ABSTRACT
From the very beginning D. P. Schreber has been both a paradigm and a person, and the paradigm has regrettably obscured the person. As a paradigm, Schreber the person became the Schreber case, a specimen exhibiting forms of psychopathology and psychodynamics. There was an enthusiastic review by Paul Mobius, who compared Schreber’s to the famous confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paul Mobius was the originator of pathography, the application of psychopathology to explain the life of a famous person, which he began with a study of Rousseau in 1889. While Guido Weber described Schreber’s hallucinatory insanity, the idea of understanding Schreber’s psychosis dynamically never occurred to him. During 1910 C. G. Jung discussed the Memoirs with Sigmund Freud and from that point on “Schreberisms” frequently pepper their correspondence. Freud’s attribution of homosexuality to Schreber is, among other motives, a projection onto Schreber of his own sexual conflicts and emotions.
