Life Writing and Schizophrenia Encounters at The E... - (3 A Striking Similarity With Our Theory' Freud and Bateson Read Memoi... )

3
‘A Striking Similarity with our Theory’:

Freud and Bateson Read Memoirs of Schizophrenia
W
ithin mainstream psychiatry today narratives by those living
with schizophrenia are still rarely considered relevant to treat-
ment. The extent to which ‘talk therapy’ has been abandoned
as a treatment for schizophrenia is evident on the National Institute of
Mental Health website, where a long section on medications and their side
effects is followed by two short paragraphs on ‘psychosocial treatments’
designed to help patients deal with day to day life. A link to the ‘psycho-
therapies section’ leads the reader to a discussion of several forms of current
psychotherapy for various kinds of mental illnesses. In only one of these,
cognitive-behavioral therapy, is schizophrenia mentioned. The reader is
warned that ‘treating schizophrenia with CBT is challenging. The disorder
usually requires medication first. But research has shown that CBT, as an
add-on to medication, can help a patient cope with schizophrenia.’ The
other sections, on family-focussed therapy, interpersonal therapy, dialec-
tical behavior therapy, psychodynamic therapy (one of the shortest sec-
tions), and light therapy make no mention of schizophrenia in particular.1
On psychcentral.com, which is a site offering information on mental ill-
ness to the general public, the section on treatment of schizophrenia is
completely focussed on medications, their history, uses, and side effects.
No mention is made of patients’ perspectives on their illnesses or ways that
those perspectives might be relevant to treatment.2
In standard approaches to psychosis, narrative is represented as part
Copyright © 2013. BRILL. All rights reserved.
Wood, Mary Elene. Life Writing and Schizophrenia : Encounters at the Edge of Meaning, BRILL, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/emory/detail.action?docID=1581533.
Created from emory on 2021-07-19 16:04:02.
and parcel of the illness itself; disturbed narration is a sign of severe mental
illness and thus does not serve as communication or expression as does the
story-telling of unaffected individuals. In a discussion of narrative ethics in
the treatment of severe mental illness, Clive Baldwin points out that ‘the
supposed loss of narrativity on the part of people with severe mental illness
is perceived from outside as a loss of the self and a function of the par-
ticular mental illness, rather than the inability of current narrative theory
to encompass the experiences of madness.’3 Referring to Brendan Stone’s
point that the ‘being-states’ of madness ‘do not fit well with narrative’s
drive to organize and arrange experience’, Baldwin takes issue with the
ways that mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy threaten the ‘narrative
dispossession’ of those with severe mental illness.4
I think we can understand better the present-day tenacity of this ‘nar-
rative dispossession’ if we look closely at two important historical junctures
when psychological theorists grappled quite seriously with the stories of
writers with schizophrenia. In 1911 Sigmund Freud wrote an essay analyz-
ing the memoir of his contemporary Daniel Paul Schreber, a high-ranking
German judge who wrote in detail about his delusions and his efforts to
understand their meaning. Fifty years later, in 1961, British-American psy-
chologist Gregory Bateson wrote an introductory essay to a new edition
of the 19th-century memoir of John Perceval, who, like Schreber, had been
institutionalized because of paranoia and hallucinations. Both of these es-
says mark important moments in the engagement of psychiatric thought
with the narratives of those diagnosed as psychotic. In Freud’s case, his
examination of Schreber’s memoir was soon followed by his well-known
and influential declaration that psychoanalysis could not succeed when the
patient was psychotic. Bateson’s introduction to Perceval’s memoir marks
an important historical shift when psychiatric thought was evolving away
from patient narrative and towards a focus on neurological structures and
functions and the drugs that affect them. Both essays are illuminating be-
cause within them the dismissal of ‘schizophrenic patient’ narrative is not
yet a given; rather, such narrative is represented as a knot to be unravelled,
a puzzle that can be solved once it is retold within a wider, more coherent
narrative frame. We might say that both psychologists write to contain and
explain narratives that are in many ways uncontainable, that strain against
119
Mary Elene Wood
narrative coherence and continuity. As psychoanalyst and literary critic

C. Barry Chabot writes, ‘The interpretive narrative assumes the cohesion
of the individual life; its task is the rendering of the terms and particular
nature of that cohesion.’5
Significantly, both Freud and Bateson perform this work even at the
risk of psychiatric theory’s own dissolution. In other words, both Freud
and Bateson acknowledge to some extent that their own narrative encoun-
ter with writings by those diagnosed with psychosis threatens to undo the
coherence towards which narrative (whether theoretical or interpretive)
is always moving. The cost of such intimate narrative encounter is a real-
ization that interpretive and explanatory ‘stories’ can themselves manifest
paranoia in the sense, elaborated by Emil Kraepelin and adopted by Freud,
of a closed, unified system of linked associations centered on a set of de-
lusory ideas. Indeed, as I shall discuss below, by the end of his analysis of
Schreber’s ‘case’, Freud sees a connection between his own narratives of
psychic development and his observation, directed at Schreber’s Memoir,
that ‘the delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in
reality at attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.’ 6
In his 1962 ‘Introduction’ to Perceval’s Narrative: a Patient’s Account of
his Psychosis, 1830–1832, Gregory Bateson struggles to create a frame for
the narrative of eighteenth-century writer John Perceval, who wrote about
both his experience of severe mental illness and his institutionalization
in asylums. Bateson rediscovered Perceval’s memoir, which was then pub-
lished in London by Hogarth Press along with Bateson’s analytical intro-
duction. In its use of psychological theories to interpret the autobiographi-
cal narrative of an institutionalized patient reflecting on his experiences
with psychosis, the ‘Introduction’ echoes Sigmund Freud’s 1911 essay
‘Psycho-Analytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, which examines Daniel Paul Schreber’s
1902 rather inaccurately titled Memoirs of a Neurotic.7 The first English
translation (Alix and James Strachey) of Freud’s study of Schreber’s mem-
oir appeared in 1925 in Volume III of the Hogarth Press edition of Freud’s
Collected Papers, edited by Ernest Jones, M.D. as part of the International
Psycho-Analytical Library. Given that this volume went through numer-
ous printings and was the most widely-used English-language edition of
120
Freud’s works in the first half of the twentieth century, it is very likely
that Bateson was familiar with the Hogarth version of Freud’s analysis of
Schreber’s autobiography.Whether or not this was the case, the Hogarth
Collected Papers circulated among British and American psychologists and
psychiatrists, making Freud’s work an integral part of an evolving transat-
lantic dialogue even as American theorists and practitioners in particular
turned to behaviorism and eventually to neuropsychiatry over and against
psychoanalysis.8
In exploring the attempts of Freud and Bateson to analyze autobio-
graphical texts, I’m less interested in the validity of their interpretations or
their place in the evolution of each psychologist’s theories than in the ways
their various and shifting narrators grapple with the challenging stories
before them, stories that articulate psychosis. Freud’s Schreber essay in par-
ticular has been plumbed in depth by both psychoanalysts and historians
of psychiatry examining its place in the development of Freud’s theories of
narcissism, paranoia, repression, and the stages of psychical maturation.9
These studies have been invaluable in identifying the centrality of Freud’s
encounter with Schreber’s Memoir to his corpus as a whole and to psycho-
analytic theories that continue to evolve. Much work has been done also
on Schreber’s Memoir itself, most notably Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis
of the text as breaking the bounds of conventional, socially-dictated desire
(in Anti-Oedipus) and Zvi Lothane’s multi-layered reading in In Defense
of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry, which places the text in deeply
researched socio-historical context.10 It would be difficult to improve on
these complex readings of Schreber’s Memoir, readings that respect Schre-
ber as a writing subject despite his labelling as a mental patient. Yet less
attention has been given to Freud’s essay as narrative engaged in an en-
counter with another narrative, an encounter that locates itself at the edge
of the distinctions between neurosis and psychosis. It is this encounter that
I would like to examine.
Peter Brooks points out in a now classic article on Freud’s examina-
tion of the ‘Wolf Man’ case that Freud’s approach to case history reveals
elements of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with detective fiction,
with its search for beginnings and tracing of significant events that will
lead to the emergence of a coherent story. Brooks reflects that ‘in the case
121
Mary Elene Wood
of the Wolf Man, Freud will discover “detection” and its narrative to be
extraordinarily complex and problematic, like the plots of modernist fic-
tion, and indeed inextricably bound up with the fictional.’11 Brooks’s in-
sights (as well as Walter Fisher’s useful observation that myriad forms of
writing, including analytical essays, use and depend on narrative forms,
both explicit and implied) help call attention to the fact that Bateson’s and
Freud’s application of psychological theories to the interpretation of these
case history-memoirs is often undone by ambivalent, unsure, unreliable,
and shifting narrators.
As he examine the words of writers trying to understand his own psy-
chosis, each of these psychologists comes face to face with the potential
collapse of the house of cards that is his theoretical frame. In Freud’s case,
this threatened disintegration has a profound effect on his evolving con-
ception of psychosis as untreatable by psychoanalysis, a conception that
will be taken up and repeated as truth within American psychiatry. Freud’s
troubled examination of Schreber’s narrative reverberates throughout the
fragmented analysis that Bateson created in his introduction sixty years
later. Bateson struggles to find a way to both respect and analyze Perceval’s
story of his mental disintegration and institutionalization; in doing so, he
is repeatedly challenged, as was Freud before him, by the narrative he seeks
to interpret.
Each of these essays, Freud’s and Bateson’s, marks a crucial moment
in the history of psychiatry’s engagement with psychosis. Freud’s essay on
Schreber’s memoir signals the beginning of the end of psychoanalytic at-
tempts to treat schizophrenic narrative as an interpretable text. In turn,
Bateson’s introduction to Perceval’s narrative represents the end of the be-
ginning of American psychiatry’s attention to the stories of those diag-
nosed as psychotic. The work of Bateson and other mid-twentieth-century
psychologists and psychiatrists studying narratives of schizophrenia would
rapidly be supplanted by neurological theories focussed on chemical imbal-
ances in the brain. The cost of this retreat would be psychiatry’s confronta-
tion with its own frailties and illusory worlds. Without this confrontation,
which both Freud and Bateson paid for by allowing the emergence in their
work of a kind of productive bafflement, the patient–other’s story falls away
before the larger psychiatric narratives that explain and contain it.
122
Sigmund Freud and psychosis
In popular understandings of schizophrenia and other forms of psycho-

sis, reference is often made to Freud’s distinction between neurosis and
psychosis and the associated idea that while neurosis is treatable by psy-
choanalysis, psychosis is beyond the reach of the analyst’s skill. While
American psychiatry and psychology have always taken a skeptical view of
Freud’s theoretical work, increasingly so over the last fifty years, favoring
behavioral and neurochemical understandings of mental illness rather than
the exploration of complex psychological mechanisms, Freud’s distinction
between psychosis and more benign forms of mental illness has not only
been widely accepted in the field but has entered popular understandings
of mental illness. For example, in the 2010 third edition of the widely-used
textbook Psychological Science, the authors write,
In the early 1900s, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and treatments based

on it were widely touted as the answer to many mental disorders. Even
Freud, however, admitted that his techniques were effective only for what
he termed ‘neuroses’ and were unlikely to benefit patients with more severe
psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.12
While it’s true enough that Freud decided psychosis was untreatable,
he did so somewhat late in his career, in the well-known 1914 essay ‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’. Yet this pronouncement can be read in the
light of the fact that Freud repeatedly called into question the usefulness
of psychoanalysis in general not only for psychosis but for any form of
mental illness, including the various forms of neurosis that he had spent
most of his previous career identifying. It would be fair to say that he at
times became discouraged by a lack of clear results and placed what faith
he had less in the theory and practice of analysis than in his work on The
Interpretation of Dreams and his skill as a reader of images and metaphors.
As early as 1897, Freud wrote to his good friend Wilhelm Fliess that ‘I no
longer believe in my neurotica’, complaining of ‘the continual disappoint-
ment in my efforts to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion’.73 Refer-
ring to his crisis of belief in his own theories of neurosis and its treatment,
123
Mary Elene Wood
Freud remarks that ‘in this collapse of everything valuable…the dream

