Quote:
Originally Posted by spiritual_emergency
Quote Freud, in his 1911 paper “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides” analyzed the illness narrative of Daniel Paul Schreber (1903), Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. Freud emphasized the withdrawal of emotional, libidinal investment in external reality in psychosis which could lead to an internal catastrophe signified in a delusion of world destruction. The latter is a restitutional attempt at self-cure of the extensive de-cathexis: “The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction”. |
I've mentioned before the book
Soul Murder, by Morton Schatzman. He delineates his thesis that Freud ignored the effect on Daniel Paul Schreber, who was a German judge who developed a debilitating fantasy life, of the upbringing at the hands of his own father, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. Since both of them were prolific writers, it is possible even at this late date to get a lot of clues to the origins of the son's disease by comparing their writings.