The Schreber Case - Sigmund Freud Introduction
Translator's Preface
The Schreber Case (Psychoanalytic Remarks on an
Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides))
[Introduction]
I. Case History
II. Attempts at Interpretation
III. On the Paranoid Mechanism
Postscript
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Moravia and lived
in Vienna between the ages of four and eighty-two. In 1938 Hitler's
invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he
died the following year. Freud's career began with several
years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the
nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study
under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology,
and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in
collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his
creation: psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating
neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew
into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in
general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to
demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in
childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams,
arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that
influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's life was
uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist
disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last
half-century.
Andrew Webber is a senior lecturer in the department of
German at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Churchill College.
He has published widely on German literature of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
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