ABSTRACT
Daniel Paul Schreber was an eminent German judge from a good family who first went insane in 1884 at the age of 42. He was placed under ‘tutelage’ at the request of his wife Sabine in November 1894, and this decision was confirmed in March 1900 (Lothane, 1992, p. 56). A tutelage order used to be taken out in Germany to protect an individual from the effects of his or her actions. These included managing one's estate unwisely and conducting oneself so as to lose face. But, as Senatspräsident Schreber himself explained, the actions harmful to other people remained a matter for ‘organs of security police’, and so a ‘tutelage’ was not quite the same as a ‘section order’ is now. The reason Schreber was subjected to tutelage was that, according to his psychiatrist Dr Weber, as a person influenced by ‘hallucinations and delusions’ he was ‘no longer master of his own free will’ (Schreber, 1903/1955, p. 475). Schreber appealed against the order, and as a part of his defence he wrote Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, using the notes he kept during his illness. The notes are not available but the memoirs were published in 1903 and translated into English by Macalpine and Hunter in 1955, and Schreber became the most frequently quoted patient in psychiatry (Schatzman, 1976). Bleuler (who was not Schreber's psychiatrist) used the Memoirs in his Dementia Praecox (Bleuler, 1911/1966, 1924/1951). Freud (1911/1972) used them to illustrate his account of psychosis (Dementia Paranoides). Klein (1975) and Fairburn (1956/1994) both put Schreber's case to use in their polemics with other psychoanalysts. The interest in Schreber is continuing (e.g. Lothane, 1992; Sass, 1992, 1994; Santner, 1996).
