Sigmund Freud, on "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber"

In light of the psychoanalytic approach, Freud’s “attempts” to interpret the case history of Doctor Schreber’s psychotic disorder lead to the particular conclusion that the origin of Schreber’s illness was triggered by unconscious feelings of a passive homosexuality (which Freud terms as feminine wish-phantasy) and his subsequent conscious retaliation against it. The process by which Schreber’s latent homosexual tendencies move from elaborate delusions of persecution to acceptance by means of transferring identities and associations in the unconscious allow for the paranoia to subside. Through the interpretation of these shifting associations and dividing identities in Schreber’s unconscious, Freud finds particular significance in the masculine figures of Schreber’s father and brother that effect feelings of emasculation in Schreber, especially concerning his inability to have children with his wife. These frustrations as Freud calls them are what lead to Schreber’s delusions. In this way Schreber’s ideas of his father, the sun, and God take on similar meanings as he develops homoerotic feelings toward them in coping with the deaths of his father and brother and his sexual impotence with his wife.

I’m led to believe that Freud’s interpretation of "The Psychotic Doctor Schreber" was particularly intended for the community of contemporaries interested in, yet at unease with, the psychiatric discipline of psychoanalysis. Throughout his analysis he appears always self-consciously returning to the discipline to reaffirm the reader of his methods and to address what seems to be an array of possibly menacing objections to his claims. This causes me to read his analysis with fascination at how he arrives at such claims but always at the risk of being susceptible to a “diminution in the certainty and trustworthiness of his results”. I do not see myself as part of his original audience but rather a member of a new audience not interested in just the relevance of psychoanalysis but in a broader theoretical discourse on the relevance of interpretation.

The most obvious assumption Freud’s analysis questions is Schreber’s own interpretation of his psychosis as being attributed to work-related causes. Another less obvious assumption is that there is no one reason or angle at which to view Schreber’s condition.

4. The closest thing to an explicit thesis is stated at the beginning of the case history (version 1) and reiterated at the beginning of his interpretation of the case history (version 2).

Version 1: “The psychoanalyst, in the light of his knowledge of the psychoneuroses, approaches the subject with suspicion that even mental structures so extraordinary as these and so remote from our common modes of thought are nevertheless derived from the most general and comprehensible of human impulses; and he would be glad to discover the motives of such a transformation as well as the manner in which it has been accomplished.”

Version 2: “The problem now lies before us of endeavoring to penetrate the meaning of this history of a case of paranoia and lay bare in it the familiar complexes and motive forces of mental life”

These two versions work together to give us an idea of what is a more implicit thesis along the lines of:
While Dr. Shreber’s case of paranoia may be shrouded in the complexities of thought completely foreign to our understanding, there exist a method by which to tease out the familiar meanings and motives at work underneath that may shed light onto a better understanding of the origins of the mental illness.

5. One example of reasoning offered up in support of Freud claims is the process of “transference” in which he explains how Schreber’s homosexual impulses for Dr. Flechsig are really connected to feelings for his brother or father but nevertheless through this associative process become synonymous with his physician Dr. Flechsig. Freud uses numerous instances of Schreber’s own autobiographical accounts to back up this interpretation with many others.
One particularly crucial and even arguable warrant is when Freud makes the connections between Flechsig, God, and Schreber’s brother and father without any evidence from the Denkwurdigkeiten to support the claim. Another warrant can be seen when Freud refers back to his previous work Traumdeutung to support the claim that “absurdity in dreams expresses scorn and derision.” He ends up relying on this assertion stated in a previous work by himself in order to argue for the connection between Schreber's miracles and the idea that they are an expression of scorn or derision.