ABSTRACT
The French psychiatrist–psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, drew on S. Freud's D. Schreber text in his 1932 doctoral thesis. Lacan represents a return to Freud, both in his approach to psychoanalysis and in his reading of Schreber. Half a century of Freudians before Lacan had understood psychosis in terms of an outwards projection by the ego. For Lacan, this was an uncritical overemphasis, given that Freud had regarded projection as insufficient to account for paranoia, and had actually stressed grammatical deduction with his four contradictions of the sentence "I love him". While Freud had originally spoken about a loss of reality in psychosis and corrected this in favour of a reality loss in both neurosis and psychosis, Lacan objects to later Freudians reducing psychosis to the ego's loss of reality. In Lacan's view, Schreber had sacrificed his being a speaking subject in order to return to the deadly reification of the mirror stage.
