In the articles put together in this issue, commemorating Freud and Paul Schreber’s centenaries, we revisit Schreber, father and son, the men and the many myths created about them down the decades. It all started with Freud in 1911, whose essay made Paul Schreber immortal, and with W. G. Niederland in 1959, whose articles portrayed Moritz Schreber as a domestic tyrant, child abuser, and…

Summary: The paper is criteriological overview of the Schreber scholarship ever since Freud’s 1911 epochal analysis of Schreber’s seminal work, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. Freud’s formulaic, psychoanalytically hermeneutic reading of Schreber’s book was, except for a few details, anhistorical; it was an exercise in applied, not clinical, psychoanalysis, misinterpreting Schreber…

Summary: The portrait of Schreber that emerges in this work is an analysis of a good man who was left in a subverted state by psychosis. This portrait is not unlike Freud’s Schreber, Lacan’s Schreber, and is certainly Schreber’s Schreber. Nevertheless, the understanding of Schreber’s mental hell comes out very different in this work and is affected here by the central use of a particula…

Summary: Daniel Paul Schreber who was imprisoned as a “paranoic” in the Sonnenstein Asylum in Pirna/Saxony (1894-1902) describes in his “Memoirs of a Nervous Patient” the torments to which he was subjected while he “was completely filled by holy ideas about God and the Order of the World”. This book, originally written only for his wife, was first published 1903 in Germany and later tra…

Summary: The article offers a brief history of Freud´s religious criticism until 1911 and examines its forms and functions in the famous writing “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911). It shows the wide gulf between Freud´s view on paranoia and religion and that of materialistic psychiatry. The author demonstrates that F…

Summary: Freud’s affectionate admiration of Judge Schreber is that of a reader who has discovered his own ideas in Schreber’s book: neural pathways are also the ways of the speaking voices; the language register makes manifest the secrets of the universe; the appetite of men for women is the evil of potentates who rule the world. There is but a step from the deity to which Schreber succ…

Summary:   The starting point of my paper is the question of how the events (or the form of life) of the 17th century (the dawn of modern sciences) can be related to Daniel Paul Schreber’s experience of life. My approach will be the following: The baroque is to 17th century science, what delusion is to the psychophysics of the early 20th century. I thus want to argue for a certain relat…

Summary:   The author shows that Lacan’s reading of D.P. Schrebers Memoirs between 1953 and 1959 demonstrates that the latter experienced at least eight distinct forms of realities at a time when he had partially recovered from his psychotic decompensation. Of these, three were intimately linked to language phenomena, three were bodily/imaginary phenomena, and two were “shared real…