Paper read at the 17th International Psycho-Analytical Congress, Amsterdam, July 1951.
This paper is a sequel to the one which Maurits Katan read at the 16th International Psycho-Analytic Congress, Zurich in 1949. See Hallucinations about the ‘Little Men’ : August 1949 (Zürich) : Maurits Katan at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan or Index of Authors’ texts)
Published International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol 33, (1952) p429-432
Available www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Authors A-Z (Katan)
Referred to by Jacques Lacan
In Seminar III The Psychoses (1955-1956) : from 16th November 1955 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19551116 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Seminar III : 14th December 1955 : p61 of Russell Grigg’s translation :
Let it be clearly understood that we shall have to proceed methodically, step by step, not leaving out any detail on the pretext that a superficial analogy with a mechanism of neurosis is apparent. In short, we shall do nothing of what is so often done in the literature.
A certain Katan, for example, who has taken a special interest in the Schreber case, takes it for granted that the origin of his psychosis is to be located in his struggle against threatening masturbation provoked by his homosexual erotic investments upon the character who formed the prototype and at the same time the nucleus of his persecutory system, namely, Professor Flechsig. [Footnote 1]This is supposed to have driven President Schreber so far as to under- mine reality, that is to say, to reconstruct, after a short period of twilight of the world,[Footnote 2]a new, unreal world, in which he didn’t have to give in to this masturbation that was thought to be so threatening. Don’t we all feel that a mechanism of this kind, while it’s true that it enters into play in the neuroses at a certain point of their articulation, would here be having altogether disproportionate results?
President Schreber gives a very clear account of the first phases of his psychosis. And when he testifies that between the first psychotic attack, a phase called, not without foundation, prepsychotic, and the progressive establishment of the psychotic phase, at the height of the stabilization of which he wrote his work, he had a fantasy which was expressed in these words, that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.[Footnote 3]
Footnote 1 : See Maurits Katan, “Schreber’s Delusion of the End of the World,” “Schreber’s Hallucinations about the ‘Little Men,’ ” “Further Remarks about Schreber’s Hallucinations,” (this paper) and “Schreber’s Prepsychotic Phase.” See below for availability or this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan or Index of Authors’ texts)
Footnote 2 : “le crispuscule du monde,” “Wehuntergang,” translated as the end of the world in Schreber’s Memoirs. See Memoirs of my nervous illness : 1903 : Daniel Paul Schreber on this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Schreber or Index of Other Authors’ text)
Footnote 3 : Memoirs p36 in German version : p63 in Ida Macalpine & Richard A. Hunter’s translation : Ch IV Personal experiences during the first and the beginning of the second nervous illness. See this site /5 Other Authors’ A-Z (Schreber or Index of Other Authors’ texts)
Seminar III : 25th January 1956 : p102 of Russell Grigg’s translation :
I shall return to one of the authors who have spoken in the greatest detail about the question of the psychoses, namely, Katan. He emphasizes the notion of defence. But I don’t want to proceed by means of commentaries on commentaries. We have to start with the book, as Freud recommends.
Seminar III : 25th January 1956 : p104-105 of Russell Grigg’s translation :
Delusions are indeed legible, but they are also transcribed into another register. In neurosis, one always remains inside the symbolic order, with this duality of signifier and signified that Freud translates as the neurotic compromise. Delusions occur in a completely different register. They are legible, but there is no way out. How does this come about? This is the economic problem that remains open at the time Freud completes the Schreber case.
I’m making some large claims. In the case of the neuroses the repressed reappears in loco where it was repressed, that is, in the very midst of symbols, insofar as man as agent and actor integrates himself into them and participates in them. The repressed reappears in loco beneath a mask. The repressed in psychosis, if we know how to read Freud, reappears in another place, in altero, in the imaginary, without a mask. This is quite clear, it’s neither new nor heterodox, it just has to be appreciated that this is the main point. This is far from being a settled issue at the time Freud puts the last full stop to his Schreber study. On the contrary, this is where the difficulties begin to appear.
Others have tried to pick up where Freud left off. Read Katan for example, who tries to give us an analytic theory of schizophrenia in volume five of the collection, Psychoanalysis of the Child.[A reference to Structural Aspects of a Case of Schizophrenia : 1950 : Maurits Katan : The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 5 : p175-211, See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan)] Read it and you will see very clearly the path that analytic theory has taken.
