ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud was among a handful of people who considered D. P. Schreber a quotable author. Everybody else regarded him as a madman, to be diagnosed, decoded, or disposed of. Descriptively, the content of the Memoirs is Schreber’s re-creation of the stream of consciousness that filled his long days and nights at Sonnenstein, that is, his thinking, whether hearing his thoughts silently or vocally, in the form of voices, that is, his own voiced thoughts. Schreber told his story in a counterpoint of the realistic and fantastic modes of representation, the latter based on thinking in analogies, pictures, metaphors, and puns. It is important to pay attention to Schreber’s own description, because the temptation is so great for an interpreter to change or paraphrase Schreber’s words to fit his interpretive scheme. Picturing is indeed the heart of his dream psychology, in the two fundamental meanings of dream, both cause and cure of sickness.
