Freud's Schreber Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: On Subjective Disposition to Psychosis

Thomas Dalzell investigates what was distinctive about the predisposition to psychosis which Freud posited in Daniel Paul Schreber, a presiding judge in Saxony's highest court.

He argues that Freud's Schreber text reversed the order of priority in late 19th century conceptions of the disposing causes of psychosis―the objective-biological and subjective-biographical―to privilege subjective disposition to psychosis, but without returning to the paradigms of early 19th century Romantic psychiatry and without obviating hereditary disposition.

The book takes the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber as its reference point, but it is not a general treatment of Schreber, or of Freud's reading of the Schreber case. It focuses rather on what was new in Freud's thinking on the disposition to psychosis, what he learned from his psychiatrist contemporaries and what he did not, and whether or not psychoanalysts have fully received his aetiology. It situates Freud's Schreber text within the evolution of his thought on psychosis, and, as a new element, it highlights his isolating a developmental fixation at infantile narcissism as the decisive moment in his aetiological chain.