In Freud the question of the subject’s centre always remains open. In the analysis of paranoia, for example, he proceeds step by step to show the evolution of an essentially libidinal disturbance, a complex play of an aggregate of transferable, transmutable desires, which may regress, and the centre of this entire dialectic is still problematic for us.
Seminar III : 11th April 1956 : p190-192 of Russell Grigg’s translation :
Freud gave powerful expression, in the text on Schreber we’re working on among others, to the radical distinction between passional conviction and delusional conviction. The former depends upon the projection of intentions. It is, for example, jealousy where I’m jealous of my own feelings in the other, where it’s my own drives to be unfaithful that I impute to the other. As to the second, Freud formulates it thus, that what has been rejected from within reappears without, or again, as one tries to say in an expanded form, that [p191] what has been suppressed in the idea reappears in the real. But what does this mean, exactly?
In neurosis, too, we see this action of the drive and its consequences. Doesn’t this formulation leave something to be desired, something confused, defective, even absurd? Every author confines himself to this formulation, and in putting it to you in this form, I wasn’t wanting to contribute anything original. I think I can find someone among you to help me look more closely at the works in which Katan has tried to grasp the mechanism of psychotic neo-formation. You will observe what an extraordinary dead-end he arrives at, from which he escapes only at the price of contradictory formulations. This testifies to the conceptual difficulties one is committed to if one confuses, however slightly, the notion of reality with that of objectivity, or even with that of meaning, if one moves away from a reality distinct from the test of the real, from a reality in the sentiment of the real.
An entire phenomenological supposition, which extends well beyond the field of psychoanalysis and holds sway there only insofar as it equally holds sway elsewhere, is based on confusing the realm of meaningfulness with the realm of meaning. Proceeding from works that are extremely rigorous elaborations upon the function of the signifier, supposedly psychological phenomenology slides into the realm of meaning. This is its basic point of confusion. It’s led towards it like a dog on a scent, and, like the dog, this will never lead it to any kind of scientific result.
You know the would-be opposition between Erklaren [JE : probably to explain or account for]and Verstehen[JE : probably to understand, to interpret, to see].Here we must maintain that the only scientific structure is where there is Erklaren. Verstehen opens onto all kinds of confusion. Erklaren doesn’t at all imply mechanical meaning or anything else of that order. The nature of Erklaren lies in the recourse to the signifier as the sole foundation of all conceivable scientific structuration.
At the beginning of the Schreber case we find a period of disorder, of fertile moment. It presents a whole set of symptoms which, because it has generally been hidden away or, more exactly, because it has slipped through our fingers, has been unable to be elucidated analytically and is most of the time only reconstructed. Now, in reconstructing it we can discover, with very few exceptions, what appear to be the meanings and mechanisms we see at work in neurosis. There is nothing that more closely resembles a neurotic symptomatology than a pre-psychotic symptomatology. Once the diagnosis has been made, we are told that one finds that the unconscious is displayed on the outside, that everything belonging to the id has passed into the external world, and that the meanings in play are so clear that we are precisely unable to intervene analytically.
This is the classical position, and it still has some value. The paradox it contains has escaped nobody, but all the reasons that have been advanced to [p192] explain it are of a tautological or contradictory character. They are super-structurations of totally absurd hypotheses. It suffices to take an interest in analytic literature as a symptom to realize this.
Where does it spring from? From the fact that the world of objects is in some way affected, captured, induced, by a meaning in relation with drives characteristic of the psychoses? Is the construction of an external world distinctive of the psychoses? However, if there is any way of equally defining neurosis, this is it. When do we decide that the subject has crossed over the limits, that he is delusional?
Take the pre-psychotic period. Our President Schreber is living out something in the nature of perplexity. He gives us in living form this question that I was saying lies at the bottom of every form of neurosis. He is prey to strange forebodings – he indicates this to us after the event. He is abruptly invaded by this image which would seem to be the least likely to enter the mind of a man of his kind and his style, that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse. This is a period of confusion and panic.
