ABSTRACT
D. Schreber's patient file highlights a hereditary burden in him and it lists his father's compulsive ideas and murderous impulses; his mother's nervousness; his mother's cousin's chronic paranoia; his sister's hysteria; and his brother's paralysis and suicide. The reason S. Freud does not refer to heredity in his Schreber text is that he did not have access to this information. This chapter shows that heredity is actually an important dispositional factor for Freud, one that he thinks psychoanalysis can do nothing about. It also shows that Freud does not do away with constitutional factors when he prioritizes subjective ones. The chapter begins with a brief sketch of the place of heredity and hereditary degeneration in the history of psychiatry. It shows that while Freud is critical of an indiscriminate diagnosis of degeneration, he does not dismiss it, but even holds it responsible for abnormalities in sexual constitution.
