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Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

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   Such then, was the result of the
changes produced in Schreber by his illness, as we find them
expressed in the two main features of his delusional system. Before
it he had been inclined to sexual asceticism and had been a doubter
in regard to God; while after it he was a believer in God and a
devotee of voluptuousness. But just as his re-conquered belief in
God was of a peculiar kind, so too the sexual enjoyment which he
had won for himself was of a most unusual character. It was not the
sexual liberty of a man, but the sexual feelings of a woman. He
took up a feminine attitude towards God; he felt that he was
God’s wife.¹

   No other part of his delusions is
treated by the patient so exhaustively, one might almost say so
insistently, as his alleged transformation into a woman. The nerves
absorbed by him have, so he says, assumed in his body the character
of female nerves of voluptuousness, and have given to his body a
more or less female stamp, and more particularly to his skin a
softness peculiar to the female sex (87). If he presses lightly
with his fingers upon any part of his body, he can feel these
nerves, under the surface of the skin, as a tissue of a thread-like
or stringy texture; they are especially present in the region of
the chest, where, in a woman, her breasts would be. ‘By
applying pressure to this tissue, I am able to evoke a sensation of
voluptuousness such as women experience, and especially in I think
of something feminine at the same time.’ (277.) He knows with
certainty that this tissue was originally nothing else than nerves
of God, which could hardly have lost the character of nerves merely
through having passed over into his body (279). By means of what he
calls ‘drawing’ (that is, by calling up visual images)
he is able to give both himself and the rays an impression that his
body is fitted out with female breasts and genitals: ‘It has
become so much a habit with me to draw female buttocks on to my
body -
honi soit qui mal y pense
- that I do it almost
involuntarily every time I stoop.’ (233.) He is ‘bold
enough to assert that anyone who should happen to see me before the
mirror with the upper portion of my torso bared - especially if the
illusion is assisted by my wearing a little feminine finery - would
receive an unmistakable impression of a
female bust
’.
(280.) He calls for a medical examination, in order to establish
the fact that his whole body has nerves of voluptuousness dispersed
over it from head to foot, a state of things which is only to be
found, in his opinion, in the female body, whereas, in the male, to
the best of his knowledge, nerves of voluptuousness exist only in
the sexual organs and their immediate vicinity (274). The spiritual
voluptuousness which has been developed owing to this accumulation
of nerves in his body is so intense that it only requires a slight
effort of his imagination (especially when he is lying in bed) to
procure him a feeling of sensual well-being that affords a
tolerably clear adumbration of the sexual pleasure enjoyed by a
woman during copulation (269).

  
¹
‘Something occurred in my own body
similar to the conception of Jesus Christ in an immaculate virgin,
that is, in a woman who had never had intercourse with a man. On
two separate occasions (and while I was still in Professor
Flechsig’s institution) I have possessed female genitals,
though somewhat imperfectly developed ones, and have felt a
stirring in my body, such as would arise from the quickening of a
human embryo. Nerves of God corresponding to male semen had, by a
divine miracle, been projected into my body, and impregnation had
thus taken place.’ (Introduction, 4.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

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   If we now recall the dream which
the patient had during the incubation period of his illness, before
he had moved to Dresden, it will become clear beyond a doubt that
his delusion of being transformed into a woman was nothing else
than a realization of the content of that dream. At that time he
had rebelled against the dream with masculine indignation, and in
the same way he began by striving against its fulfilment in his
illness and looked upon his transformation into a woman as a
disgrace with which he was threatened with hostile intention. But
there came a time (it was in November, 1895) when he began to
reconcile himself to the transformation and bring it into harmony
with the higher purposes of God: ‘Since then, and with a full
consciousness of what I did, I have inscribed upon my banner the
cultivation of femaleness.’ (177-8.)

   He then arrived at the firm
conviction that it was God Himself who, for His own satisfaction,
was demanding femaleness from him:

   ‘No sooner, however, am I
alone with God (if I may so express it), than it becomes a
necessity for me to employ every imaginable device and to summon up
the whole of my mental faculties, and especially my imagination, in
order to bring it about that the divine rays may have the
impression as continuously as possible (or, since this is beyond
mortal power at least at certain times of day) that I am a woman
luxuriating in voluptuous sensations.’ (281.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

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   ‘On the other hand, God
demands a
constant state of enjoyment
, such as would be in
keeping with the conditions of existence imposed upon souls by the
Order of Things; and it is my duty to provide Him with
this . . . in the shape of the greatest possible
generation of spiritual voluptuousness. And if, in this process, a
little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in
accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure
of suffering and privation that has been mine for so many past
years . . .’ (283.)

   ‘. . . I
think I may even venture to advance the view based upon impressions
I have received, that God would never take any steps towards
effecting a withdrawal - the first result of which is invariably to
alter my physical condition markedly for the worse - but would
quietly and permanently yield to my powers of attraction, if it
were possible for me
always
to be playing the part of a
woman lying in my own amorous embraces,
always
to be casting
my looks upon female forms,
always
to be gazing at pictures
of women, and so on.’ (284-5.)