How are we to locate the border between this moment of confusion and the point at which his delusion ended with the construction that he was in actual fact a woman, and not just any woman, but the divine woman, or more exactly God’s fiancée? Is there anything here that is sufficient for locating the onset of psychosis? Certainly not, Katan reports a case that he saw declare itself at a much earlier period than Schreber’s, and about which he was able to form a direct idea, having come onto the scene at the turning point of the case.[Footnote 3] It was the case of a youth at the age of puberty, whose whole pre-psychotic period the author analyses very well, while conveying the idea that there was nothing in this subject of the order of accession to anything that would realize in him the virile type. Everything failed. And while he did try to conquer the typically virile attitude, it was by means of imitation, of a latching on, following the example of one of his friends. Like him and following him, he engaged in the first sexual maneuvers of puberty, namely masturbation, which he subsequently renounced under the injunction of the said friend, and he began to identify with him for a whole series of exercises that were called exercises of self-conquest. He behaved as if he were at the mercy of a severe father, which was the case with his friend. Like him, he became interested in a girl who, as if by chance, was the same one his friend was interested in. And once this identification with his friend has gone quite a way, the young girl will readily fall into his arms.
Here we obviously find the as if mechanism that Mrs. Helene Deutsch has stressed as being a significant dimension in the symptomatology of the schizophrenias. [Footnote 4] It’s a mechanism of imaginary compensation – you can verify the usefulness of the distinction between the three registers – for the absent Oedipus complex, which would have given him virility in the form, not of the paternal image, but of the signifier, the name of the father.
Once the psychosis has broken out, the subject will conduct himself in the same way as before, as an unconscious homosexual.
Footnote 3 : See “Structural Aspects of a Case of Schizophrenia” : 1950 : Maurits Katan : The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 5 : p175-211
& Schreber’s Prepsychotic Phase : 1953 : Maurits Katan – see end for availability or See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan or Index of Authors’ texts)
Footnote 4 : Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia (‘as if’ case) : 1942 : Helene Deutsch. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Deutsch or Index of Authors’ texts)
Seminar III : 18th April 1956 : p203-204 of Russell Grigg’s translation :
To designate it we’ve made do until now with the term Verwerfung.
This may lead to more than one conflict, but it isn’t essentially a matter of conflicting constellations which in neurosis are explained by a significant decompensation. In psychosis it’s the signifier that is in question, and as the signifier is never solitary, as it invariably forms something coherent – this is the very meaningfulness of the signifier – the lack of one signifier necessarily brings the subject to the point of calling the set of signifiers into question.
Here you have the fundamental key to the problems of the beginning of psychosis, the sequence of its stages, and its meaning.
In fact, the terms in which these questions are usually framed imply what I’m telling you. A Katan, for example, states that hallucination is a mode of defence like any other. [Footnote 6] He’s aware, however, that there are phenomena here which though very closely related are different – the certainty of meaning without content, which may simply be called interpretation, is, effectively, different from hallucination properly so-called. He explains the two by mechanisms designed to protect the subject according to another mode than the one in operation in the neuroses. In the neuroses it’s meaning that temporarily disappears, is eclipsed, and goes and lodges itself somewhere else, whereas reality itself remains. Such defences are inadequate in the case of psychosis, where what is to protect the subject appears in reality. The subject places outside what may stir up inside him the instinctual drive that he has to confront.
It’s obvious that the term reality as it’s used here is totally inadequate. Why [p204] not have the courage to say that the mechanism being appealed to is the id – since it’s considered to have the power to modify and disturb what one may call the truth of the thing?
According to this explanation it’s a matter of the subject’s protecting him- self against homosexual temptations. Nobody has ever gone on to say – Schreber less so than anyone else – that all of a sudden he could no longer see people, that the very face of his male counterparts was, by the hand of eternal God, covered with a cloak.
Footnote 6 : See “Schreber’s Hallucinations about the ‘Little Men.’ ” : August 1949 (Zurich) : Maurits Katan – see end for availability or this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan or Index of Other Authors’ texts)
Seminar III : 25th April 1956 : p211-212
We shall come back to the existence of the souls who are the support of the sentences that constantly include the subject in their turmoil. They waste away with time, down to these famous little men that have greatly attracted the attention of analysts. Katan, in particular, devotes an article to these little men who have been the occasion for all sorts of more or less ingenious interpretations, such as assimilating them to spermatozoa that the subject, having rejected masturbation at a certain point, refuses to lose. [Footnote 4] There is no need to reject such an interpretation but, even if we allow it, it doesn’t exhaust the problem. [p212]
The important thing is that it involves regressive characters who have returned to their original procreative cell. Katan seems to have forgotten some very early works by Silberer, who was the first to speak of dreams in which there occur certain images of spermatozoa or of the primitive female cell of the ovum.[Footnote 5] At that time, which may be regarded as archaic, Silberer had nevertheless observed perfectly well that it is above all a question of grasping what the function played by these images was, whether they were fantasized or oneiric. It’s moreover curious to see someone, in 1908, take into consideration the notion of what these images signify. According to him, their appearance has a meaning of mortality. It’s a question of a return to origins. It’s equivalent to a manifestation of the death instinct. We can see this clearly in the present case since the little men occur in the context of the twilight of the world, a properly constitutive phase of the delusion’s development.
