Freud - Complete Works (412 page)

   In textbooks of psychiatry we
frequently come across statements to the effect that megalomania
can develop out of delusions of persecution. The process is
supposed to be as follows. The patient is primarily the victim of a
delusion that he is being persecuted by powers of the greatest
might. He then feels a need to account to himself for this, and in
that way hits on the idea that he himself is a very exalted
personage and worthy of such persecution. The development of
megalomania is thus attributed by the textbooks to a process which
(borrowing a useful word from Ernest Jones) we may describe as
‘rationalization’. But to ascribe such important
affective consequences to a rationalization is, as it seems to us,
an entirely unpsychological proceeding; and we would consequently
draw a sharp distinction between our opinion and the one which we
have quoted from the textbooks. We are making no claim, for the
moment, to knowing the origin of the megalomania.

  
¹
‘It is only, he writes towards the
end of the book, ‘as possibilities which must be taken into
account, that I mention that my emasculation may even yet be
accomplished and may result in a new generation issuing from my
womb by divine impregnation.’ (293.)

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2421

   Turning once more to the case of
Schreber, we are bound to admit that any attempt at throwing light
upon the transformation in his delusion brings us up against
extraordinary difficulties. In what manner and by what means was
the ascent from Flechsig to God brought about? From what source did
he derive the megalomania which so fortunately enabled him to
become reconciled to his persecution, or, in analytical
phraseology, to accept the wishful phantasy which had had to be
repressed? The
Denkwürdigkeiten
give us a first clue;
for they show us that in the patient’s mind
‘Flechsig’ and ‘God’ belonged to the same
class. In one of his phantasies he overheard a conversation between
Flechsig and his wife, in which the former asserted that he was
‘God Flechsig’, so that his wife thought he had gone
mad (82). But there is another feature in the development of
Schreber’s delusions which claims our attention. If we take a
survey of the delusions as a whole we see that the persecutor is
divided into Flechsig and God; in just the same way Flechsig
himself subsequently splits up into two personalities, the
‘upper’ and the ‘middle’ Flechsig, and God
into the ‘lower’ and the ‘upper’ God. In
the later stages of the illness the decomposition of Flechsig goes
further still (193). A process of decomposition of this kind is
very characteristic of paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as
hysteria condenses. Or rather, paranoia resolves once more into
their elements the products of the condensations and
identifications which are effected in the unconscious. The frequent
repetition of the decomposing process in Schreber’s case
would, according to Jung, be an expression of the importance which
the person in question possessed for him.¹ All of this
dividing up of Flechsig and God into a number of persons thus had
the same meaning as the splitting of the persecutor into Flechsig
and God. They were all duplications of one and the same important
relationship.² But, in order to interpret all these details,
we must further draw attention to our view of this decomposition of
the persecutor into Flechsig and God as a paranoid reaction to a
previously established identification of the two figures or their
belonging to the same class. If the persecutor Flechsig was
originally a person whom Schreber loved, then God must also simply
be the reappearance of some one else whom he loved, and probably
some one of greater importance.

  
¹
Jung (1910
a
). Jung is probably right
when he goes on to say that the decomposition follows the general
lines taken by schizophrenia in that it uses a process of analysis
in order to produce a watering-down effect, and is thus designed to
prevent the occurrence of unduly powerful impressions. When,
however, one of his patients said to him: ‘Oh, are you Dr. J.
too? There was some one here this morning who said he was Dr.
J.’, we must interpret it as being an admission to this
effect: ‘You remind me now of a different member of the class
of my transferences from the one you reminded me of when you
visited me last.’

  
²
Otto Rank (1909) has found the same process
at work in the formation of myths.

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2422

   If we pursue this train of
thought, which seems to be a legitimate one, we shall be driven to
the conclusion that the other person must have been his father;
this makes it all the clearer that Flechsig must have stood for his
brother - who, let us hope, may have been older than himself.¹
The feminine phantasy, which aroused such violent opposition in the
patient, thus had its root in a longing, intensified to an erotic
pitch, for his father and brother. This feeling, so far as it
referred to his brother, passed, by a process of transference, on
to his doctor, Flechsig; and when it was carried back on to his
father a settlement of the conflict was reached.

   We shall not feel that we have
been justified in thus introducing Schreber’s father into his
delusions, unless the new hypothesis shows itself of some use to us
in understanding the case and in elucidating details of the
delusions which are as yet unintelligible. It will be recalled that
Schreber’s God and his relations to Him exhibited the most
curious features: how they showed the strangest mixture of
blasphemous criticism and mutinous insubordination on the one hand
and of reverent devotion on the other. God, according to him, had
succumbed to the misleading influence of Flechsig: He was incapable
of learning anything by experience, and did not understand living
men because He only knew how to deal with corpses; and He
manifested His power in a succession of miracles which, striking
though they might be, were none the less futile and silly.

 
 
¹
No information
on this point is to be found in the
Denkwürdigkeiten
.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2423

   Now the father of
Senatspräsident Dr. Schreber was no insignificant person. He
was the Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber whose memory is kept
green to this day by the numerous Schreber Associations which
flourish especially in Saxony; and, moreover, he was a
physician
. His activities in favour of promoting the
harmonious upbringing of the young, of securing co-ordination
between education in the home and in the school, of introducing
physical culture and manual work with a view to raising the
standards of health - all this exerted a lasting influence upon his
contemporaries.¹ His great reputation as the founder of
therapeutic gymnastics in Germany is still shown by the wide
circulation of his
Ärtzliche Zimmergymnastik
in medical
circles and the numerous editions through which it has passed.

   Such a father as this was by no
means unsuitable for transfiguration into a God in the affectionate
memory of the son from whom he had been so early separated by
death. It is true that we cannot help feeling that there is an
impassable gulf between the personality of God and that of any
human being, however eminent he may be. But we must remember that
this has not always been so. The gods of the peoples of antiquity
stood in a closer human relationship to them. The Romans used to
deify their dead emperors as a matter of routine; and the Emperor
Vespasian, a sensible and competent man, exclaimed when he was
first taken ill: ‘Alas! Methinks I am becoming a
God!’²

  
¹
I have to thank my colleague Dr. Stegmann
of Dresden for his kindness in letting me see a copy of a journal
entitled
Der Freund der Schreber-Vereine
[
The Friend of
the Schreber Associations
]. This number (Vol. II. No. 10)
celebrates the centenary of Dr. Schreber’s birth, and some
biographical data are contained in it. Dr. Schreber senior was born
in 1808 and died in 1861, at the age of only fifty-three. From the
source which I have already mentioned I know that our patient was
at that time nineteen years old.

  
² Suetonius,
Lives of the Caesars
, Book VIII, Chapter
23. This practice of deification began with Julius Caesar. Augustus
styled himself ‘
Divi filius
’ [‘the son of
the God’] in his inscriptions.

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2424

   We are perfectly familiar with
the infantile attitude of boys towards their father; it is composed
of the same mixture of reverent submission and mutinous
insubordination that we have found in Schreber’s relation to
his God, and is the unmistakable prototype of that relation, which
is faithfully copied from it. But the circumstance that
Schreber’s father was a physician, and a most eminent
physician, and one who was no doubt highly respected by his
patients, is what explains the most striking characteristics of his
God and those upon which he dwells in such a critical fashion.
Could more bitter scorn be shown for such a physician than by
declaring that he understands nothing about living men and only
knows how to deal with corpses? No doubt it is an essential
attribute of God to perform miracles; but a physician performs
miracles too; he effects miraculous cures, as his enthusiastic
clients proclaim. So that when we see that these very miracles (the
material for which was provided by the patient’s
hypochondria) turn out to be incredible, absurd, and to some extent
positively silly, we are reminded of the assertion in my
Interpretation of Dreams
that absurdity in dreams expresses
ridicule and derision.¹ Evidently, therefore, it is used for
the same purposes in paranoia. As regards some of the other
reproaches which he levelled against God, such, for instance, as
that He learned nothing by experience, it is natural to suppose
that they are examples of the
tu quoque
mechanism used by
children,² which, when they receive a reproof, flings it back
unchanged upon the person who originated it. Similarly, the voices
give us grounds for suspecting that the accusation of soul-murder
brought against Flechsig was in the first instance a
self-accusation.³

  
¹
p. 891
.

  
²
It looks remarkably like a
revanche
of this sort when we find the patient writing out the following
memorandum one day: ‘
Any attempt at exercising an
educative influence must be abandoned as hopeless
.’
(188.) The uneducable one was God.

  
³
‘Whereas for some time past the facts
have been deliberately inverted and an attempt has been made to
"represent" myself as being the one who practises
soul-murder . . .’ etc. (23).

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2425

   Emboldened by the discovery that
his father’s profession helps to explain the peculiarities of
Schreber’s God, we shall now venture upon an interpretation
which may throw some light upon the remarkable structure of that
Being. The heavenly world consisted, as we know, of the
‘anterior realms of God’ which were also called the
‘fore-courts of Heaven’ and which contained the souls
of the dead, and of the ‘lower’ and the
‘upper’ God, who together constituted the
‘posterior realms of God’ (19). Although we must be
prepared to find that there is a condensation here which we shall
not be able to resolve, it is nevertheless worth while referring to
a clue that is already in our hands. If the ‘miracled’
birds, which have been shown to be girls, were originally
fore-courts of Heaven, may it not be that the
anterior
realms of God and the fore-courts¹ of Heaven are to be
regarded as a symbol of what is female, and the
posterior
realms of God as a symbol of what is male? If we knew for certain
that Schreber’s dead brother was older than himself, we might
suppose that the decomposition of God into the lower and the upper
God gave expression to the patient’s recollection that after
his father’s early death his elder brother had stepped into
his place.

   In this connection, finally, I
should like to draw attention to the subject of the
sun
,
which, through its ‘rays’, came to have so much
importance in the expression of his delusions. Schreber has a quite
peculiar relation to the sun. It speaks to him in human language,
and thus reveals itself to him as a living being, or as the organ
of a yet higher being lying behind it (9). We learn from a medical
report that at one time he ‘used to shout threats and abuse
at it and positively bellow at it’ (382)² and used to
call out to it that it must crawl away from him and hide. He
himself tells us that the sun turns pale before him.³ The
manner in which it is bound up with his fate is shown by the
important alterations it undergoes as soon as changes begin to
occur in him, as, for instance, during his first weeks at
Sonnenstein (135). Schreber makes it easy for us to interpret this
solar myth of his. He identifies the sun directly with God,
sometimes with the lower God (Ahriman),
⁴
and sometimes with the upper.
‘On the following day . . . I saw the upper
God (Ormuzd), and this time not with my spiritual eyes but with my
bodily ones. It was the sun, but not the sun in its ordinary
aspect, as it is known to all men; it
was . . .’ etc. (137-8.) It is therefore no
more than consistent of him to treat it in the same way as he
treats God Himself.