In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry

In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schrebers illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schrebers troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schrebers illness.

Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schrebers two psychiatrists, Paul Flechsig and Guido Weber, Zvi Lothane offers a stunning reappraisal of the Schreber case that overturns virtually all previous opinion. Lothane examines both the man and his milieu in a way that allows the reader
fresh access not only to the tragedy of Schrebers illness but also to his heroic, if doomed, attempts to come to terms with his condition through writing. In the process, he persuasively demonstrates that important issues of both psychiatric diagnosis and psychoanalytic interpretation have heretofore been compromised by a failure to pay sufficient attention to Schrebers interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts.