ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the phenomenology of D. P. Schreber’s delusions and fantasies by trying to contextualize them vis-a-vis the various forms of discourse available to him as he tried to come to some understanding of his illness. In developing his revolutionary psychoanalytic method based on his dream psychology, Sigmund Freud acknowledged Immanuel Kant’s dictum that the madman is the dreamer wide awake. Freud saw that the bridge between emotional health and emotional illness is the concept of meaning: people create meanings when they are well and when they are ill. As against myth, the central life reality, on the surface and in the depths, is that persons live in love relations, that love and existence are inseparable. Freud was clear-sighted to realize that the redeemer dream was a sign of the process of recovery, of reestablishing the contact with the world lost earlier in the end-of-the-world fantasy.
