Freud's Schreber between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis - Book Review

This book of Thomas Dalzell’s is a tour de force. Despite stating that his text is not intended as ‘another general exploration of Sigmund Freud’s 1911 Schreber text’, he does in the end provide us with a subtle exploration of the case from which the most experienced analysts could learn a lot. Beyond this, he uses Schreber’s case like a chemical reagent, which reveals, as in the development of a photographic print, hidden aspects of Freud’s thinking, and also the state of thinking of the Viennese psychoanalysts, of Emile Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler etc. The careful exposition of Kraepelin’s logic in his development of a classification of psychotic entities based largely on the course of the illness and its prognosis is very helpful for today’s clinicians.…