[book] stands entirely secure and my beginnings of the metapsychological
work have only grown in my estimation’. The 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’,
in which he rejects previous claims to being able to treat schizophrenia
(or ‘paraphrenia’, as he preferred to call it),13 in a sense marks the fact that
Freud went through periods of expressing skepticism about his own clini-
cal methods, skepticism which would often include much of his clinical
work, not only that directed at psychosis.
Yet earlier in his career Freud expressed a great deal of optimism about
the possibilities of using psychoanalysis to treat more severe mental illness.
In 1895 (‘The Defence Neuro-Psychoses’) Freud described the beginnings
of his theory of the return of the repressed, in which painful suppressed
memories barred from the conscious mind returned in various symptom
formations. Working from his experiences (as well as those of collaborator
Josef Breuer) with ‘hysterical’ patients, he described a failed ‘forgetting’
that eventually ‘led to various pathological reactions, giving rise either to
hysteria, or to an obsession, or to an hallucinatory psychosis’.14 While, as
Colin McCabe points out, Freud did not have much actual experience
working with psychotic patients, he did see neurosis, hysteria and more
severe forms of mental pathology as originating in the same psychic pro-
cesses.15
Freud explains that hysteria is the result of what he calls ‘conversion’,
in which traumatic experiences are removed from the conscious mind,
their unbearable content transposed by the ego into a bodily manifesta-
tion, so that ‘the ego succeeds in resolving the incompatibility within itself;
but instead it has burdened itself with a memory-symbol, which dwells in
consciousness, like a sort of parasite, either in the form of a persistent mo-
tor innervation or else as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation,
and remains until a reversion takes place in the opposite direction.’16 The
more unbearable the memory of trauma, the more intensive the conver-
sion, to the point that ‘the ego rejects the unbearable idea together with its
associated affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the person
at all’. In this case, ‘the person in question will have developed a psychosis,
and his state can only be described as one of “hallucinatory confusion”.’17
Freud follows this claim with a case description in which a young girl who
124
has lost touch with reality regains her bearings once an original trauma
is discovered through hypnosis, the method favored by both Freud and
Breuer during that time. According to Freud, the ‘psychosis, which at the
time of its occurrence had been unintelligible, was explained ten years later
with the aid of an hypnotic analysis.’18
In 1896 Freud returned to the topic in ‘Further Remarks on the De-
fence of the Neuro-Psychoses’ in an attempt to strengthen his and Breuer’s
claims and validate ‘the toilsome but completely reliable method of psy-
cho-analysis which I use in making these investigations’.19 During these
years, Freud used his clinical work to develop his theories of the uncon-
scious in a direction that would gradually move him away from hypnosis
therapy towards psychoanalytic treatment based in conversation with the
patient and interpretation of patient narrative. In his 1896 discussion of
the case of Frau P., who suffered from auditory and visual hallucinations,
Freud writes,
The voices therefore owed their origin to the repression of thoughts which,
if followed to their conclusion, really signified self-reproaches in regard to
experiences which had a significance analogous to that of the trauma in
childhood; they were accordingly symptoms of the return of the repressed,
at the same time, however, a compromise between the resistance of the
ego and the strength of the idea under repression, which in this case had
brought about an absolutely unrecognizable distortion.20
The contrast between Freud’s early hopefulness about using psychoanalysis

to treat such severe symptoms and his later abandonment of this approach
for treating psychosis is apparent in the 1922 note he addended to this
case, in which he remarks that Frau P. later deteriorated and was institu-
tionalized ‘having all the signs of dementia praecox’.21 At this early point,
however, he fully believed that the same approach used for anxiety or ob-
sessiveness could work for delusions and hallucinations.
In these early studies of the mechanisms of repression and conversion,
studies in which his theory of the psyche developed alongside psycho-
analysis as a method of treatment, Freud paid particular attention to the
patient’s own words, to his or her story of illness and struggle. His growing
125
Mary Elene Wood
conviction that his job was that of interpreter, knowledgeable reader of

patient stories, dreams, and memories, placed him in the somewhat para-
doxical position in relation to the other, his patient. Feminist readers of
Freud have insightfully questioned his attempts to coopt and manipulate
women’s stories of their lives and troubles (particularly in the case of Dora’s
‘hysteria’), interpreting their symptoms as signs of fraught sexuality and
failing to account adequately for either the analyst’s or the female patient’s
internalization of gender hierarchies.22 We can see this kind of forced inter-
pretation, and what Toril Moi calls ‘epistemological phallocentrism’,23 in
the case of Frau P. in which, for example, Freud states, ‘I then succeeded in
inducing her to reproduce the various scenes in which the sexual relations
with her brother had culminated.’24 He clearly already has in mind an
interpretation of her paranoia based in her childhood incestuous relations
with her brother, and once he decides on this cause and effect relationship
her words become ‘evidence’, all the more so when she denies or evades his
interpretation. Freud’s overriding of the patient’s reading of feelings and
events led in part to Susan Sontag’s statement ‘against interpretation’, in
which she indicts the process of interpretation as cooptation and rewriting
of the original story, an act that ‘digs “behind” the text, to find a subtext
which is the true one’.25
Yet, at the same time, reading Freud’s exegesis of Frau P.’s case from
where we stand now, in an age when severe mental illness is invariably ap-
proached as being without story and without interpretation, it’s difficult
not to appreciate the seriousness with which he took the patient’s words,
even as we might acknowledge that he distorts and appropriates them.
He thus listens closely to her account of ‘the first time that she heard the
voices’, which occurred when, on becoming absorbed in a novel, she ‘had
noticed that while reading thoughts kept creeping into her mind.’26 While
not always quoting her exactly here, Freud seems to be working from pre-
cise notes taken while she was talking about her experiences. Part of his
therapeutic approach requires such attention to detail—the name of the
novel, the exact words she said to herself as she walked ‘along a country
road’ after she was done reading, when exactly she started to hear voices
speaking passages of the book to her—so that, however Freud may be
distorting the original story, he nevertheless interweaves Frau P.’s narrative
126
with his own, providing not only an interpretation of her words but frag-
ments of her own account. The result is a multivocal narrative in which the
psychologist’s voice alternates between interpretive intrusion and retreat to
make way for the voice of the patient–other. Frau P.’s subjectivity emerges,
if sporadically. Freud’s finding of continuity between neuroses and the in-
tense hallucinatory paranoia experienced by Frau P. furthers the idea that
she is a thinking, feeling subject ontologically identical to a non-psychotic
subject. Even as Freud continued to develop the idea that those suffering
from paranoia and other more severe forms of dementia praecox were sub-
ject to a significant difference in their psychic development (in which they
failed to progress to the next phase of maturation), his system did not posit
a distinct ontological status for patients in psychosis.
Freud deepens this approach as well as his insistence that psychoanaly-
sis can help unravel the mysteries of psychosis in his 1911 interpretation of
Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 Memoirs of a Neurotic. Schreber’s account had
already been analyzed by C. G. Jung in 1907 as a work of interpretation
that Freud admired. In fact, Jung had gone far in his 1907 text The Psy-
chology of Dementia Praecox in attempting to explore in depth this disease
(soon to be called ‘schizophrenia’ more widely, after Eugen Bleuler’s new
terminology), its subsets (such as catatonia, hebephrenia, and paranoia),
its distinction from hysteria, and its possible treatments, which depended
largely on the analyst’s interpretive abilities and an understanding of the
relationship between conscious and unconscious processes described by
Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900. Foreshadowing
Freud’s work on Schreber’s memoir, in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,
Jung analyzed in depth the language of a young woman beset by fears and
hallucinations, unable to distinguish dream-like perception from reality.
In Jung’s analysis, this patient, overcome by her illness, speaks in such
a way that ‘it makes no difference to her whether she expresses an opta-
tive in the present or in the imperfect tense; she talks just like a dream.
This peculiarity of dreams has been pointed out by Freud. Her dreamlike,
condensed, disconnected manner of speaking is in clear agreement with
this fact.’27 In their 1909 translation of Jung’s text, Frederick Peterson and
A.A. Brill underscore the connections between Jung’s interpretations of
psychotic language and Freud’s developing theories of the unconscious and
127
Mary Elene Wood
dreams, going so far as to say that ‘the complexes as developed by Jung

are identical with the dissociated psychic groups described by Freud. Just
as the complexes dominate our thoughts and actions, so do the repressed
psychic groups assert themselves symbolically not only in pathological
but also in normal individuals.’28 For Jung, as for Freud, it was crucial to
understand psychosis as rooted in mechanisms of the psyche; both psy-
choanalysts struggled against the biological psychiatry of the time, which
focussed, as biological psychiatry does today, on neurobiological brain
structure and function. Rejecting the widely held idea that purely physical
processes caused catatonia, for example, Jung invokes Freud to argue,
We know that the normal psychic series develops under the constant influ-
ence of countless psychological constellations of which we are as a rule un-
conscious. Why should this fundamental psychological law suddenly cease
to apply in catatonia? Is it because the ideational content of the catatonic
is foreign to his consciousness? But is it not the same in our dreams? Yet
no one will assert that dreams originate so to speak directly from the cells
without psychological constellations. Anyone who has analysed dreams ac-
cording to Freud’s method knows what an enormous influence these con-
stellations have.29
Following Jung’s taxonomy of dementia praecox and related disorders,

Freud labeled Schreber’s illness as ‘dementia paranoides’, claiming that
his ongoing paranoid state had evolved ‘from the initial acute psychosis,
which had directly involved the patient’s entire mental life and deserved
the name of “hallucinatory insanity”’.30 Freud distinguishes Schreber’s
paranoia, which centered on a delusional system of rays, divine beings,
and a communicative God who had chosen Schreber as his female con-
sort, from dementia praecox proper, which had a deteriorating course and
affected all the patient’s ideas. Like Jung, Freud approaches Schreber as
an intelligent equal (he was a higher court judge), granting respect to the
patient’s narrative position even as Freud locates himself as interpreter able
to garner the true source and meaning of Schreber’s reported delusional
ideas. In his preface to the interpretation, Freud quotes Schreber’s own
account of himself as ‘a man of superior mental gifts and endowed with
128
an unusual keenness alike of intellect and of observation’, remarking in a

footnote on the accuracy of ‘this piece of self-portraiture, which is very far
from being unjustified’.31
Furthermore, noting the tendency of ‘paranoics’ to reveal themselves
‘(in a distorted form, it is true)’, Freud grants validity to the act of analyz-
ing a text rather than a living person ‘whom I have never seen, but who has
written his own case history and brought it before the public in print’.32
Freud assumes a continuity between the oral narrative of a present per-
son and the written narrative of someone he has never met. Each offers a
story to be interpreted. The inclusion of the essay on Schreber’s memoir
among the standard five case histories corroborates this blurring of the
line between patient and text, underscoring the belief, reiterated by C.
Barry Chabot (himself an analyst and literary critic) in his 1982 analysis
of Freud’s essay, that ‘all interpretation, whether of individual texts or of
patients, is essentially a textual exercise; understanding strings of words,
with their metaphors and their sequence word-after-word, is the objective
of both; both can only do so within the securing context of a psychological
theory that explicated the relationships of those words to their speaker and
to one another.’33
Freud presents himself as the interpreter par excellence because, like
Schreber, he is ‘a man of superior mental gifts and endowed with an un-
usual keenness alike of intellect and of observation’, a description that in a
sense stands in for Freud’s somewhat truncated argument for the validity
of his own study. More even than in the case of Frau P., Freud interweaves
his narrative with that of Schreber, promoting his interpretation as supe-
rior even as he admits to large gaps in his knowledge and understanding
(he doesn’t return to the patient to fill in the text as he would if Schreber
were actually his current patient).34 He further validates his analysis by cit-
ing Schreber’s own invitation to be read and analyzed, apparent in the wish
he expresses that ‘during my lifetime, qualified authorities were enabled to
undertake some examination of my body and to hold some inquiry into
my personal experiences.’35 Freud further underscores his foregrounding of
Schreber’s own narrative by insisting that he quotes verbatim from the text
and by urging his readers ‘to make themselves acquainted with the book by
reading it through at least once beforehand’.36
129
Mary Elene Wood
Freud’s emphasis on story runs counter in early twentieth-century

European and American psychiatry on the one hand to more behaviorist
approaches, which privilege the patient’s ability to function in the world
(which Schreber comes to do quite well) over psychic mechanisms revealed
through language, and on the other to the biological approaches that Jung
argued against in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. Indeed, the years
leading up to Freud’s publication of his essay on Schreber’s memoir were
marked by the ongoing and often fruitless efforts of psychoanalysts to
garner respect at such professional gatherings as the 1910 meeting of the
Swiss Society of Alienists, the 1911 Budapest Society of Physicians, and
the 1911 International Congress of Medical Psychology and Psychothera-
py.37 Not surprisingly, Freud moves directly from a summary of Schreber’s
memoir to a criticism of behaviorist approaches, in which ‘the interest felt
by the practical psychiatrist in such delusional formations as these is, as a
rule, exhausted when once he has ascertained the character of the products
of the delusion and has formed an estimate of their influence upon the pa-
tient’s general behaviour: in his case astonishment is not the birth of com-
prehension.’38 In contrast, the psychoanalyst ‘approaches the subject with
a suspicion that even mental structures so extraordinary as these and so
remote from our common modes of thought are nevertheless derived from
the most general and comprehensible of human impulses; and he would be
glad to discover the motives of such a transformation as well as the manner
in which it has been accomplished.’39 Here, as in the Frau P. discussion,
Freud approaches psychosis not as an illness of a completely different order
(either behaviorally or neurobiologically) but as a state explainable by the
rules that govern all human psychological development and response.
Freud, Schreber’s Memoir, and the voice of the narrator
Daniel Paul Schreber had suffered a brief episode of hypochondria from

1884–85. He was briefly treated in the clinic of Professor Flechsig, who
would later become a persecutory villain in his memoir, then released,
presumably cured. He returned to his regular life as a German husband
and judge, apparently living without mental disturbance for eight years,
at the end of which he was appointed to the prestigious post of Presiding
130
Judge in the Court of Appeals in Leipzig. He began to experience insom-

nia, followed by increasingly disturbing thoughts and fantasies, leading
him to consult psychiatrists once again. He was treated briefly again by
Dr. Flechsig, then by Dr. Pierson in Dresden before being admitted to the
Sonnenstein Asylum in 1901. While he never abandoned his delusional
system, in which he claimed that God communicated with him through
rays and divine messengers and that he was in the process of transforming
into a woman with reproductive capabilities, he was able to argue his san-
ity in court and to write the memoir, in which he reflects insightfully on
his experiences.
Freud’s focus on Schreber’s autobiography enables him to demon-
strate–in relation to a text that anyone can pick up and read–the central-
ity of patient story-telling to the processes of interpretation of mental ill-
ness and its simultaneous treatment. Freud goes about this rhetorically by
building up the readability of Schreber’s narrative, beginning his analysis
in ‘Part One: Case History’ with a summary designed to capture the at-
tention not only of psychiatrists and psychologists per se but of readers
interested in a good story. Indeed, the main point I want to make here is
that Freud creates a number of shifting, unstable narrative positions in his
encounter with Schreber’s story, positions that initially may seek to engage
and win over a reading audience skeptical of psychoanalysis to begin with
but that, like any narrative acts, perform largely outside of authorial con-
sciousness and control. Furthermore, I hope to show that, while Chabot
may be correct in asserting that ‘Freud’s interpretive practice implies a dis-
tinction between interpretive and theoretical discourse—that they are not
continuous, that they cannot quickly be assimilated one to the other’,40
both kinds of discourse require a narrator, whether explicit and readily
available to the reader or implicit and virtually erased from the text.
Of course, I am by no means the first person to read Freud’s essay on
Schreber’s memoir by focussing at least as much on the analyst as on the
object of analysis. In My Own Private Germany, Eric Santner connects
Freud’s readings to dissent within European psychoanalysis at the time,
including Freud’s fraught paternalistic relationships with his followers
(Adler, Jung and Ferenczi in particular). Several scholars point out Freud’s
inadequate analysis of his relationship with his own father, his possible
131
Mary Elene Wood
homosexual feelings, and the countertransference that might as a result

show itself in his reading of Schreber’s story.41 In an implicit recognition of
Freud’s use of narrative positionings, Colin McCabe observes that ‘While
there can be no doubt of the brilliance of Freud’s interpretative schemas,
there can also be no doubt that this interpretation is much less compelling
than his synopsis of the case.’42
Yet these discussion of Freud’s essay tend to collapse author and nar-
rator into a singular entity, one that may express contradictions but is
ultimately understood to inhabit a single consciousness. By examining the
ways that the narrator(s) move and change throughout the text, I hope to
bring out a different understanding of what can happen when a narrator(s)
identified as psychoanalyst encounters a narrative by someone diagnosed
with psychosis. Most importantly, approaching the essay in this way lo-
cates both the analyst’s narrative and that of the ‘patient’ or ‘case’ on the
same playing field, highlighting the fact that they are both utilizing narra-
tive tools, albeit for different purposes.
As he synopsizes Schreber’s story, Freud enters into his world; he both
quotes liberally from the autobiography and paraphrases Schreber’s ac-
count as if it were the truth.
The most essential feature of his mission of redemption is that it must be

preceded by his transformation into a woman. It is not to be supposed that
he wishes to be transformed into a woman; it is rather a question of a ‘must’
based upon the order of things, which there is no possibility of his evading,
much as he would personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and
masculine station in life. But neither he nor the rest of mankind can win
back their immortality except by his being transformed into a woman (a
process which may occupy many years or even decades) by means of divine
miracles. He himself, of this he is convinced, is the only object upon which
divine miracles are worked, and he is thus the most remarkable man who
has ever lived upon earth.43
Freud’s focalization through Schreber here is marked by both ironic dis-

tance (‘of this he is convinced’) and sincere wonder (‘much as he would
personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and masculine station
132
in life’). Pure irony, which would reveal an assertion of his own superiority
and distance from Schreber, might alienate the very reader that Freud tries
to capture with this abstract that reads today very much like the blurb on
the back of the book jacket. The main tenor of Freud’s narrative here is to
show that Schreber’s story-telling, in all its strange detail, is essential to an
understanding of his illness. In fact, writes Freud, ‘we must now endeav-
our to arrive at a more exact view of his theologico-psychological system,
and we must expound his opinions concerning nerves, the state of bliss, the
divine hierarchy, and the attributes of God, as they occur in his delusional
system.’44 For Freud, both the content of Schreber’s delusions and their
chronology are important to an understanding of the psychic mechanisms
at play in his illness, mechanisms that reveal the brilliance of Schreber as an
individual and of the human psyche with its array of defensive maneuvers,
both of which evince an ‘astonishing mixture of the platitudinous and the
clever, of what has been borrowed and what is original.’45
Yet at the same time, Freud’s narrative exceeds these apparently con-
scious designs, frequently dissolving boundaries between psychologist/
narrator and patient-to-be-interpreted. The sense of wonder mentioned
above, in which Freud’s narrator completely enters Schreber’s story world,
subverts the ironic distance that repeatedly tries to reestablish itself. In
outlining carefully Schreber’s delusional theory in Part One (‘Case His-
tory’) of the essay, Freud often reports on Schreber’s belief system as if it is
a true accounting of the way the world works. Freud writes, for example,
‘Whereas men consist of bodies and nerves, God is from his very nature
nothing but nerve. But the nerves of God are not, as is the case with human
bodies, present in limited numbers, but are infinite or eternal.’46 In long
sections of Freud’s narrative, he quotes Schreber directly only occasion-
ally, primarily to establish coined expressions that label theological realms
or entities: ‘Posterior realms of God’, ‘so-called “root-language”’, ‘Jehovah
rays’.47 It is difficult not to read these quoted intrusions ironically given
the strange originality of the claims made and their insertion in Freud’s
rational explication of the theory. The effect within Freud’s narrative is an
abrupt telescoping between complete immersion in Schreber’s story world
and an almost violent ironic distancing. The ‘Case History’ discussion of
Schreber’s autobiography thus enacts a fraught engagement between narra-
133
Mary Elene Wood
tor and ‘other’, in which the analyst moves jerkily between merger with the
patient’s story world and rejection of the truth of that world.
This form of interpretation in a sense models the psychoanalyst’s ap-
proach to psychosis that Freud advocates in his developing theory but has
some trouble putting into practice. In engaging with this written text,
Freud allows himself as narrator/subject to become absorbed in the pa-
tient’s story in ways not apparent in his discussion of encounters with liv-
ing patients such as Frau P. Whether this is the case because Freud identi-
fied with Schreber in terms of gender and class (and even, as some readers
have suggested, in homosexual desire and transgenderism) or because he
felt more free to experiment with a written text rather than a living person
is difficult to know. In any case, his admiration for Schreber and engage-
ment with the world he creates in his autobiography resonates throughout
the ‘Case History’ section of the narrative.
Yet this engagement with the patient–other ends abruptly in Part
Two, ‘Attempts at Interpretation’. Here Freud’s narrator pulls back to the
psychoanalyst’s desk, so to speak, reorienting his reader with the state-
ment that ‘the problem now lies before us of endeavouring to penetrate
the meaning of this history of a case of paranoia and to lay bare in it
the familiar complexes and motive forces of mental life.’48 It’s not clear
whether or not the reader is part of the ‘us’ invoked here, but at this point
in the account Schreber himself most certainly is not. He is now across the
room, or his autobiography is, newly established as an object of analysis
rather than a subject immersing his readers in a total story world. While
Freud claims that Schreber ‘by no means infrequently … presses the key
into our hands, by adding a gloss to some delusional proposition in an
apparently incidental manner, or by making a quotation or producing an
example in connection with it, or even by expressly denying some paral-
lel to it that has arisen in his own mind’,49 this ‘key’ is itself another text
open to straightforward ‘translation’ through the psychiatrist’s scientific
method. The reader has entered a world where story is a box to be opened
and the key to the box is really another box, hardly a key at all: ‘we have
only to follow our usual psycho-analytic technique (to strip his sentence
of its negative form, to take his example as being the actual thing, or his
quotation or gloss as being the original source) and we find ourselves in
134
possession of what we are looking for—a translation of the paranoic mode

of expression into the normal one.’50
The interplay in the previous section between merger with the patient
‘other’ and abrupt distancing has evolved (rather suddenly) here into clear,
bounded distance between analyst and patient. The analyst is a scientist
whose techniques appear reliable and methodical.
And yet in actual practice Schreber’s narrative refuses to reveal all its
secrets. The actual ‘key’ in Freud’s interpretation turns out to be missing
as Freud reveals that the original autobiography has been censored just at
the crucial point. Remarking on the excised section of Shreber’s memoir,
Freud writes,
Flechsig, according to the patient, committed, or attempted to commit,

‘soul-murder’ upon him—an act which may perhaps be compared with
the efforts made by the devil or by demons to gain possession of a soul, and
which may have had its prototype in events which occurred between mem-
bers of the Flechsig and Schreber families long since deceased. We should
be glad to learn more of the meaning of this ‘soul-murder’, but at this point
our sources relapse once more into a tendentious silence.51
While Freud goes on to interpret the memoir according to his theory that
frustrated infantile desires (in this case Schreber’s desire for his father and
brother), when repressed, could produce psychotic symptoms, the gap in
Schreber’s text unsettles any straightforward interpretation. The theory it-
self, with its dependence on childhood fantasies and desires, wavers when
juxtaposed to the missing knowledge of crucial real-life ‘events which oc-
curred’. The missing part of the story acts as what Gerald Prince refers
to as ‘disnarration’, absent material that propels and disturbs the actual
narration.52 Despite the confident opening of Part Two of Freud’s essay, in
sections such as that quoted above, the scientist–psychiatrist cedes control
of the analysis to the patient, who, by possessing a knowledge his reader
does not have, reasserts his subjectivity within the narrative. The ‘we’ of the
opening paragraphs who was in full possession of the tools of analysis is
disempowered, at the mercy of a text that withholds its truths.
In Part Three, ‘The Mechanism of Paranoia’, it as if Freud’s narrator
135
Mary Elene Wood
takes a deep breath and begins again, presenting his theory that paranoia
arises from the failed repression of homosexual wish-fantasies that, as ele-
ments in normal psychological development, should be sublimated into
friendship as the individual matures into heterosexuality. Here the narrator
seems to banish Schreber altogether for several pages, invoking instead—
almost as substitutes for the intimacy with Schreber created in the text up
to this point—fellow psychologists, ‘my friends C.G. Jung of Zurich and
S. Ferenczi of Budapest in investigating upon this single point a number
of cases of paranoid disorder’.53 Instead of citing Schreber’s memoir in the
first pages of this section, the narrator creates a dialogue of his own to show
that the homosexual’s unclaimed thought, ‘I (a man) love him’, mutates
through repression into ‘I do not love him—I hate him, because HE PER-
SECUTES ME’.54 In a strange enactment of his own theory, Freud’s narra-
tor here turns away from Schreber to create an internal story world with its
own dialogue unconnected to living beings or even to created characters.
Freud’s narrator emerges from this world rather suddenly, a dozen
pages into the section, to discuss, of all things, Schreber’s perception of the
end of the world. Writes Freud,
At the climax of his illness, under the influence of visions which were ‘part-
ly of a terrifying character, but partly, too, of an indescribable grandeur’ (p.
73), Schreber became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe,
of the end of the world. Voices told him that the work of the past 14,000
years had now come to nothing, and that the earth’s allotted span was only
212 years more (p. 71); and during the last part of his stay in Prof. Flech-
sig’s sanatorium he believed that that period had already elapsed.55
In relation to the larger narrative in the essay, this paragraph is striking

