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.

Conclusions

How do you guys usually go about concluding humanities papers? My go-to strategy is to briefly philosophize on the broader implications of the argument or to suggest other potentially fruitful avenues of inquiry. Both seem kind of cheesy and inappropriate in the case of these papers, however.

My Rhetoric 103A teacher says that summarizing the preceding arguments in a short paper is insulting to the reader's intelligence. I'm not sure I buy this, since at least some crystallization of the thesis seems useful.

Any ideas?

About the Prompts

This morning I have given you at last, the last minute gift of some added prompts for the final due so soon. I will admit that I am hoping that nearly all of you are already so well along in your writing that you will have no need or interest in taking up these new prompts, but I also suspect that at least some of you will turn to them, whether because you are are stymied or uninspired by the already available topics, or perhaps because you have been putting things off to the last minute. But whether you actually write about these topics in your finals or not, I do hope that everybody will give some thought to them, because taken together they also function as a kind of preliminary map of the terrain to which the last lectures of the course will be devoted. It seems to me that it is only now, in the end, that it makes good sense for you to be turning your thoughts to these connections in particular as a way of beginning to take stock of the texts, themes, and problems of the course as a whole.

Final Prompts:

For Essaylet Two:

In "Relfections on Violence" Hannah Arendt writes

The experience of death, whether the experience of dying or the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most anti-political experience there is, insofar as it is usually faced in complete loneliness and impotence, signifying that we shall leave the company of our fellow men and with it that being-together and acting in concert which makes life worthwhile… What is important is that these experiences, whose elementary force is beyond doubt, have never found an institutional, political expression. No body politic I know of was ever founded on the equality before death and its actualization in violence.

How does this viewpoint comport with Judith Butler's elaboration in the essay "Precarious Life" of a connection between politics and an awareness of the precarity of human life? In the essay Butler draws our attention to a provocative claim by Emmanuel Levinas, namely: "To be in relation with the other face to face is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse." How does this assertion differ (if it does) from Arendt's insistence that "to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant"?

For Essaylet One:

Option A -- Make and defend any strong claim about the situation of the colonized and their political prospects in the chapter "Concerning Violence" from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, but you must substantiate that claim primarily through a close reading of the unusually long passage Fanon recounts (curiously without providing much in the way of a reading himself) from Aime Cesaire's Les Armes Miraculeuses, the exchange of the Rebel and the Mother. How do the arguments and details in that passage illuminate the problems, ambitions, characteristics of the text as a whole to which you want to draw our attention?

Option B -- Make and defend any strong claim about the relation between the "doing" of gender, our "undoing" by gendered desire, and the differences (or not) between these doings and undoings and the way in which violence can "do us in" as Judith Butler elaborates these paradoxes in Undoing Gender, but whatever case you make, you must substantiate your claim in a way that takes into account, among other things, the following provocative claim:

[O]ne mourns when when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance.

Although there is no necessity about this, it may be useful, in responding to either of these options for Essaylet One, to bear in mind (even if you do not address it specifically in the resulting reading) the passages on the relation of mortality and freedom from Arendt's "Reflections on Violence" to which I have already drawn your attention in the prompt for Essaylet Two, above.

One day, at Disneyland...

...I met Michael Jackson. I was about 7 years old and he was in a wheel chair and wearing an oft-donned surgical mask. I remember it very vaguely and my memory has been strengthened by the snapshots taken of this meeting (which are now in some Rubbermaid bin at my parent's house). But I do remember his lit up eyes and, of course, a very gentle disposition.

Anyway, the truly interesting part of this, to me, is when I met M.J., I was exiting the ride "Peter Pan" while he was just about to board the flight to Never, Never land. Rapidly, a huge group of people formed around the exit from the ride, waiting for Michael to appear. After a long time of waiting, much longer than it takes to fly to Never, Never land and back, people began to leave, it seems Michael never found the exit.

True story.

How to cite graphic novels

What is the appropriate way to quote Maus (or any g.n.)? Page numbers? Does each box have a special marker?

A History of Violence Alternate Edition

I stumbled across this in my research... I figure it would resonate with some of you and give you a little break as well.