ABSTRACT
The analysis of Schreber’s autobiography and the investigation of paranoiac patients established the decisive role of homosexuality, generally warded off with the aid of projection, in the pathogenesis of this psychosis. The brutal intervention in his anal erotogenic zone had been well adapted to reawaken the wish to repeat the infantile homosexual play which survived in his unconscious. But in the meantime the sexuality, which in the earlier stage had been childish play, had developed into the impetuous and dangerous drive of a strong, adult, man. The same unconscious, passive-pederastic fantasy underlay both the delusional ideas and the paraesthesias which had preceded the outbreak of those ideas. The ‘crowing cock in the yard’ to which the patient attributed a special place in his delusional ideas was identical with the ‘greatest enemy’ to whom he had played the hen in his boyhood.