because it comes after a long expanse in which Freud’s narrator has himself
eliminated Schreber’s world, a world in which the narrator had been inti-
mately involved in the previous two sections. At the same time, the part of
the essay on Schreber’s belief in the end of the world precedes several pages
of counter-argument in which the narrator makes a fraught case for basing
his paranoia theory in the separation between libidinal and ego instincts,
admitting that ‘beyond this [separation] are only hypotheses, which we
136
have taken up–and are quite ready to drop again–in order to help us to
find our bearings in the chaos of the obscurer processes of the mind’.56
This juxtaposition of Shreber’s belief that the world has ended and Freud’s
anxious defense of his theory creates the impression that Freud’s narrator
teeters on the brink of extinction, reeling in a sense before the prospect
that the theory-world he has created is about to come crashing down, or
has already, along with ‘the work of the past 14,000 years’.
This impression is supported by the narrator’s turn, between the para-
graphs on Schreber’s end of the world and those defending the theory, to
a brief passage from Part I of Goethe’s Faust, which breaks entirely from
the genre of theoretical discourse and effects a sublime interruption in the
scientist/narrator’s text:
Woe! Woe!
Thou hast destroyed it,
The beautiful world,
With mighty fist!
It tumbles, it falls in pieces!
A demigod has shattered it!
Mighty
Among the sons of earth,
More splendid
Build it again,
Build it up in thy bosom!57
Rather than interpreting these lines, the narrator continues on from where
they leave off: ‘And the paranoiac builds it up again, not more splendid, it
is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it.’58 This is exactly what
the narrator then proceeds to do with his own theory, to build up in the
midst of profound doubt an explanation of processes that Schreber’s own
story has called into question, particularly the investment in the ego of
energies that seem so powerfully libidinal even though the ego, in Freud’s
previous theory, has been defined largely by its distinction from libido.
Perhaps more importantly, this sublime interruption signifies and
137
Mary Elene Wood
echoes the point a few pages earlier at which Freud’s narrator declared ho-
mosexuality to be a normal stage in psychological development that, bar-
ring pathology, should be sublimated as the individual embraced hetero-
sexuality: ‘After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached,
the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be supposed, done away with
or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and
applied to fresh uses. They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts
and, as “anaclitic” components, help to constitute the social instincts, thus
contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de
corps and to the love of mankind in general.’59 This passage describes in
expository terms the way that the ‘world’ of homosexual desire must be
abandoned and remade through sublimation into friendship and ‘the love
of mankind in general’. At the same time, the passage enacts this rupture
by signaling the narrator’s break from intimate relations with Schreber,
the beloved patient–subject who merged with the narrator in the open-
ing section. This break had already been marked by the narrator’s turn
to ‘my friends’ Jung and Ferenczi, ‘distrusting my own experience on the
subject’,60 each of whom he identifies by his geographical city of origin, as
if to reinforce the theoretical rebuilding of a world by drawing the reader’s
attention to actual places, worlds not previously invoked in the text. After
this break from Schreber, the narrator then deploys the anxious and unsat-
isfying responses to counter-arguments noted above, responses that often
seem ensnared in a frantic logic that culminates, strangely enough, in a
return to Schreber through the narrator’s somewhat stunning acknowl-
edgement that
Schreber’s ‘rays of God’, which are made up of a condensation of the sun’s

rays, of nerve-fibres, and of spermatozoa, are in reality nothing else than a
concrete representation and external projection of libidinal cathexes; and
they thus lend his delusions a striking similarity with our theory. His belief
that the world must come to an end because his ego was attracting all the
rays to itself, his anxious concern at a later period, during the process of
reconstruction, lest God should sever his re-connection with him,—these
and many other details of Schreber’s delusional formation sound almost
like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have as-
138
sumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can

nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had devel-
oped my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents
of Schreber’s book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is
more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there
is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared
to believe.61
Thus by the end of the essay, Freud’s narrator returns to his intimacy with
Schreber by asserting their similarity and readmitting Schreber’s subjectivi-
ty into the discussion of psychological processes. In fact, Freud comes close
to granting Schreber the god-like position the memoir itself constructs
when the analyst suggests he might need to defend himself against the
charge that he plagiarized Schreber’s own theories of the psyche. Whether
or not this is a joke on Freud’s part, the suggestion remains, as Freud him-
self would admit, to trouble the distinction between analyst and patient.62
More importantly, Freud’s assertion that ‘it remains for the future to de-
cide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to
admit’ puts forward the possibility that Freud’s own ideas exist within a
system that always turns back upon itself, unable to transform through
connection to an outside ‘other’.
In what appears as a rather desperate attempt to transform the closed
individual-centered world of psychoanalytic theory, Freud addended a
‘Postscript’ to the publication of his ‘Notes’ on Schreber’s memoir. This
short piece focusses on Schreber’s declaration after his ‘recovery’ that he
could look at the sun ‘without being more than slightly dazzled by it, a
thing which had naturally been impossible for him formerly’.63 Referenc-
ing his own 1907 essay ‘Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices’, which
would be developed in 1913 into Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between
the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Freud employs ‘a psycho-analytic
explanation of the orgins of religion’ to claim that Schreber’s declaration
echoes ‘the totemistic habits of thought of primitive peoples’.64 Just as
Schreber learns to gaze at his sun-father without being dazzled, ‘primitive
peoples’ use animal myths (such as that of the eagle who tests whether
his progeny can ‘look into the sun without blinking’) to ensure their in-
139
Mary Elene Wood
heritance and belonging within a particular group.65 Freud supports this

comparison by citing Schreber’s symbolic substitution of the sun for his
father as well as his claim that ‘the Schrebers are members of the highest
aristocracy of Heaven’.66 Freud thus constructs not only religion but the
German class system as fantasies designed to provide support for founder-
ing psyches.
Yet what seems most crucial (for our purposes) in Freud’s turn to the
‘anthropological and phylogenetically conceived counterpart’ to psycho-
analysis is his final assertion that dreams and neurosis lead not only to
the child within the adult but to what Freud calls (quoting himself with
underscoring emphasis) ‘the savage … the primitive man, as he stands re-
vealed to us in the light of the researches of archaeology and of ethnol-
ogy’.67 Just at the moment when he has aligned himself with Schreber
and called into question the project of psychoanalytic theory as a possible
delusion, Freud puts psychoanalysis to use in the service of a science of a
different sort, a science that emerges in Freud’s text only in the process of
invoking an ‘other’, a ‘savage’ named both in the past of archaeology and
the present of ethnology. Here, like Schreber, Freud replaces one illusion
with another.68 At risk of losing his foundation and following Schreber
into the abyss, Freud anchors these new sciences with the creation of an
‘other’ necessarily defined as undeveloped and thus in need of treatment in
order to enter the ‘adult’ status represented by the European intellectual.
In a later chapter on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (the bible of Euro-American psychiatric diagnosis) I will further
explore the destructive implications of psychiatry’s creation and ‘treat-
ment’ of the ‘savage’ other. What is significant here is that the retreat from
the abyss represented by the ‘schizophrenic patient’ happens almost simul-
taneously with the creation of an ‘other’—the ‘savage’ defined implicitly
as a person of color and a colonial subject—who serves in the final sen-
tence of Freud’s work on Schreber’s memoir as both an object of analysis
and the keystone of a foundation, a new sun that can be ‘looked into…
without blinking’. Significantly, Freud presents this assertion in the form
of self-quotation, offered as the exact sentence with which ‘thus we may
complete our proposition’.69 When Freud writes ‘upon the primitive man,
as he stands revealed to us in the light of the researches of archaeology and
140
of ethnology’,70 he substitutes the narrative of science for that of the man

so described, a man who now ‘stands revealed’ in the ‘light’ of that science
but does not offer up his story of what it feels like to stand there, exposed
and examined. Unlike Schreber, he stands silently, his story now beside
the point.
In the end what Freud offers his reader is a text fraught by a narrative
voice that shifts and mutates unexpectedly. In his study Unnatural Voices:
Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Brian Richard-
son maintains that ‘the basic categories of first and third person narration
or homo- and heterodiegesis, themselves based on foundational linguistic
oppositions articulated by Benveniste, are repeatedly problematized and
violated by experimental writers.’71 According to Richardson, while non-
fiction is limited to the first and third person perspectives delineated by
Gerard Genette, ‘in contemporary fiction, one narration is collapsed into
another, and one consciousness bleeds into a second one, or a foreign text
inscribes itself on a mind.’72 The psychiatrist–narrator in Freud’s essay on
Schreber’s memoir undergoes the mutations we might expect to see, ac-
cording to Richardson, in works by Beckett, Borges, or Calvino. In Part
One, the ironic third-person reporter becomes a first-person character em-
bedded in his story world. In Part Two, Freud gives us a different narrator
altogether, an objective first-person scientist allied with an equally objec-
tive reader, both of whom waver and dissolve before Schreber’s censored
first-person story-teller, who in turn mutates between educated rational
judge, gendered masculine, and sexualized divinity, gendered feminine.
The narrative in Part Three presents a first-person theorist who invokes
the ‘we’ of a community of psychology researchers as he logically builds
his case. Yet this logical narrator is soon disturbed by the interruptions of
Goethe’s sublime poetic vision of the world’s end and the imagined col-
lapse of the theory-world.
Clearly Freud’s relationship to psychotic patients’ stories is a troubled
one in which his own narrator fails to maintain a stable position as psy-
chiatrist—scientist analyzing patient—object. To allow patient stories to
inform both theory and treatment means to allow the unsettling of his
own narrative positions by an acknowledgment, however fraught, of pa-
141
Mary Elene Wood
tient subjectivity on the one hand and the tenuous line between fantasy
and reality on the other. The difficiulty of distinguishing real events from
fantasy in patient thoughts and memories had plagued Freud since the
late 1890s, when he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess that ‘there are no indica-
tions of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between
truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.’73 In his discussion of
Schreber’s memoir, the structures and functions of the psyche that Freud
spent years building within his own mind begin to waver as if they are the
light rays in Schreber’s universe.
Freud’s engagement with Schreber’s story continues as what we might
call a shadow narrative—an unarticulated narrative that runs parallel to
and underlies the articulated one—throughout the rest of Freud’s work
on psychosis, in particular in his important essay ‘On Narcissism: An In-
troduction’, published in 1914. As Colin McCabe has pointed out, this
essay is ‘the indispensable companion piece’ to Freud’s essay on Schre-
ber’s memoir.74 McCabe and others, most notably Jacques Lacan, have
discussed the ways that ‘On Narcissism’ marks a turning point in Freud’s
theory of the structures of the psyche; here Freud goes beyond his previous
idea that the ego stands apart from the libidinal drives to posit that the
ego has its own libido, which can turn inward, making the self its object.75
By assigning libido to the ego itself, Freud attempts to resolve difficulties
raised by Schreber’s ‘case’ and within paranoid schizophrenia in general (or
‘paraphrenia’ as Freud preferred to call it), particularly the megalomania
that displayed libidinal intensity directed at the self rather than any ex-
ternal object. In ‘On Narcissism’, Freud suggests that it is part of ‘normal’
masculine psychological development for the child first to take himself as
his own beloved sexual object (a move Freud defines as homosexual), then
to repress this self-desire and transform it in an effort ‘to recover the early
perfection, thus wrested from him, in the new form of an ego-ideal’.76 This
newly formed ego-ideal , formed simultaneously with the repression of ho-
mosexual desire, is maintained by conscience, which is ‘at bottom an em-
bodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society’.77
What interests me here is less Freud’s development of ego-libido the-
ory than the narrative voice he employs to present it. If we read this essay
(following Lacan)78 as a return to the problems raised in his essay on Schre-
142
ber, where Freud’s narrator intermittently dissolves into Schreber’s point

