Freud - Complete Works (406 page)

   In the numerous applications to
the courts, by which Dr. Schreber endeavoured to regain his
liberty, he did not in the least disavow his delusions or make any
secret of his intention of publishing the
Denkwürdigkeiten
. On the contrary, he dwelt upon the
importance of his ideas to religious thought, and upon their
invulnerability to the attacks of modern science; but at the same
time he laid stress upon the ‘absolute harmlessness’
(430) of all the actions which, as he was aware, his delusions
obliged him to perform. Such, indeed, were his acumen and the
cogency of his logic that finally, and in spite of his being an
acknowledged paranoic, his efforts were crowned with success. In
July, 1902, Dr. Schreber’s civil rights were restored, and in
the following year his
Denkwürdigkeiten eines
Nervenkranken
appeared, though in a censored form and with many
valuable portions omitted.

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

2393

   The Court Judgement that gave Dr.
Schreber back his liberty summarizes the content of his delusional
system in a few sentences: ‘He believed that he had a mission
to redeem the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss.
This, however, he could only bring about if he were first
transformed from a man into a woman.’ (475.)

   For a more detailed account of
his delusions as they appeared in their final shape we may turn to
Dr. Weber’s Report of 1899: ‘The culminating point of
the patient’s delusional system is his belief that he has a
mission to redeem the world, and to restore mankind to their lost
state of bliss. He was called to this task, so he asserts, by
direct inspiration from God, just as we are taught that the
Prophets were; for nerves in a condition of great excitement, as
his were for a long time, have precisely the property of exerting
an attraction upon God - though this is touching on matters which
human speech is scarcely, if at all, capable of expressing, since
they lie entirely outside the scope of human experience and,
indeed, have been revealed to him alone. The most essential part of
his mission of redemption is that it must be preceded by his
transformation into a woman
. It is not to be supposed that
he
wishes
to be transformed into a woman; it is rather a
question of a "must" based upon the Order of Things,
which there is no possibility of his evading, much as he would
personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and masculine
station in life. But neither he nor the rest or mankind can regain
the life beyond except by his being transformed into a woman (a
process which may occupy many years or even decades) by means of
divine miracles. He himself, of this he is convinced, is the only
object upon which divine miracles are worked, and he is thus the
most remarkable human being who has ever lived upon earth. Every
hour and every minute for years he has experienced these miracles
in his body, and he has had them confirmed by the voices that have
conversed with him. During the first years of his illness certain
of his bodily organs suffered such destructive injuries as would
inevitably have led to the death of any other man: he lived for a
long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without
lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with
shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx
with his food, etc. But divine miracles ("rays") always
restored what had been destroyed, and therefore, as long as he
remains a man, he is altogether immortal. These alarming phenomena
have ceased long ago, and his "femaleness" has become
prominent instead. This is a matter of a process of development
which will probably require decades, if not centuries, for its
completion, and it is unlikely that anyone now living will survive
to see the end of it. He has a feeling that enormous numbers of
"female nerves" have already passed over into his body,
and out of them a new race of men will proceed, through a process
of direct impregnation by God. Not until then, it seems, will he be
able to die a natural death, and, along with the rest of mankind,
will he regain a state of bliss. In the meantime not only the sun,
but trees and birds, which are in the nature of "bemiracled
residues of former human souls", speak to him in human
accents, and miraculous things happen everywhere around him.’
(386-8.)

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

2394

   The interest felt by the
practical psychiatrist in such delusional formations as these is,
as a rule, exhausted when once he has ascertained the character of
the products of the delusion and has formed an estimate of their
influence on the patient’s general behaviour: in his case
marvelling is not the beginning of understanding. The
psycho-analyst, in the light of his knowledge of the
psychoneuroses, approaches the subject with a suspicion that even
thought-structures so extraordinary as these and so remote from our
common modes of thinking are nevertheless derived from the most
general and comprehensible impulses of the human mind; and he would
be glad to discover the motives of such a transformation as well as
the manner in which it has been accomplished. With this aim in
view, he will wish to go more deeply into the details of the
delusion and into the history of its development.

   (
a
) The medical officer
lays stress upon two points as being of chief importance: the
patient’s
assumption of the role of Redeemer
, and his
transformation into a woman
. The Redeemer delusion is a
phantasy that is familiar to us through the frequency with which it
forms the nucleus of religious paranoia. The additional factor,
which makes the redemption dependent upon the man being previously
transformed into a woman, is unusual and in itself bewildering,
since it shows such a wide divergence from the historical myth
which the patient’s phantasy is setting out to reproduce. It
is natural to follow the medical report in assuming that the motive
force of this delusional complex was the patient’s ambition
to play the part of Redeemer, and that his
emasculation
was
only entitled to be regarded as a means for achieving that end.
Even though this may appear to be true of his delusion in its final
form, a study of the
Denkwürdigkeiten
compels us to
take a very different view of the matter. For we learn that the
idea of being transformed into a woman (that is, of being
emasculated) was the primary delusion, that he began by regarding
that act as constituting a serious injury and persecution, and that
it only became related to his playing the part of Redeemer in a
secondary way. There can be no doubt, moreover, that originally he
believed that the transformation was to be effected for the purpose
of sexual abuse and not so as to serve higher designs. The position
may be formulated by saying that a sexual delusion of persecution
was later on converted in the patient’s mind into a religious
delusion of grandeur. The part of persecutor was at first assigned
to Professor Flechsig, the physician in whose charge he was; later,
his place was taken by God Himself.

