ABSTRACT
S. Freud had written a number of papers on psychosis, but his 1911 text, based on what the famous German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, had said about his illness, was and remains the principle source for anyone wanting to understand Freud's aetiology of paranoia and schizophrenia. Schreber said in the Denkwurdigkeiten that his two illnesses were due to overstrain, the first from his election campaign, the second from working as a new Senatsprasident. The Denkwurdigkeiten traced the evolution of Schreber's pathological thinking. It was in June 1893, after his nomination to Dresden, that the first indications of femininity appeared in the form of the phantasy he had one morning in bed. When he was readmitted to Flechsig's clinic, he started to fear the threat of emasculation as a persecution, initially by Flechsig and then by God, and continued to resist this when he was transferred to Sonnenstein.
