Sigmund Freud PSYCHO-ANALYTIC NOTES ON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF PARANOIA (DEMENTIA PARANOIDES) [excerpts]
Preface
The analytic investigation of paranoia
presents difficulties of a peculiar nature to physicians who, like myself, are
not attached to public institutions. We cannot accept patients suffering from
this complaint, or, at all events, we cannot keep them for long... It is only
in exceptional circumstances, therefore, that I succeed in getting more than a
superficial view of the structure of paranoia... [O]f course, I see plenty of
cases of paranoia and of dementia praecox, and I learn as much about them as
other psychiatrists do about their cases; but that is not enough, as a rule, to
lead to any analytic conclusions.
The psycho-analytic investigation of
paranoia would be altogether impossible if the patients themselves did not
possess the peculiarity of betraying (in a distorted form, it is true)
precisely those things which other neurotics keep hidden as a secret. Since
paranoics... only say what they choose
to say, it follows that this is precisely a disorder in which a written report
or a printed case history can take the place of personal acquaintance with the
patient. For this reason I think it is
legitimate to base analytic
interpretations upon the case history of a patient suffering from paranoia (or,
more precisely, from dementia paranoides) whom I have never seen, but who has
written his own case history and brought it before the public in print.
I refer to Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber,
formerly Senatspräsident in Dresden, whose book, Denkwürdigkeiten eines
Nervenkranken [Memoirs of a Nerve Patient], was published in 1903, and, if I am
rightly informed, aroused considerable interest among psychiatrists. It is
possible that Dr. Schreber may still be living to-day and that he may have
dissociated himself so far from the delusional system which he put forward in
1903 as to be pained by these notes upon his book...
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