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

2395

   I will quote the relevant
passages from the
Denkwürdigkeiten
in full: ‘In
this way a conspiracy against me was brought to a head (in about
March or April, 1894). Its object was to contrive that, when once
my nervous complaint had been recognized as incurable or assumed to
be so, I should be handed over to a certain person in a particular
manner: my soul was to be delivered up to him, but my body - owing
to a misapprehension of what I have described above as the purpose
underlying the Order of Things - was to be transformed into a
female body: and as such surrendered to the person in
question¹ with a view to sexual abuse, and was then simply to
be "left on one side" - that is to say, no doubt, given
over to corruption.’ (56.)

   ‘It was, moreover,
perfectly natural that from the human standpoint (which was the one
by which at that time I was still chiefly governed) I should regard
Professor Flechsig or his soul as my only true enemy - at a later
date there was also the von W. soul, about which I shall have more
to say presently - and that I should look upon God Almighty as my
natural ally. I merely fancied that He was in great straits as
regards Professor Flechsig, and consequently felt myself bound to
support him by every conceivable means, even to the length of
sacrificing myself. It was not until very much later that the idea
forced itself upon my mind that God Himself had played the part of
accomplice, if not of instigator, in the plot whereby my soul was
to be murdered and my body used like a strumpet. I may say, in
fact, that this idea has in part become clearly conscious to me
only in the course of writing the present work.’ (59.)

   ‘Every attempt at murdering
my soul, or at emasculating me for purposes
contrary to the
Order of Things
(that is, for the gratification of the sexual
appetites of a human individual), or later at destroying my
understanding - every such attempt has come to nothing. From this
apparently unequal struggle between one weak man and God Himself, I
have emerged as the victor - though not without undergoing much
bitter suffering and privation - because the Order of Things stands
upon my side.’ (61.)

   In a footnote attached to the
words ‘
contrary to the Order of Things
’ in the
above passage, the author foreshadows the subsequent transformation
in his delusion of emasculation and in his relation to God:
‘I shall show later on that emasculation for quite another
purpose - a purpose
in consonance with the Order of Things
-
is within the bounds of possibility, and, indeed, that it may quite
probably afford the solution of the conflict.’

  
¹
It is shown from the context in this and
other passages that ‘the person in question’ who was to
practise this abuse was none other than Flechsig. (See
below.)

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

2396

   These statements are of decisive
importance in determining the view we are to take of the delusion
of emasculation and in thus giving us a general understanding of
the case. It may be added that the ‘voices’ which the
patient heard never treated his transformation into a woman as
anything but a sexual disgrace, which gave them an excuse for
jeering at him. ‘Rays of God¹ not infrequently thought
themselves entitled to mock at me by calling me "Miss²
Schreber", in allusion to the emasculation which, it was
alleged, I was about to undergo.’ (127.) Or they would say:
‘So
this
sets up to have been a Senatspräsident,
this person who lets himself be f--d!’³ Or again:
‘Don’t you feel ashamed in front of your
wife?’

   That the emasculation phantasy
was of a primary nature and originally independent of the Redeemer
motif
becomes still more probable when we recollect the
‘idea’ which, as I mentioned on an earlier page,
occurred to him while he was half asleep, to the effect that it
must be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation
(36.) This phantasy appeared during the incubation period of his
illness, and before he had begun to feel the effects of overwork in
Dresden.

   Schreber himself gives the month
of November, 1895, as the date at which the connection was
established between the emasculation phantasy and the Redeemer idea
and the way thus paved for his becoming reconciled to the former.
‘Now, however,’ he writes, ‘I became clearly
aware that the Order of Things imperatively demanded my
emasculation, whether I personally liked it or no, and that no
reasonable
course lay open to me but to reconcile myself to
the thought of being transformed into a woman. The further
consequence of my emasculation could, of course, only be my
impregnation by divine rays to the end that a new race of men might
be created.’ (177.)

  
¹
The ‘rays of God’, as we shall
see, are identical with the voices which talked the ‘basic
language’.

  
²
[In English in the original.]

  
³
I reproduce this omission from the
Denkwürdigkeiten
, just as I do all the peculiarities of
their author’s way of writing. I myself should have found no
reason for being so shamefaced over a serious matter.

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

2397

   The idea of being transformed
into a woman was the salient feature and the earliest germ of his
delusional system. It also proved to be the one part of it that
persisted after his cure, and the one part that was able to retain
a place in his behaviour in real life after he had recovered.
‘The
only thing
which could appear unreasonable in the
eyes of other people is the fact, already touched upon in the
expert’s report, that I am sometimes to be found standing
before the mirror or elsewhere with the upper portion of my body
bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons,
false necklaces, and the like. This only occurs, I may add, when I
am
by myself
; and never, at least so far as I am able to
avoid it, in the presence of other people.’ (429.) The Herr
Senatspräsident confesses to this frivolity at a date (July,
1901) at which he was already in a position to express very aptly
the completeness of his recovery in the region of practical life:
‘I have now long been aware that the persons I see about me
are not "cursorily improvised men" but real people, and
that I must therefore behave towards them as a reasonable man is
used to behave towards his fellows.’ (409.) In contrast to
the way in which he put his emasculation phantasy into action, the
patient never took any steps towards inducing people to recognize
his mission as Redeemer, beyond the publication of his
Denkwürdigkeiten
.