Be that as it may, on this occasion we’re unable to avoid wondering whether a certain incompleteness in the realization of the paternal function isn’t involved in Schreber’s case. Every author has in fact attempted to explain the onset of Schreber’s delusion with reference to the father. Not that Schreber was in conflict with his father at the time – he had disappeared a long time previously. Not that he was at a time of setback in acceding to paternal functions, since on the contrary he was entering a brilliant stage of his career and had been placed in a position of authority that seems to have solicited him to truly adopt a paternal position, to have offered him a support for idealizing and referring himself to this position. President Schreber’s delusion would therefore depend more on the giddiness of success than on a sense of failure. This is what the understanding generated by authors of the mechanism determining the psychosis revolves around, at least on the psychical level.
For my part, I would make three responses on the subject of the function of the father.
[Footnote 5 : See Herbert Silberer, “Zur Frage der Spermatozoeniraume,” “Spermato- zoentraume,” and “Zum Thema: Spermatozoentraume.”
Footnote 4 : See Katan, “Schreber’s Hallucinations about the ‘Little Men.’ ” See below for availability or this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Katan or Index of Other Authors’ texts).
References used by Maurits Katan
– P429 of Katan’s text : Quote : Whereas these visions occurred at night, I thought I could notice during the day the sun following my movements; if I walked to and fro in the one-windowed room which I occupied at the time, I could observe the sunshine corresponding to my movements, sometimes on the right wall, sometimes on the left wall … It is difficult for me to regard as an illusion of my senses this observation, which, as mentioned, I made during the daytime; the more so, as I remember calling this observation, which naturally horrified me, to the attention of Dr Tauscher, the assistant physicianm on the occasion of one of his visits’ : p70 of the German edition of Memoirs of my nervous illness : 1903 : Daniel Paul Schreber, see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Schreber) : Ch VI Personal experiences continued. Visions. “Seer of spirits’ : p84 of Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter’s translation
– p431 of Katan’s text : Quote : We see that the schizophrenic hallucination and the neurotic phobia have one trait in common : both are based on an anticipation of danger. The phobic anxiety is formed by the ego and, as described by Freud, serves the purpose of inhibiting further development in the direction of the danger. :
Note there is no reference given for this wild assertion! May be Lecture XXV : The Angst [Die Angst] : 1917 : Part III. General theory of the neuroses (1917) of SE XVI, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (1916-17). : Sigmund Freud : Notes, quotation & availability this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19150105)
–p431-432 of Katan : Quote : ‘In the second, inferior shape I must have, if I may yse the expression, quietly passed one day; I remember that I was lying in bed in a room which I cannot now recall as resembling any of the rooms familiar to me while at Flechsig’s Clinic and that I was clearly conscious of a gradual extinction of my soul – an experience, by the way, which was similar to a peaceful dozing across into death, except for depressing memories of my wife, of whom I thought much during those moments. On the other hand, there was a time when the souls who were in nerve-connection with me spoke of a plurality of heads (i.e. a number of individualities in the same head) which they encountered in me and from which they drew back, as though frightened, with the utterance, “Why, for heaven’s sake, that is a man with a number of heads!”’ : p72 & 73 of the German edition of Memoirs of my nervous illness : 1903 : D. P. Schreber. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Schreber or Index of Other Authors’ texts) : p86 of Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter’s translation, Ch VI Personal experiences continued. Visions. “Seer of spirits’
– p432 of Katan : Quote : Fortunately, in another chapter of his autobiography (Chapter VII, p81 of the German edition) Schreber gives an explanation of his death. He states that he remembers reading in a daily paper about the middle of March, 1894, an announcement of his own death. : p91 of Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter’s translation, Ch VII Personal experiences continued; peculiar manifestations of illness. Visions
Related texts
For details of commentaries & related texts, see Sigmund Freud’s examination of President Schreber’s Memoirs and related texts : 1st August 2024 (from 2nd September 2015), this site /Date (August of the current or last year) or /3 Sigmund Freud