   In Schreber’s system the
two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a
woman and his favoured relation to God) are linked in his
assumption of a feminine attitude towards God. It will be an
unavoidable part of our task to show that there is an essential
genetic
relation between these two elements. Otherwise our
attempts at elucidating Schreber’s delusions will leave us in
the absurd position described in Kant’s famous simile in the
Critique of Pure Reason
- we shall be like a man holding a
sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

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II

ATTEMPTS AT INTERPRETATION

There are two angles from which we could
attempt to reach an understanding of this history of a case of
paranoia and to lay bare in it the familiar complexes and motive
forces of mental life. We might start either from the
patient’s own delusional utterances or from the exciting
causes of his illness.

   The former method must seem
enticing since the brilliant example given us by Jung in his
interpretation of a case of dementia praecox which was far severer
than this one and which exhibited symptoms far more remote from the
normal. The high level of our present patient’s intelligence,
too, and his communicativeness, seem likely to facilitate the
accomplishment of our task along these lines. He himself not in
frequently presses the key into our hands, by adding a gloss, a
quotation or an example to some delusional proposition in an
apparently incidental manner, or even by expressly denying some
parallel to it that has arisen in his own mind. For when this
happens, we have only to follow our usual psycho-analytic technique
- to strip his sentence of its negative form, to take his example
as being the actual thing, or his quotation or gloss as being the
original source - and we find ourselves in possession of what we
are looking for, namely a translation of the paranoid mode of
expression into the normal one.

   It is perhaps worth giving a more
detailed illustration of this procedure. Schreber complains of the
nuisance created by the so-called ‘miracled birds’ or
‘talking birds’, to which he ascribes a number of very
remarkable qualities (208-14). It is his belief that they are
composed of former ‘fore-courts of Heaven’, that is, of
human souls which have entered into a state of bliss, and that they
have been loaded with ptomaine¹ poison and set on to him. They
have been brought to the condition of repeating ‘meaningless
phrases which they have learnt by heart’ and which have been
‘dinned into them’. Each time that they have discharged
their load of ptomaine poison on to him - that is each time that
they have ‘reeled off the phrases which have been dinned into
them, as it were’ - they become to some extent absorbed into
his soul, with the words ‘The deuce of a fellow!’ or
‘Deuce take it!’ which are the only words they are
still capable of using to express a genuine feeling. They cannot
understand the meaning of the words they speak, but they are by
nature susceptible to similarity of sounds, though the similarity
need not necessarily be a complete one. Thus it is immaterial to
them whether one says:

                                                               
‘
Santiago
’ or
‘
Karthago
’,

                                                               
‘
Chinesentum
’ or ‘
Jesum
Christum
’,

                                                               
‘
Abendrot
’ or
‘
Atemnot
’,

                                                               
‘
Ariman
’ or ‘
Ackermann
’
etc.
²
(210.)

As we read this description, we cannot avoid
the idea that what it really refers to must be young girls. In a
carping mood people often compare them to geese, ungallantly accuse
then of having ‘the brains of a bird’ and declare that
they can say nothing but phrases learnt by rote and they betray
their lack of education by confusing foreign words that sound
alike. The phrase ‘The deuce of a fellow!’, which is
the only thing that they are serious about, would in that case be
an allusion to the triumph of the young man who has succeeded in
impressing them. And, sure enough, a few pages later we come upon a
passage in which Schreber confirms this interpretation: ‘For
purposes of distinction, I have as a joke given girls’ names
to a great number of the remaining bird-souls; since by their
inquisitiveness, their voluptuous bent, etc., they one and all most
readily suggest a comparison with little girls. Some of these
girls’ names have since been adopted by the rays of God and
have been retained as a designation of the bird-souls in
question.’ (214.) This easy interpretation of the
‘miracled birds’ gives us a hint which may help us
towards understanding the enigmatic ‘fore-courts of
Heaven’.

  
¹
[German ‘
Leichengift
’,
literally ‘corpse poison’.]

  
²
[ Santiago’ or
‘Carthage’,

     
‘Chinese-dom’ or ‘Jesus Christ’,

     
‘Sunset’ or ‘Breathlessness’,

     
‘Ahriman’ or ‘Farmer’.]

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

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   I am quite aware that a
psycho-analyst needs no small amount of tact and restraint whenever
in the course of his work he goes beyond the typical instances of
interpretation and that his listeners or readers will only follow
him as far a their own familiarity with analytic technique will
allow them. He has every reason, therefore, to guard against the
risk that an increased display of acumen on his part may be
accompanied by a diminution in the certainty and trustworthiness of
his results. It is thus only natural that one analyst will tend too
much in the direction of caution and another too much in the
direction of boldness. It will not be possible to define the proper
limits of justifiable interpretation until many experiments have
been made and until the subject has become more familiar. In
working upon the case of Schreber I have had a policy of restraint
forced on me by the circumstance that the opposition to his
publishing the
Denkwürdigkeiten
was so far effective as
to withhold a considerable portion of the material from our
knowledge - the portion, too, which would in all probability have
thrown the most important light upon the case.¹ Thus, for
instance, the third chapter of the book opens with this promising
announcement: ‘I shall now proceed to describe certain events
which occurred to
other members of my family
and which may
conceivably have been connected with the soul-murder I have
postulated; for there is at any rate something more or less
problematical about all of them, something not easily explicable
upon the lines of ordinary human experience.’ (33.) But the
next sentence, which is also the last of the chapter, is as
follows: ‘The remainder of this chapter has been withheld
from print as being unsuitable for publication.’ I shall
therefore have to be satisfied if I can succeed in tracing back at
any rate the nucleus of the delusional structure with some degree
of certainty to familiar human motives.