ABSTRACT
This chapter is developed on the premise that people deal with anxiety by negating and repressing it. Neurotics try to push uncomfortable and contradictory ideas under the carpet by repressing them; they then have to deal with the resultant internal and external conflicts that escape from repression. Sigmund Freud’s classic account of psychosis is to be found in his case study based on the memoirs of a hitherto successful German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber who experienced a psychotic breakdown. There are two persuasive reasons for returning to Freud once more. Firstly, Schreber was treated in an age before the invention of psychotropic drugs changed the nature of the hallucinations commonly experienced by psychotic patients. Secondly, Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness are an extraordinarily lucid account of his experience of severe mental illness.
