Freud - Complete Works (413 page)

  
¹
[The German word
‘
Vorhof
’ besides having the literal meaning of
‘fore-court’, is used in anatomy as a synonym for the
‘vestibulum’, a region of the female
genitals.]

  
²
‘The sun is a whore’, he used
to exclaim (384).

  
³
‘To some extent, moreover, even to
this day the sun presents a different picture to my eyes from what
it did before my illness. When I stand facing it and speak aloud,
its rays turn pale before me. I can gaze at it without any
difficulty and without being more than slightly dazzled by it;
whereas in my healthy days it would have been as impossible for me
as for anyone else to gaze at it for a minute at a time.’
(139, footnote.)

  
⁴
‘Since July, 1894, the voices that
talk to me have identified him directly with the sun.’
(88.)

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2426

   The sun, therefore, is nothing
but another sublimated symbol for the father; and in pointing this
out I must disclaim all responsibility for the monotony of the
solutions provided by psycho-analysis. In this instance symbolism
overrides grammatical gender - at least so far as German
goes,¹ for in most other languages the sun is masculine. Its
counterpart in this picture of the two parents is ‘Mother
Earth’ as she is generally called. We frequently come upon
confirmations of this assertion in resolving the pathogenic
phantasies of neurotics by psycho-analysis. I can make no more than
the barest allusion to the relation of all this to cosmic myths.
One of my patients, who had lost his father at a very early age,
was always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and sublime
in Nature. Since I have known this, it has seemed to me probable
that Nietzsche’s hymn ‘Vor Sonnenaufgang’
[‘Before Sunrise’] is an expression of the same
longing.² Another patient, who became neurotic after his
father’s death, was seized with his first attack of anxiety
and giddiness while the sun shone upon him as he was working in the
garden with a spade. He spontaneously put forward as an
interpretation that he had become frightened because his father had
looked at him while he was at work upon his mother with a sharp
instrument. When I ventured upon a mild remonstrance, he gave an
air of greater plausibility to his view by telling me that even in
his father’s lifetime he had compared him with the sun,
though then it had been in a satirical sense. Whenever he had been
asked where his father was going to spend the summer he had replied
in these sonorous words from the ‘Prologue in
Heaven’:

                                                               
Und seine vorgeschrieb’ne Reise

                                                               
Vollendet er mit Donnergang.
³

His father, acting on medical advice, had been
in the habit of paying an annual visit to Marienbad. This
patient’s infantile attitude towards his father took effect
in two successive phases. As long as his father was alive it showed
itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but
immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based
upon abject submission and deferred obedience to him.

  
¹
[The German word for ‘sun’ is
feminine: ‘
die Sonne
’.]

  
²
Also Sprach Zarathustra
, Part III.
It was only as a child that Nietzsche too knew his
father.

  
³
[’And with a tread of thunder he
accomplishes his prescribed journey.’]

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2427

   Thus in the case of Schreber we
find ourselves once again on the familiar ground of the
father-complex.¹ The patient’s struggle with Flechsig
became revealed to him as a conflict with God, and we must
therefore construe it as an infantile conflict with the father whom
he loved; the details of that conflict (of which we know nothing)
are what determined the content of his delusions. None of the
material which in other cases of the sort is brought to light by
analysis is absent in the present one: every element is hinted at
in one way or another. In infantile experiences such as this the
father appears as an interferer with the satisfaction which the
child is trying to obtain; this is usually of an auto-erotic
character, though at a later date it is often replaced in phantasy
by some other satisfaction of a less inglorious kind.² In the
final stage of Schreber’s delusion a magnificent victory was
scored by the infantile sexual urge; for voluptuousness became
God-fearing, and God Himself (his father) never tired of demanding
it from him. His father’s most dreaded threat, castration,
actually provided the material for his wishful phantasy (at first
resisted but later accepted) of being transformed into a woman. His
allusion to an offence covered by the surrogate idea
‘soul-murder’ could not be more transparent. The chief
attendant was discovered to be identical with his neighbour von W.,
who, according to the voices, had falsely accused him of
masturbation (108). The voices said, as though giving grounds for
the threat of castration: ‘For you are to be
represented
as being given over to voluptuous
excesses.’³ (127-8.) Finally, we come to the enforced
thinking (47) to which the patient submitted himself because he
supposed that God would believe he had become an idiot and would
withdraw from him if he ceased thinking for a moment. This is a
reaction (with which we are also familiar in other connections) to
the threat or fear of losing one’s reason
⁴
as a result of indulging in sexual
practices and especially in masturbation. Considering the enormous
number of delusional ideas of a hypochondriacal nature
⁵
which the patient developed, no
great importance should perhaps be attached to the fact that some
of them coincide word for word with the hypochondriacal fears of
masturbators.
⁶

  
¹
In the same way, Schreber’s
‘feminine wishful phantasy’ is simply one of the
typical forms taken by the infantile nuclear complex.

  
²
See some remarks on this subject in my
analysis of the ‘Rat Man’.

  
³
The systems of ‘representing’
and of ‘noting down’ (126), taken in conjunction with
the ‘proved souls’, point back to experiences in the
patient’s school days.