of view, allowing the intrusion of Schreber’s own narrator and perspective,
and becomes befuddled by the unsolved mysteries of the censored mate-
rial, then the narrator of ‘On Narcissism’ seems to be trying to reassert his
authority as objective scientist building a rational argument. One might
argue that this is a different genre—a theoretical essay rather than a case
study or psychological biography. Yet it is difficult to read this theoretical
essay without hearing the echo of Freud’s earlier narrator trying with little
success to move from case study to theory. The floundering theorist–nar-
rator of the Schreber essay, written three years earlier, undermines the au-
thoritative voice running the show in ‘On Narcissism’.
The main difference, of course, is that there is no ‘case’ in the 1914
essay. The narrator’s voice does not have to compete with another voice
or voices that might interrupt the dominant story. And yet the ties to the
earlier text are everywhere apparent,79 and Schreber still holds the loose
threads that on the one hand constitute the woof of the later essay and
on the other could unravel both the theory itself and the authoritative
voice that constructs it. Part of Schreber’s power over the essay lies in the
fact that his paranoid schizophrenia provides the essay’s impetus yet Freud
repeatedly remarks that schizophrenia (or dementia praecox as he still occa-
sionally calls it, with deference to Kraepelin) remains an unsolved mystery,
even as he seeks to discover whether the theory may ‘be consistent and
fruitful, and whether it may be applied to other affections also, e.g. to
schizophrenia’.80 Two pages later, he moves away from this goal, suggest-
ing instead that the study of extreme mental illnesses is useful primarily
in what it can contribute to understandings of psychological formations
in general, given that ‘in order to arrive at what is normal and apparently
so simple, we shall have to study the pathological with its distortions and
exaggerations.’ 81
This move from a troubled understanding of paranoid schizophrenia
to the development of a theory of ego-libido applicable to the human
psyche in general has a double effect. On the one hand the gesture rel-
egates Schreber’s memoir to the shadows, from which place it continues to
disturb the essay’s logic as well as the confident voice of the theorist–nar-
rator. On the other hand, Freud’s focus on theory of normal psychology
143
Mary Elene Wood
developed from pathological processes helps construct the person expe-

riencing schizophrenia as ontologically identical to, if developmentally
different from, the person with neurosis, hysteria, or otherwise ‘normal’
psychological functioning. In fact, though barely mentioned in the essay,
Schreber emerges not as ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘paraphrenic’ or ‘paranoic’ but
as an individual whose mental processes took a logical turn given his char-
acter and circumstances, a turn designed, despite extreme psychic disarray,
to preserve his integrity as a human being.
As late as 1924, Freud maintained in ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’ that
‘Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas
psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the rela-
tion between the ego and its environment (outer world).’82 In cases of
schizophrenia, he wrote, ‘the delusion is found like a patch on the spot
where originally there was a rent in the relation between ego and outer
world.’83 As in the neuroses, in psychosis the psyche struggles to survive a
conflict, and even tries to repair itself, so that ‘manifestations of the patho-
genic process are often overlaid by those resulting from an attempt at cure
or at reconstruction’.84 Thus there exists ‘a common feature in the aetiol-
ogy both of the psychoneuroses and the psychoses’, which is ‘the factor of
frustration—the lack of fulfillment of one of those eternal uncontrollable
childhood’s wishes that are so deeply rooted in our composition, phyloge-
netically fore-ordained as it is.’85 Where contemporary American psychia-
try and psychology may reject the primacy of ‘those eternal uncontrollable
childhood’s wishes’ to all forms of mental distress, Freud establishes a com-
mon ontological basis for those with psychosis and the rest of humanity,
a basis that begins to evaporate after the 1970s when ‘schizophrenics’ and
other psychotic patients are overwhelmingly described as manifesting a
difference in the brain itself. In fact, Freud concludes his 1924 essay by
claiming that all manifestations of psychic distress—neurosis and psycho-
sis—are exaggerations of normal processes by means of which the ego sur-
vives, given that ‘it is always possible for the ego to avoid a rupture in any
of its relations by deforming itself, submitting to forfeit something of its
unity, or in the long run even to being gashed and rent.’86 While this asser-
tion of a common ontology is highly troubled by Freud’s own shifting nar-
rative position, as in his discussion of ‘primitive peoples’ in the Postscript
144
to his Schreber essay, it continues as a strong thread in his discussions of

psychosis.
Gregory Bateson and the ‘infinite regress of contexts’
In his introduction to John Perceval’s early nineteenth century memoir en-

titled Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832,
Gregory Bateson, like Freud, brings to his interpretation an interest in
finding correspondences between his own theories of schizophrenia and
the insights of the patient himself.87 As Freud does with Schreber’s work,
Bateson undertakes a fraught engagement with Perceval’s narrative of his
experiences, representing the text (and the author it embodies) at times as
an object of analysis and at times as the embodiment of an active, thinking
subject.
As in Freud’s analysis of Schreber, Bateson’s own narrative voice often
casts Perceval as a theorizing subject who has valid insights into his own
condition. In his narrative approach to Perceval’s story, Bateson seems to
identify with him as an upper class white man, a gentleman who deserves
better than what life has handed him. Like Freud, who regards Daniel
Schreber as a kindred spirit, a man of learning and social rank, Bateson
establishes himself as scientist-narrator analyzing the patient-other who
is also a social equal, even though, in Perceval’s case, he is an equal who
lived and died two hundred years earlier. Both Freud and Bateson repre-
sent their subjects as fellow interpreters who—because of their first-hand
experience and status as educated ‘gentlemen’—hold a key to the mysteries
of their psychoses.88
Yet where, through shifts in narrative voice and position, Freud re-
treats in the end from embracing Schreber’s perceptions and their fright-
ening challenge to psychoanalytic theory’s attempts to differentiate fantasy
from reality, Bateson uses the correspondences between Perceval’s narrative
and psychological theory to reframe psychiatry’s understanding of schizo-
phrenia. In doing so, he shifts focus from the distinction between the
imagined and the real that haunted Freud, that preoccupied Perceval, and
that captured the attention of psychiatrists in the 1960s seeking to iden-
tify, define, and treat schizophrenia. Instead, Bateson turns his attention
145
Mary Elene Wood
to dynamic familial relations evolving within larger, interconnected worlds

that he characterizes as an ‘infinite regress of contexts’. Chabot has pointed
out that it was just such an infinite regress (the ‘associative chain’) that at
times baffled and frustrated Freud in his attempts to describe the complex
web of fantasy and real events that constituted the genealogy of a patient’s
psychological distress.89 Yet the unending chain of associations that often
frustrated Freud as he struggled to bring coherence to the narrative of
Schreber’s life became the organizing principle of Bateson’s psychologi-
cal theory. His introduction to Perceval’s memoir embeds schizophrenic
narrative in a web of familial, social, political, and biological realities and
thus insists that, while the coherence of a life may remain elusive, such
narrative holds meaning. At the same time, however, as in Freud’s essay,
the impenetrability of that meaningfulness remains as a knot in Bateson’s
own narrative, a mystery that threatens to dissolve Bateson’s own theoreti-
cal structures.
While during the late 1950s and early 1960s Gregory Bateson was a
prominent name in the treatment and theorizing of schizophrenia, today
his work is barely mentioned in the history and study of that disease. He
tends to be associated with the ‘blaming the mother’ theories of Harry
Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who—a generation before
Bateson—popularized the concept of the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ who
literally drove her child crazy by being both cold and demanding. In his
1997 study A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age
of Prozac, Edward Shorter explicitly, and disapprovingly, ties Bateson to
these theories, maintaining that ‘Fromm-Reichmann’s schizophrenogen-
ic mother became the basis of “family systems theory” in the treatment
of schizophrenia, and such therapists as Gregory Bateson at the Mental
Health Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, postulated a complex
“double bind” theory of the disease, in which the mother emerged as the
sickest member of the family.’90
A few contemporary researchers, fighting upstream against neurobi-
ological explanations of schizophrenia, refer positively to Bateson as an
important precursor to present-day family-systems and communication-
based understandings of mental illness including psychosis. John Read,
146
Fred Seymour, and Loren R. Mosher, remarking that ‘the possible role of
families in the causation of “schizophrenia” has become a taboo subject’,91
include Bateson and other members of the ‘MRI Group’ in their histori-
ography of family systems approaches to schizophrenia.92 Remarking that
this group’s ‘case studies are complex, thoughtful and convincing’, they
protest that ‘they were not at all in the business of blaming parents’ as so
many present-day representations of Bateson claim.93 Janis Hunter Jenkins
lists Bateson among the early-twentieth-century group of psychologists
and anthropologists (most prominently Henry Stack Sullivan and anthro-
pologist Edward Sapir) who worked ‘at the interface of psychiatry and so-
cial science’ to understand the relationships among culture, interpersonal
relations, and individual psychological development.’94
Yet Shorter’s caricature of Bateson reflects the fact that the dominant
attitude within psychiatry and history of psychiatry towards Bateson’s
theories and this phase of schizophrenia treatment is that it was idealistic,
wrong-headed, and based in poor science. Interestingly, Bateson’s work has
been revived in recent years not so much because of his interests in men-
tal illness and its treatment as because his ecological theories contribute
to contemporary ecocriticism and environmental studies.95 Yet Bateson’s
understanding of psychosis was intimately connected to his biological and
ecological theories and particularly to his conception that what he referred
to as ‘mind’ was both a metaphor for and an embodied enactment of the
complex interconnected web that is the living earth.
Bateson came to psychotherapy as an evolutionary biologist (following
his English Darwinian biologist father William Bateson) and an anthro-
pologist who had studied, with colleague and spouse Margaret Mead, the
indigenous cultures of New Guinea. He considered himself first and fore-
most a scientist, yet a scientist who refused the Lockean division between
mind and body, observer and observed. His daughter Mary Catherine
Bateson, who continued to explain her father’s work long after his death,
remarks that
When Gregory spoke about the two great stochastic processes—learning,

involving trial and error and involving something like reinforcement to
determine what is retained, and evolution, where natural selection has the
147
Mary Elene Wood
same effect, he was proposing yet another aspect of the pattern which con-
nects all living things, recognizing in our own mental processes of thought
and learning a pattern which connects us to the biosphere rather than an
argument for separation. This recognition is inhibited by the dualistic as-
sumption that what happens in the natural world is mechanical. It is in-
hibited in a deep way by the Cartesian body-mind distinction, as if the
natural world were purely material instead of being shaped by process and
organization.96
In fact, even as he praised efforts of Lamarck and others to order and name
observable phenomena, Bateson abhorred the divisions and distances be-
tween academic disciplines, seeing them as the death of true education.
In summarizing his life’s work in 1971, Bateson observes, ‘I have been
concerned with four sorts of subject matter: anthropology, psychiatry, bio-
logical evolution and genetics, and the new epistemology which comes out
of systems theory and ecology.’97 For Bateson, these fields are intimately re-
lated to one another. His major influences were Darwin, Lamarck, Samuel
Butler, and William Blake, whose views on the phenomenal world he saw
as both in tension and potentially sympathetic.98
In his work on schizophrenia, undertaken primarily at the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, from 1949 to 1962,
Bateson used an eclectic approach that rejected European psychoanalysts’
privileging of sexuality and the unconscious in favor of Adolf Meyer’s
emphasis on empirical observation and Harry Stack Sullivan’s insistence
that schizophrenia was rooted in psychodynamic processes.99 While he has
been relentlessly linked to Sullivan’s alleged penchant for mother-blaming
(also a reductionist version of Sullivan’s theory, but that’s outside of our
concerns here), what Bateson’s work more significantly has in common
with Sullivan’s (and Freud’s as well) is the conception that schizophrenia
is the manifestation of normal psychological processes by means of which
an individual adapts (if often self-destructively) to highly stressful environ-
mental circumstances. Remarking on a group of schizophrenia patients,
Sullivan maintains that ‘the psychosis was none the less conservative for it
made subsequent social life possible and thereby preserved an individual
who had not been equal to the demands of the social integration.’100
148
While for Sullivan the environmental etiological factors for schizo-

phrenia could be biological (disease), drug related, or socio-psychological,
for Bateson they were primarily communicational. In his own treatment
and study of schizophrenia patients, Bateson intensified this focus on the
embeddedness of the individual in social worlds, representing schizophre-
nia as primarily a disorder of intrafamilial communication. At the same
time, he saw elements of the sacred and the scientific coalesce in the in-
dividual’s experience of psychosis; this many-pronged approach to severe
mental illness emerges in his edition of John Perceval’s memoir and the
introductory essay that accompanies it.101
Schizophrenia and different logical types
As a narrator who is not necessarily reliable or conscious of his own com-

