and imagining what it must have felt like to be in his situation. The more I read and the more I compared Freud’s great interpretation with what Schreber said, the more it struck me that Freud was not listening to Schreber, not, as he would say later (Freud, 1933, p. 12), interpreting from Schreber but interpreting into Schreber, projecting his ideas into him. This raised questions about method.

An essential piece of the puzzle was missing: the awareness of the reality of Schreber’s long years in mental hospitals and how important this was in itself. For the Memoirs are about his adult life, illnesses and hospitalizations. It was as if, for Freud, Schreber’s life had existed in a vacuum, unaffected by his life in the institutions. But this could not be so. How were aspects of daily life affecting the patient? How were they reflected in his hallucinations, delusions and bodily sensations? This connection had not been previously acknowledged and seemed to be a glaring omission.¹⁰ It was as if Schreber’s illness had existed as a static fact, as if Schreber were a “windowless monad,” to use Leibniz’s expression. After all, in medicine there is recognition of the iatrogenic effects of the doctor and his treatments on the patient and the course of an illness. Why was this not acknowledged in the case of Schreber? Why did he complain so bitterly about Professor Flechsig, his first psychiatrist? Was it all a delusion? Why did Dr. Weber, his other psychiatrist, fight so hard in court to keep Schreber under lock and key, even as the patient improved? How did this opposition affect the patient’s mental state? Who were Flechsig and Weber? What were their personalities, backgrounds, theories and practices? How did these affect the patient and how did he portray this in his story? My next step was to immerse myself in reading the writings of Flechsig and Weber and what was said about them by their contemporaries and later generations.

In the summer of 1988 I traveled to Dresden and searched in the Dresden State Archives.¹¹ I reviewed the Flechsig personal and hospital files and found the files of Guido Weber, Schreber’s psychiatrist from 1894 to 1902. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of some abbreviations used in this book
• 1. Man in Search of a Soul
• 2. Paul Schreber’s Story
• 3. The Life and Legacy of Moritz Schreber
• 4. Moritz Schreber’s Philosophy of Medicine and Education
• 5. Paul Flechsig and the First Biological Psychiatry
• 6. Guido Weber and the First Antipsychiatry
• 7. How Others Interpreted Schreber
• 8. Schreber as Interpreter and Thinker
• 9. The Dreams and Dramas of Love
• Appendix: Paul Schreber’s Clinical Chart
• References
• Index