  
⁴
‘This was the end in view, as was
frankly admitted at an earlier date in the phrase "We want to
destroy your reason", which I have heard proceeding from the
upper God upon countless occasions.’ (206
n
.)

  
⁵
I
must not omit to remark at this point that I shall not consider any
theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it also covers the
hypochondriacal
symptoms by which that disorder is almost
invariably accompanied. It seems to me that hypochondria stands in
the same relation to paranoia as anxiety neurosis does to
hysteria.

  
⁶
‘For this reason attempts were made
to pump out my spinal cord. This was done by means of so-called
"little men" who were placed in my feet. I shall have
more to say presently on the subject of these "little
men", who showed some resemblance to the phenomena of the same
name which I have already discussed in Chapter VI. There used as a
rule to be two of them - a "little Flechsig" and a
"little von W." - And I used to hear their voices, too,
in my feet.’ (154.) Von W. was the man who was supposed to
have accused Schreber of masturbation. The ‘little men’
are described by Schreber himself as being among the most
remarkable and, in some respects, the most puzzling phenomena of
his illness (157). It looks as though they were the product of a
condensation of children and - spermatozoa.

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2428

   Any one who was more daring than
I am in making interpretations, or who was in touch with
Schreber’s family and consequently better acquainted with the
society in which he moved and the small events of his life, would
find it an easy matter to trace back innumerable details of his
delusions to their sources and so discover their meaning, and this
in spite of the censorship to which the
Denkwürdigkeiten
have been subjected. But as it is, we
must necessarily content ourselves with this shadowy sketch of the
infantile material which was used by the paranoic disorder in
portraying the current conflict.

   Perhaps I may be allowed to add a
few words with a view to establishing the causes of this conflict
that broke out it relation to the feminine wishful phantasy. As we
know, when a wishful phantasy makes its appearance, our business is
to bring it into connection with some
frustration
, some
privation in real life. Now Schreber admits having suffered a
privation of the kind. His marriage, which he describes as being in
other respects a happy one, brought him no children; and in
particular it brought him no son who might have consoled him for
the loss of his father and brother and upon whom he might have
drained off his unsatisfied homosexual affections.¹ His family
line threatened to die out, and it seems that he felt no little
pride in his birth and lineage. ‘Both the Flechsigs and the
Schrebers were members of "the highest nobility of
Heaven", as the phrase went. The Schrebers in particular bore
the title of "Margraves of Tuscany and Tasmania"; for
souls, urged by some sort of personal vanity, have a custom of
adorning themselves with somewhat high-sounding titles borrowed
from this world.’² (24.) The great Napoleon obtained a
divorce from Josephine (though only after severe internal
struggles) because she could not propagate the dynasty.³ Dr.
Schreber may have formed a phantasy that if he were a woman he
would manage the business of having children more successfully; and
he may thus have found his way back into the feminine attitude
towards his father which he had exhibited in the earliest years of
his childhood. If that were so, then his delusion that as a result
of his emasculation the world was to be peopled with ‘a new
race of men, born from the spirit of Schreber’ (288) - a
delusion the realization of which he was continually postponing to
a more and more remote future - would also be designed to offer him
an escape from his childlessness. If the ‘little men’
whom Schreber himself finds so puzzling were children, then we
should have no difficulty in understanding why they were collected
in such great numbers on his head (158): they were in truth the
‘children of his spirit’.
⁴

  
¹
‘After my recovery from my first
illness I spent eight years with my wife - years, upon the whole,
of great happiness, rich in outward honours, and only clouded from
time to time by the oft-repeated disappointment of our hope that we
might be blessed with children.’ (36).

  
²
He goes on from this remark, which
preserves in his delusions the good-natured irony of his saner
days, to trace back through former centuries the relations between
the Flechsig and Schreber families. In just the same way a young
man who is newly engaged, and cannot understand how he can have
lived so many years without knowing the girl he is now in love
with, will insist that he really made her acquaintance at some
earlier time.

  
³
In this connection it is worth mentioning a
protest entered by the patient against some statements made in the
medical report: ‘I have never trifled with the idea of
obtaining a
divorce
, nor have I displayed any indifference
to the maintenance of our marriage tie, such as might be inferred
from the expression used in the report to the effect that "I
am always ready with the rejoinder that my wife can get a divorce
if she likes".’ (436.)

  
⁴
Cf.
what I have said about the method of representing patrilineal
descent and about the birth of Athena in my analysis of the
‘Rat Man’ (1909
d
),
p. 2183 
n
.

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

2429

III

ON
THE MECHANISM OF PARANOIA

We have hitherto been dealing with the
father-complex, which was the dominant element in Schreber’s
case and with the wishful phantasy round which the illness centred.
But in all of this there is nothing characteristic of the form of
disease known as paranoia, nothing that might not be found (and
that has not in fact been found) in other kinds of neuroses. The
distinctive character of paranoia (or of dementia paranoides) must
be sought for elsewhere - namely, in the particular form assumed by
the symptoms; and we shall expect to find that this is determined,
not by the nature of the complexes themselves, but by the mechanism
by which the symptoms are formed or by which repression is brought
about. We should be inclined to say that what was
characteristically paranoic about the illness was the fact that the
patient, as a means of warding off a homosexual wishful phantasy,
reacted precisely with delusions of persecution of this kind.