municational gestures, Bateson offers a brief but telling interpretation of
the memoir. Bateson struggles to come to terms with the voice of schizo-
phrenia and Perceval’s recovered narrator who engages in a dialogue with
that voice. Yet Bateson remains stymied, if intrigued, by the memoirist’s
refusal to dismiss his schizophrenic experience entirely once he has recov-
ered. Bateson’s own narrative and analysis comes face to face with an un-
solvable mystery within the memoirist’s narrative, a mystery represented
by Perceval’s maintenance of continuity between the identities of madness
and sanity, his insistence, once recovered, that the voices and visions that
plagued (and at times delighted) him while he was admittedly delusional
and that continue into the narrative present, are not simply to be dismissed
as psychological aberrations. Perceval writes that ‘the mind being thus pre-
ternaturally disposed to be influenced through the imagination, it is pos-
sible that the Almighty may make use of that faculty, in some to enlighten
and instruct them, and to give them foreknowledge for the instruction of
others; in others to amuse them; in others to deceive them; in others for all
these purposes united.’102 He further claims that ‘my organs of sight and
of hearing may have been still disordered, but not my understanding.’103
Bateson’s analysis of Perceval’s memoir struggles both to accept Per-
ceval’s own reading of his psychotic experiences and to explain those expe-
riences from a psychodynamic perspective. His reading is hampered by the
149
Mary Elene Wood
fact that, in Perceval’s refusal to reject the voices heard during his illness,
the former asylum inmate does not seem fully ‘recovered’. Perceval’s doubt
and insight make him a believable narrator, yet Bateson cannot quite fully
believe his accounting of his own life. This troubled position cannot help
but invoke Freud’s similar dilemma in the face of Schreber’s combination
of fraught recovery and depth of insight.
Gregory Bateson shared Freud’s belief that neurosis and psychosis
arose from common psychological processes and that psychosis, rather
than signalling a different neurological make-up, was the result of psychic
defense mechanisms. Yet Bateson questioned Freud’s focus on sexuality
and libido, the energy system that Freud saw as elemental in understand-
ing mental processes and that played a central role in his overarching nar-
rative of psychological development. In Bateson’s view, Freud mistakenly
turned his attention to matter, energy, and content rather than form and
context. To Bateson, the material of the psyche was much less important
than the relational forms of interaction, which he saw as common to all
biological forms.
In his 1971 commentary on Part Two of Steps Towards an Ecology of
Mind, which includes most of the essays written during the course of his
career, Bateson summarizes this viewpoint by comparing ‘the arrangement
of leaves and branches in the growth of a flowering plant’ to ‘the formal
relations that obtain between different sorts of words in a sentence’.104 In
making an argument both for such an analogy and for an interdisciplinary
approach within which it would make sense, Bateson clarifies that he is not
so much claiming that ‘the relation between leaf and stem is the same as
the relation between noun and verb’. Rather,
what is claimed is, first, that in both anatomy and grammar the parts are
to be classified according to the relations between them. In both fields, the
relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary.
Beyond this, it is claimed that the relations are of the sort generated by pro-
cesses of information exchange…All of this speculation becomes almost
platitude when we realize that both grammar and biological structure are
products of communicational and organizational process.105
150
In a 1967 essay entitled ‘Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive

Art’, Bateson expands this idea as a veiled attack on Freud’s approach to
dream interpretation. Writes Bateson,
In the conventional interpretation of dream, another set of relata, often sexu-

al, is substituted for the set in the dream. But perhaps by doing this we only
create another dream. There indeed is not a priori reason for supposing that
the sexual relata are any more primary or basic than any other set.106
Moving from this argument about dream interpretation to a discussion

of art, Bateson claims that a work of art is not ‘about’ any one thing but
always ‘about’ many things in their relation to one another. He concludes,
‘In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable
relata.’107
As early as 1940, when Bateson was still primarily engaged in anthro-
pological research, while Bateson expressed admiration for Freud’s contri-
butions, he also remarked (in ‘Experiments in Thinking about Observed
Ethnological Material’) that ‘misplaced concreteness abounds in every
word of psychoanalytic writing’. 108 In his Introduction to Steps to an Ecol-
ogy of Mind, Bateson more specifically challenges Freud’s concept of the
libido, maintaining that ‘the nineteenth-century scientists (notably Freud)
who tried to establish a bridge between behavioral data and the fundamen-
tals of physical and chemical science were, surely, correct in insisting upon
the need for such a bridge but, I believe, wrong in choosing “energy” as the
foundation for that bridge.’109 Thus Bateson implies that Freud’s search for
a key to Schreber’s psychosis in repressed libidinal energies manifested a
misdirected focus on substance and content. In this critique, Freud would
do better to ignore the development of libidinal energy within early child-
hood, focussing instead on the numerous interlocking contexts for Schre-
ber’s narrative, asking how and why Schreber learned to become psychotic
through ongoing social interaction and following the ‘infinite regress of
contexts’ as far as humanly possible.
Yet Bateson’s approach to schizophrenia is not a simple behaviorism
that looks for cause and effect in human action. In ‘Minimal Require-
ments for a Theory of Schiophrenia’, he maintains rather that in order for
151
Mary Elene Wood
the psychologist ‘to explain the observed phenomena [of patient pathol-
ogy] we always have to consider the wider context of the learning experi-
ment, and every transaction between persons is a context of learning.’110
Most importantly for psychiatric patients, the presence and behavior of the
psychologist provides one of these contexts, so that ‘the observer must be
included within the focus of observation, and what can be studied is always
a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a “thing”.’111
This interaction goes beyond the psychoanalytic theory of transference, in
which the patient displaces onto the analyst relationships from infancy and
childhood, to suggest that the relationship between therapist and patient is
significant in its own right.
Bateson’s theory that each individual functions within ‘an infinite re-
gress of relationships’ and ‘an infinite regress of such relevant contexts’112
is central to his understanding of schizophrenia. In this understanding,
in the family world of the schizophrenic, contexts provide conflicting
messages that are of ‘different logical types’ and thus place the identified
schizophrenic in a ‘double bind’. Messages themselves are not isolated enti-
ties but are all that can really be known. For Bateson,
in the world of communication the only relevant entities or ‘realities’ are

messages, including in this term parts of messages, relations between mes-
sages, significant gaps in messages, and so on. The perception of an event
or object or relation is real. It is a neurophysiological message. But the
event itself or the object itself cannot enter this world and is, therefore,
irrelevant and, to that extent, unreal. Conversely, a message has no reality
or relevance qua message, in the Newtonian world: it there is reduced to
sound waves or printer’s ink.113
The individual psyche is a place of message retrieval and intersection. Con-

texts appear within the psyche as messages ‘represented or reflected (cor-
rectly or with distortion) in multiple parts of the communicational system
which we are studying; and this system is not the physical individual but
a wide network of pathways of messages.’114 History and present coalesce
in these messages, which always exist in the present moment but contain
complex genealogies that influence the ways they are communicated and
interpreted.
152
For the individual identified as schizophrenic, messages of at least two

different orders, or logical types, repeatedly come into conflict in such a
way that the person feels confronted with no viable choice of how to be-
have. According to Bateson, what an individual experiences as ‘I’ comes
into being ‘in the communicational world as an essential element in the
syntax of [his]experience and in the experience of others, and the commu-
nications of others may damage [his] identity, even to the point of break-
ing up the organization of [his] experience.’115 In Bateson’s view, a person
who becomes schizophrenic usually does so within the context of a family
system that fosters and is in turn fostered by the schizophrenic behavior.
According to Bateson, ‘Anybody watching the transactions which occur
between the members of a family containing an identified schizophrenic
will perceive immediately that the symptomatic behavior of the identi-
fied patient fits with this environment and, indeed, promotes in the other
members those characteristics which evoke the schizophrenic behavior.’116
Just as a living creature adapts to its environment over time, and may then
contribute—in a fluid, continuous process—to further changes in other
elements within that environment, so the family and other social groups
surrounding the person with schizophrenia evolve to reinforce his or her
behavior and experience.
For Bateson, the most significant way that the individual’s identity
and experience become disorganized and destructive is that he or she loses
the ability to distinguish between different logical types of messages. In
other words, he or she becomes unable to identify where messages come
from or what kind of value to give them. Writes Bateson,
Their behavior seems characterized by conspicuous or exaggerated errors

and distortions regarding the nature and typing of their own messages (in-
ternal and external), and of the messages which they receive from others.
Imagination is seemingly confused with perception. The literal is confused
with the metaphoric. Internal messages are confused with external. The
trivial is confused with the vital. The originator of the message is confused
with the recipient and the perceiver with the thing perceived. And so on.
In general, these distortions boil down to this: that the patient behaves in
such a way that he shall be responsible for no metacommunicative aspect of
153
Mary Elene Wood
his messages. He does this, moreover, in a manner which makes his condi-
tion conspicuous: in some cases, flooding the environment with messages
whose logical typing is either totally obscure or misleading; in other cases,
overtly withdrawing to such a point that he commits himself to no overt
message.117
Gregory Bateson reads John Perceval’s memoir
Bateson’s understanding of schizophrenia as rooted in communication-

gone-wrong is crucial to his reading of Perceval’s memoir as well as to
his own self-construction as a narrator. Like Freud, Bateson reveals a fair
amount of self-consciousness about his own practice as deliverer of certain
kinds of messages, in this case interpretive messages that on the one hand
analyze Perceval’s words and sentences and on the other create a story, a
narrative, about Perceval’s life, based on Bateson’s own theories of schizo-
phrenia. Because of his concentration on the logical typing of different
kinds of messages, we would expect Bateson to have some awareness that
an analysis can, indeed necessarily is, a kind of narrative that tells a story
about someone else’s story. Interestingly, both Bateson and Freud, in focus-
sing the lens on written memoirs, turn from the dynamic dialogue of live
psychoanalysis (however much a monologic psychoanalytic narrative may
lurk in the background of seemingly spontaneous speech between analy-
sand and therapist)118 to a monologic analysis that does not anticipate a
response. In such a monologue, not only does transference become impos-
sible, but the narrative contextualizing of the memoir becomes more overt
as the analyst offers up in writing, through a kind of unimpeded counter-
transference, his longing for an etiology, a journey, and a resolution, the
traditional, shadowy elements of narrative hidden within the logical steps
of scientific analysis.
As in Freud’s discussion of Schreber’s memoir, the narrator of Bate-
son’s ‘Introduction’ to Perceval’s Narrative expresses two sets of tensions:
the first is between the analyst scientifically evaluating a patient’s words (as
window to the psyche) and the storyteller longing for resolution and the
second is between a removed, authoritative, somewhat superior interpreter
and an intimate, empathetic equal. Indeed, Bateson’s introduction seems
154
to hesitate and restart multiple times as its author approaches his subject
from a variety of positions and logical frames. Bateson alternates between
recounting Perceval’s journey through madness, analyzing that madness
itself, and positing the impenetrable experiences of schizophrenia as verg-
ing on unknowable mystery.
Bateson’s ‘Introduction’ thus opens with an overview of Perceval’s ex-
periences of madness and incarceration, moves to a factual chronicle of
‘The Author’s Life’, shifts to a narrative of the insanity itself, inserts a ‘di-
gression’ on his alleged ‘recovery’, then concludes with a highly speculative
meditation on Perceval’s early childhood as leading to his psychosis. As in
Freud’s work on Schreber, Bateson’s introduction repeatedly shifts both
tone and focus, as if the writer is grasping again and again for a hold on
the memoirist’s life and writing.
The ‘Introduction’ begins with a reference to the 1812 assassination
of Perceval’s father, Spencer Perceval, then Prime Minister of Britain, as he
entered the House of Commons. While the reader attuned to psychoanal-
ysis might expect that such an introduction would lead to an analysis of
Perceval’s illness as stemming from this traumatic event in his childhood,
in fact Bateson uses the event to draw a distinction between two kinds of
narrative journeys—on the one hand the more public and more familiar
narrative of the ‘great man’ who becomes the Prime Minister of England
and on the other the memoir of the insane son ‘in which he makes con-
tributions to our knowledge of schizophrenia, which entitle him to fame
of a very different order from that achieved by his stuffy but ambitious
father.’119 In a subtle challenge to literary history, Bateson thus identifies
the internal psychic journey of the son as a story worth telling, while he
dismisses the father’s more public, nation-building life story as uninterest-
ing, even trite.
Bateson further revises dominant conceptions of the literary value of
a text such as Perceval’s by claiming that it goes beyond recent ‘autobio-
graphical books … dealing with the writers’ experiences during psychosis’,
books that serve merely ‘as specimens of psychotic or postpsychotic ut-
terance rather than as scientific contributions in their own right’.120 In-
stead John Perceval ‘achieved something more’ because ‘in his compulsive
struggle to make sense of his psychotic experiences, he discovered what we
155
Mary Elene Wood
would today call the Freudian Unconscious and related this system to of
phenomena to what Freud later called the “psychopathology of everyday
life”’.121 Equally importantly (and here Perceval begins to sound quite a bit
like Bateson himself ),
His theoretical position is perhaps midway between that of Freud and that
of William Blake. What Blake called the Creative Imagination Perceval
assigns to some inner action of the Almighty. His language is often that of
theology, where his thoughts are those of a scientist.122
Here Bateson introduces the main threads of Perceval’s memoir as he un-

derstands them: it is a diachronic narrative of an inner journey (and as such
replaces the father’s story of quest, action and achievement), an insightful
theoretical analysis of schizophrenia, and a chronicle of mysteries that have
no teleology, no resolution. As in Freud’s analysis of Schreber, these threads
appear in Bateson’s own work; the discussion of the memoir of schizophre-
nia thus establishes a kind of mute interlocuter—the analysand who does
not respond directly but serves as a wall that bounces back the echo of the
analyst’s own ideas and words. Like Freud, Bateson expresses an admira-
tion of his subject’s insights that verges on awe. The main difference here
is that where Freud turns away from the mystery he sees within schizo-
phrenia, Bateson intermittently embraces it, moving between psychiatric
analysis and retreat before the unsolvable mysteries of Perceval’s psychosis.
For the most part presenting Perceval as a kind of misunderstood equal,
Bateson draws out of the Perceval’s narrative the insights into schizophre-
nia that Bateson himself has expressed elsewhere. Bateson observes that
what Perceval ‘has to say on the subject is first and foremost this: that it is
the task or duty of the physician or of those who love the patient to un-
derstand. The patient’s utterance is not to be brushed off as crazy nor is his
behavior to be penalized with cold tubs or manacles.’123 Here Bateson asserts
through Perceval’s point of view that the patient diagnosed with schizophre-
nia should be listened to and treated as a thinking, feeling human being.
Most importantly, Bateson asserts via Perceval that the patient should be
approached with a manner that is ‘both accepting and critical’. According to
Bateson’s reading, ‘John’s later recovery was facilitated whenever he encoun-
156
tered primary acceptance accompanied by doubt or criticism.’124

