Freud's interest in Schreber's famous Memoirswas not to examine Schreber, a life, in all its historicity, but to use the book as case material to illustrate a specific theory he had formulated in 1908: the causal connection between repressed homosexual libido and the paranoid syndrome. While of undoubted heuristic value, this causal connection has not stood the test of time as a universal clinical formulation. In singling out this combined drive and developmental explanatory theory, Freud left untapped many descriptive, diagnostic and dynamic aspects in the story of Schreber. – This formulation also illustrates the perennial tension in psychoanalysis between the breadth of method and the narrowness of theory, or doctrine. Whereas method addresses such general issues as the creation of meaning in health and disease, of meaning as mediated by language, memory, perception and imagination, trauma and transference, theory is concerned with the role of specific etiological forces and factors. The theory in question, the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses, has been variously contested during Freud's lifetime and thereafter. – The debates about the privileged role of sexuality were important in the history of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic movement, the various Freudian and now-Freudian schools, and the Freud-Jung relationship. The differences between Freud and Jung concerning the libido theory and Schreber led to their fateful clash and final parting of the ways.
Nowadays Freud bashing is not only à la mode, in certain circles it has become de rigueur. Once a name of respect, Freud has become a name of ridicule. But like any scientific method, body of knowledge, and therapeutic procedure, psychoanalysis should be subjected to critical scrutiny. The recent crop of hostile Freud critics may have filled a vacuum left for decades by a psychoanalytic establishment which, like the Church of yesteryear, shunned all forms of criticism intramural and extramural. A central guiding idea of this essay is the distinction between the psychoanalytic method and psychoanalytic doctrines, hypotheses, and theories. This distinction has been invariably confused by both Freud's adherents and Freud's attackers. Moreover, arguments ad rem have been conflated with arguments ad hominem. A socially responsible criticism must seek to be constructive and not merely destructive. It is the latter course that was taken by the various hostile critics that came to be labeled as Freud bashers. The time has come to take a stand against the more egregious attacks on Freud and the psychoanalytic method.
By 1900, Freud had formulated an original and operational method of psychoanalytic treatment and research: the technique of free association. In 1912–1915 and later writings, he recommended it as a fundamental procedure and process, called the fundamental rule, in psychoanalytic therapy. In recent years, free association as a method has been variously misrepresented, misunderstood, and denied by some schools of psychoanalysis. This paper reviews the history of free associations and argues for upholding the continuity and relevance of Freud's fundamental methodology and for a renewal of interest in reciprocal, i.e., interactive and interpersonal, free association.
Schreber's fantasy of turning into a woman to be fertilized by God and produce a new race of mankind was a major motive for Superintendent of Sonnenstein, Dr Guido Weber, to maintain that Schreber was a case of chronic and incurable paranoia and unfit for life in society, failing to see the difference between the concrete and the metaphorical. Schreber not only proved Weber wrong, but prophetically anticipated a number of issues in current awareness of gender psychology and gender roles in society. – In Schreber's system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman and his favored relation to God) are linked by the assumption of a feminine attitude towarh God. It will be our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it.