Significantly, this last sentence reveals Bateson’s delight in finding
this narrative whose chronology apparently supports Bateson’s belief that
schizophrenia is part of a healing psychic process in which the patient, in
an attempt to escape the impossible emotional double binds of family life,
plunges into a psychotic state of mind that under the right circumstances
can actually transform itself back into a healthful state. Bateson sees the
value in Perceval’s narrative and those of others with schizophrenia precise-
ly in the ways that they demonstrate this self-healing trajectory. According
to these narratives,
It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a
course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery
which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he
comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never
embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would
appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony—a death and
a rebirth—into which the novice may have been precipitated by his fam-
ily life or by adventitious circumstance, but which in its course is largely
steered by endogenous process.125
By using this interpretive lens, in which schizophrenia leads the patient

into a kind of death and then rebirth, Bateson reads Perceval’s narrative
as tracing a path through illness to recovery. Along the way, Bateson high-
lights the ways in which the asylum and its treatments actually worsened
Perceval’s condition by using methods that Bateson clearly ties to present-
day (1960s) approaches to severe mental illness, observing that ‘then, as
now, the principal modes of treatment were such as to reduce the patient’s
sense of his own worth and responsibility. To the strait jackets, the cold
tubs, and the isolation rooms of those days, modern institutional psychia-
try has added the shock therapies and the tranquilizing drugs, but the
principles of treatment are not much changed.’126 Then as now, according
to Bateson, the patient was not informed about decisions involving his
own treatment and he or she often became isolated and withdrawn, af-
fording the patient ‘plenty of unexplained and painful experiences around
157
Mary Elene Wood
which he could build delusional explanations’.127

Yet in Perceval’s case, according to Bateson, he uses his own intellect
and reasoning powers to take a step back and begin to understand what is
happening to him, accepting and analyzing the doubts that begin to enter
his mind. This step fits in with the trajectory of the disease as Bateson un-
derstands it. While he admits to having little information about Perceval’s
early childhood that could help him decipher the dynamics that may have
led to his illness (similar to the missing key Freud laments in his analysis of
Schreber), Bateson extrapolates the past relations from the present form of
the illness, thus by inference filling in the gaps in Perceval’s chronological
narrative. According to Bateson the paranoia of the schizophrenic ‘is a de-
nial of those accumulated inner fears and weaknesses which long and bitter
experience of being put in the wrong has built up. Perceval says nothing of
what his parents and siblings did to him to reinforce these feelings of weak-
ness and unworthiness, but he narrates in some detail how he was treated
by his hallucinatory voices.’128
The voices, then, echo those of early childhood. Yet, according to
Bateson, the internalization of these voices allows Perceval then to play
out a response to them that never could happen when he was a child. The
voices begin to admit the doubts that Perceval was earlier never allowed to
entertain in the double-binds of childhood. By ‘accepting the fact of the
delusion and reinforcing the doubt’, they eventually lead him to accept
the doubt and thus eventually to reject the delusions. Thus Perceval enacts
through his narrative Bateson’s belief that ‘this is one of the most interest-
ing characteristics of the strange condition known as schizophrenia: that
the disease, if it be one, seems sometimes to have curative properties.’129
Here Bateson questions whether this process can even be called a disease,
the implication being that such a curative chain of events is potentially
healing if allowed to run its course.
And indeed this is what Bateson sees as happening in Perceval’s case,
as he highlights Perceval’s growing awareness not only of the abuses of the
punitive asylum ‘treatments’, but his realization of ‘what is now generally
recognized, namely, that the utterances of a schizophrenic and his delu-
sions are to be taken as metaphoric rather than literal’.130 For Bateson,
the course of Perceval’s so-called illness becomes a series of ‘discoveries’
158
in which Perceval progresses in his understanding of his own illness. He

‘discovers also that his voices are remarkably unreliable—that what they
promise does not happen’ and also ‘discovers the power of his imagina-
tion to create perceptions and images, either in the ear or in the eye, and
this relieves much of his anxiety regarding the phenomena of hallucina-
tions.’131 All these discoveries, while they cannot abolish the sounds of the
voices themselves, do lead Perceval, unlike Schreber, to doubt and thus to
analyze the reality of his perceptions. It is through this doubt and analysis,
according to Bateson, that he arrives at a theory of the unconscious not so
different from that of Freud. Writes Bateson,
He discovered what we would today call the Freudian Unconscious and

related this system of phenomena to what Freud later called the ‘psychopa-
thology of everyday life’. He even observed the creative processes that occur
during perception—those processes by which we make after-images or at-
tribute imaginary forms to ink blots or to clouds in the sky—and he went
on from this to realize that his own hallucinations might be phenomena
of this sort.132
Yet while Bateson grants Perceval the narrative position of the observ-
ing scientist evaluating his own experience, he remains troubled (as does
Freud in his discussion of Schreber’s memoir) by those perceptions and
their persistence. In this sense, Bateson’s longing for a chronological nar-
rative that ends in recovery gives way before Perceval’s own insistence that
the voices continue to be a real part of his life even up to the time of the
memoir’s writing. Indeed, Bateson’s own narrative takes on a form that
turns back upon itself, echoing the patterns of return evident in Perceval’s
memoir. Immediately before Bateson begins a section of the introduction
on ‘what system of circumstances may have been responsible for forcing
Perceval to embark upon this extraordinary voyage and what circumstanc-
es may have hindered its progress’,133 Bateson remarks that ‘the voices are
still real, they still intend certain meanings; it was he [Perceval] that was in
error in his understanding of them.’134 Bateson moves awkwardly between
an acknowledgment of the voices’ survival to an insistence on cause and
effect, on an attention to the ‘system of circumstances’ at play in Perceval’s
159
Mary Elene Wood
schizophrenia. In other words, he returns to the assertion of a diachronic

chain of events, yet it is a chain that he has already visited several pages
before. Bateson’s own narrative thus refuses a straightforward chronology
even as it reasserts it; the ‘Introduction’ has a form that turns back upon
itself, spiral-like, as he considers yet again the beginnings of Perceval’s life,
just as he did in the opening passage on the assassination of his father the
Prime Minister, and as he did again in the telling of Perceval’s break from
reality.135
It is just such a turning back upon his own story that Bateson sees
in Perceval’s confrontation with the abusive treatments of asylum doctors
and orderlies. Bateson comments that if the institutions ‘were hindering
and even exacerbating circumstances during the progress of the psycho-
sis, it is reasonable to look for similar circumstances in Perceval’s relations
with his family to see whether these might not have been precipitating or
conditional causes’.136 The phrase ‘it is reasonable’ is the logical turn of
phrase that allows for chronological time to be broken in favor of a cyclical
return. The phrase recasts the returning of psychosis as a rational revisiting
of earlier patterns. Similarly, it validates Bateson’s own return to the begin-
ning of Perceval’s life in a narrative move that shifts the genre from story to
analytical essay, departing from the one-directional trajectory from illness
to recovery that Bateson himself suggested earlier in the introduction.
It is precisely in these jumps from life narrative to analytical and argu-
mentative prose that imagination and desire rend the careful construction
of an analysis in Bateson’s text. Once again invoking his own narrator’s ra-
tionality, Bateson claims that ‘it is reasonable to picture the young Perceval
before his psychosis’, 137exercising an act of imagination at the very point
that he asserts rational argument. Bateson’s imaginings reveal, among oth-
er things, a longing for the story Perceval failed to live, the psychologically
‘healthy’ story of an unburdened psyche. At one point, Bateson seems al-
most to berate Perceval for his failures of theoretical understanding, writ-
ing that ‘He ought to have taken the responsibility for doubt upon his
conscience.’138 Bateson seems to want to erase the story of Protestant guilt
and unworthiness that he sees as lying at the root of Perceval’s schizophre-
nia, rewriting it from the beginning as a story of self-acceptance and the
admission of doubt that is the mark of reasonability.
160
Yet the desire implicit in Bateson’s rational assertions is allowed to lin-

ger in Bateson’s text, invoking doubt—in Bateson’s introduction—similar
to that which Bateson sees as the sign of the healing schizophrenic. Both
desire and doubt, contained within Bateson’s often tentative analysis, grant
a certain legitimacy to Perceval’s narrative voice, even as it claims the delu-
sions have never fully dissipated.
Like Freud in his discussion of Schreber, Bateson presents to his reader
a ‘schizophrenic’ writer who has learned to question his delusions but who
still hears voices and will not in the end reject the reality of his own percep-
tions. This is the point where Freud abandoned the psychoanalytic treat-
ment of schizophrenia, on the one hand casting the psychotic as unable
to break the shell of an intransigient narcissism and on the other revealing
that Schreber reflected back to the psychoanalyst (in a startling reversal of
Foucault’s madhouse mirror) the frightening narcissism of his theoretical
world. Bateson allows Perceval the mystery of his persistent voices, even
though his own narrative, like Freud’s, cannot hold a coherent shape in
the face of a narrative that will not cast off completely its schizophrenia.
Where Freud retreated from the attempted interpretation of psychosis but
held fast to his interest in dreams, Bateson eschews the universe of the un-
conscious and in his focus on communicative messages remains troubled
by any discussion of perceptions that are out of the ordinary. In the end,
he can maintain the narrative stance of neither analytical scientist nor em-
pathetic reporter and his introduction founders in its search for ground on
which to stand. Yet this foundering is a productive one; it allows Perceval’s
voice to emerge as it is. Bateson’s ‘Introduction’ enters into dialogue with
Perceval’s narrative but in the end does not overwhelm or subsume it into
contemporary psychological theory.
The mysteries that Freud dismisses in his Postscript with the reasser-
tion of science and the creation of the ‘primitive’ other are allowed to stand
with Bateson’s statement that ‘To evaluate a psychosis is perhaps impos-
sible.’139 It is the ‘perhaps’ here, the insertion of doubt (of which Bateson
laments the disappearance in Perceval’s story), that differentiates Bateson’s
own theorizing from the delusory narcissistic world-building that Freud
feared collapsed his own thinking into Schreber’s. As the sign of metarep-
resentation (whose absence marks schizophrenic thinking), Bateson’s ‘per-
161
Mary Elene Wood
haps’ allows the coexistence of both Perceval’s thought-world and his own,
and admits the possibility that those two worlds may touch and affect one
another without mutual destruction.
I don’t mean to imply that Bateson’s introduction succeeds where
Freud’s essay fails. While Bateson’s narrative doesn’t push towards cohe-
sion and coherence as does Freud’s, it’s also much less complex and much
less self-reflective. Freud’s multi-leveled analysis, which overtly interprets
rather than merely introducing Schreber’s memoir reveals an awareness of
its own struggles and limitations. More importantly, while Bateson rejects
Freud’s privileging of libidinal forces as an explanation of schizophrenia,
his discussion of Perceval’s memoir in terms of family systems of commu-
nication would hardly be possible without Freud’s prior theorization of the
processes through which a subject comes into being by relating to others.
Yet what Bateson’s introduction does offer is an acceptance of the in-
adequacy of narrative to contain, explain, or summarize Perceval’s memoir.
As Sergio Manghi has eloquently pointed out, rather than distance and
then sacrifice the person living with schizophrenia as a social scapegoat,
Bateson’s introduction lingers in the discomfort of the grey areas.140 In
this particular narrative encounter, the introduction remains suspended,
its own momentum of desire for some kind of final explanation left hang-
ing in the air.
Interestingly, this suspension of desire, its refusal to move towards clo-
sure, is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize in their second
‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ volume, A Thousand Plateaus, whose title
they trace back to Bateson himself, in relation not to Perceval but to his
work as an anthropologist in Bali, where, in his view, sexual desire (as
well as argument and other socio-cultural practices) is expected to remain
at peak intensity rather than resolving through climax. According to De-
leuze and Guattari, ‘Gregory Bateson uses the word “plateau” to designate
something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities
whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point
or external end.’141 The theorists use Bateson’s finding to remark that ‘It
is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions
and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them
on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.’142 In their
162
view, schizophrenia is defined as that which dwells in this ‘continuous,

self-vibrating region of intensities’, undermining the incessant movement
of Western capitalist structures towards transcendent ends, the closure and
(empty) fulfillment of desire.
While Bateson and his anthropological observations get left behind
in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion, it might be useful to turn their use
of his interest in unresolved desire back in his direction to where he grap-
ples, through fragmented narrative, with Perceval’s written experiences
with schizophrenia. It is precisely in giving permission for the narrative to
flounder, to turn back upon itself, to move in spurts and laggings without
really ending up anywhere that Bateson’s ‘Introduction’ engages fully with
Perceval’s story and allows for an open, democratic encounter to occur. Be-
cause of Bateson’s failure to create a closed frame for the memoir, Perceval’s
words emerge with authority, if also with bafflement and an unavoidable
absence of full explanation.
Notes
1. ‘Psychotherapies’, National Institute of Mental Health, accessed 20 April,

2012, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/psychotherapies/index.shtml.
2. ‘Schizophrenia and Psychosis Treatment’, PsychCentral, accessed 20 April
2012, http://psychcentral.com/disorders/schizophrenia/schizo_treatment2.
htm.
3. C. Baldwin, ‘Narrative, Ethics and People with Severe Mental Illness’,
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39:11-12 (Nov. 2005),
1022–9: 1023.
4. Ibid., 1023.
5. C.B. Chabot, Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 106.
6. S. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in E. Jones (ed.), Collected Papers,
Vol. III, trans. A. and J. Strachey (1925; London: Hogarth Press and Insti-
tute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 390-470: 457.
7. The German title, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, has also been
translated as Memories of my Nervous Illness and Memories of a Neuropath.
163
Mary Elene Wood
Freud identified Schreber as having a paranoid form of dementia praecox, the

early-ninetenth-century diagnosis that later became schizophrenia.
8. Like Chabot, I rely on the Strachey translation of Freud’s essay. I justify this
partly because of my interest in the ways that Freud’s work entered Anglo-
American understandings of psychoanalysis and partly because my knowl-
edge of German doesn’t allow me the in-depth engagement with the original
text that I am able to do with the translation. I recognize the limitations of
this approach, especially given Lacan’s valid complaint that ‘we forget, de-
spite Freud’s reminders, the apparatus of the signifier’. Nevertheless, I’ll ven-
ture to say that because I am focussing less on the interpretation of words
and more on narrative positionings the translation provides a legitimate
text. See J. Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955-1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book Three, J-A. Miller (ed.), trans. Russell Grigg (NY: Norton, 1993), 237.
9. Most notably, in The Psychoses, 1955-1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book Three, Jacques Lacan pushes beyond Freud’s analysis of Schreber’s
memoir to suggest that those with schizophrenia are stuck in the body-cen-
tered world of the imaginary, unable to progress into the symbolic register,
where language symbolizes bodies and objects. Followers of Lacan, such as
Janet Lucas, continue the analysis of Freud’s essay in this vein. Other readers
have examined Freud’s Schreber essay in biographical, socio-historical, or
philosophical terms, often focussing on Freud’s fraught confrontation with
his own homosexual feelings. See, for example, Jay Geller’s 1994 ‘Freud
v. Freud: Freud’s Reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten
eines Nervenkranken’, in which he analyzes the essay in the light of Freud’s
letters to Ferenczi regarding his relationships with both Fleiss and Jung.
In his 1988 biography of Freud, Peter Gay discusses the essay as part of a
biographical narrative on the development of Freud’s theories of repression
and sexual development. Thomas Dalzell’s recent book Freud’s Schreber
Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: On Subjective Disposition to Psycho-
sis argues that Freud did not reject the possibility of hereditary biological
predisposition to psychosis but made this etiology secondary to disorders of
psychological development. He thus uses Freud’s essay on Schreber to locate
Freud’s theory in relation to that of other psychiatrists of the time. J. Lacan,
The Psychoses, 1955-1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, op. cit.,
(note 9); J. Lucas, ‘The Semiotics of Schreber’s Memoirs: Sign, Sinthome
and Play’, The Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan.com: 4 (Spring 2003); J.
164
Geller, ‘Freud v. Freud: Freud’s Reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwür-

digkeiten eines Nervenkranken’, in S.L. Gilman, et al. (eds.), Reading Freud’s
Reading (New York University Press, 1994), 180-210: 199; P. Gay, Freud:
A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 277-83. T. Dalzell, Freud’s
Schreber Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: On Subjective Disposition to
Psychosis (London: Karnac, 2011).
10. G. Delueze, Gilles and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Z. Lothane,
In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry (NY: Routledge, 1992).
See also Elias Canetti’s 1960 Crowds and Power, which reads in Schreber’s
memoir a foreshadowing of Hitler’s megalomania, and, for an analysis based
in philosophy, Louis Sass’s The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber,
and the Schizophrenic Mind, which posits that the memoir is concerned
more with epistemology than with power. In another philosophical ap-
proach to Schreber’s memoir, Angela Woods rejects Freud’s focus on Schre-
ber’s psychosexual development, turning instead to Schreber’s relationship
with God and his representation, to both God and his reading audience, of
his experiences as sublime. E. Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. C. Stewart
(New York: Continuum, 1973), 55-70; L. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion:
Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1994); A. Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophre-
nia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 76–107.
11. P. Brooks, ‘Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understandings’,
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: A.A.
Knopf, 1984), 270.
12. M. Gazzaniga, T. Heatherton, and D. Halpern (eds.), Psychological Science,
third edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 689.
13. See S. Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, E. Jones (ed.), Collected
Papers, Vol. IV., trans. J. Riviere (1925; London: Hogarth Press and Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, 1950), 30-59: 31. Lacan writes at length about Freud’s
distinction between paranoia, the label he assigns to Schreber, and other
forms of schizophrenia, the latter being marked by fixation in an earlier
stage of development, but this discussion lies outside the bounds of my
concerns in this chapter. J. Lacan, The Psychoses, op. cit. (note 8), 4. In ‘On
Narcissism’, Freud appears to be exploring the role of narcissism in the
165
Mary Elene Wood
schizophrenias in general. For further discussion on Freud’s distinction

between paranoia and dementia praecox, see T. Dalzell, op. cit. (note 9), 62.
14. Freud, ‘The Defence of Neuro-Psychoses’ (ed.), E. Jones, Collected Papers,
Vol. I., trans. Joan Riviere (1924; London: Hogarth Press and Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1950), 59-75: 62.
15. C. McCabe, ‘Introduction’, The Schreber Case, trans. A. Webber (New York:
Penguin, 2003), 9-10.
16. S. Freud, ‘The Defence of Neuro-Psychoses’, op. cit. (note 13), 63.
17. Ibid., 72–3.
18. Ibid., 73.
19. S. Freud, ‘Further Remarks on the Defence Neuro-Psychoses’ (ed.), E.
Jones, Collected Papers, Vol. I., trans. J. Rivere. (1924; London: Hogarth
Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950), 155–182: 154.
20. Ibid., 178.
21. Ibid., 176.
22. Key feminist works on the Dora case include C. Clement and H. Cixous,
La jeune née (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975); H. Cixous, Portrait
de Dora (Paris: des femme, 1976); J. Rose, ‘Dora: Fragment of an Analysis’,
m/f 2 (1978); S. Gaerhart, ‘The Scene of Psychoanalysis: the Unanswered
Questions of Dora’, Diacritics (Spring, 1979); M. Ramas, ‘Freud’s Dora,
Dora’s Hysteria: The Negation of a Woman’s Rebellion’ Feminist Studies (Fall
1980); and T. Moi, ‘Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemol-
ogy in Freud’s Dora’, Feminist Review 9 (1981), 60-74. For a good collec-
tion of essays on the Dora case, see C. Bernheiner and C. Kahane (eds.),
In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, Second Ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990).
23. T. Moi, op. cit. (note 22), 72-4.
24. Freud, ‘Further Remarks on the Defence Neuro-Psychoses’, op. cit., 176.
25. S. Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1961), 6.
26. Freud, ‘Further Remarks on the Defence Neuro-Psychoses’, op. cit., 177.
27. C.G. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, Bollingen Series 20, trans.
R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 119–20.
28. C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, trans. F. Peterson and A.A.
Brill (New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co.,
1909), xvi.
166
29. Jung, Psychogenesis, op. cit. (note 27), 7.

30. S. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, op. cit. (note 6), 393.
31. Ibid., 388.
32. Ibid., 387–8.
33. Chabot, op. cit.(note 5), 50.
34. Interestingly, Freud speculates about contacting Schreber, but never actually
does it. He writes in a letter to Jung: ‘Since the man I still alive, I was think-
ing of asking him for certain information (e.g., when he got married) and
for permission to work on his story. But perhaps that would be risky. What
do you think?’ W. McGuire (ed.), The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence
between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XCIV, trans. R.
Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
214F (Oct. 1, 1910), 358.
35. S. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6,), 388.
36. S. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6), 389.
37. E. Jones, 276–7.
38. S. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6), 396–7.
39. Ibid., 397.
40. Chabot, op. cit. (note 5), 5.
41. See J. Geller in particular on Freud’s own fraught feelings of homosexuality.
Op. cit. (note 9), 199.
42. McCabe, op. cit. (note 14), xii-xiii.
43. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 29), 395–6.
44. Ibid., 401.
45. Ibid., 401.
46. Ibid., 402.
47. Ibid., 403.
48. Ibid., 417.
49. Ibid., 417.
50. Ibid., 417.
51. Ibid., 421.
52. G. Prince, “The Disnarrated’, Style 22 (1988), 1-8.
53. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6), 444.
54. Ibid., 448–9.
55. Ibid., 455.
167
Mary Elene Wood
56. Ibid., 461.

57. Ibid., 457.
58. Ibid., 457.
59. Ibid., 446-7.
60. Ibid., 444.
61. Ibid., 466.
62. Freud’s comment in the essay itself is echoed by a similar concern stated in
a letter to Jung, dated Oct. 1, 1910: ‘During my trip I was able to amplify
this theory a little, and now I mean to test my progress against Schreber’s
case history and various other publications on paranoia. Still, measured by
my original design, the whole thing is so incomplete that I do not know
when I shall be able to publish it or how long it will be. In any case the out-
come will be a study on Schreber and people will think I designed my theory
with the book in mind.’ W. McGuire, ed., op. cit. (note 34), 214F: 358.
63. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6), 467–8.
64. Ibid., 468.
65. Ibid., 468.
66. Ibid., 469n.
67. Ibid., 470
68. Janet Lucas has astutely observed that Schreber replaces his failed religious
belief with Dr. Flechsig, but ‘when Flechsig is “exposed” as incapable of
“curing” Schreber, and as such, science is “exposed” as incapable of continu-
ing to function as a substitute, Schreber collides with the abyss in place of
the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, i.e., he confronts a thoroughly inept
God who is (not surprisingly) “embarrassingly exposed”’. Lucas, op. cit.
(note 9).
69. Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes’, op. cit. (note 6), 470.
70. Ibid., 470.
71. B. Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration and Modern and Con-
temporary Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 13–4.
72. Ibid., 12.
73. J.M. Masson, (ed. and trans.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1985), 264.
74. McCabe, op. cit. (note 5), xx.
75. See J. Lacan, J.–A. Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book One:
Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. J. Forrester (Cambridge:
168
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 114-15.

76. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, op. cit., (note 12), 51.
77. Ibid., 53.
78. Lacan, The Seminar: Book One, op. cit. (note 5), 114.
79. For a start, on the second page of the essay, he footnotes an assertion that
the withdrawal of libido from the external world in paraphrenia marks ‘an
effort towards recovery’ by urging a comparison with his discussion of the
end of the world in the Schreber analysis. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, op. cit.
(note 12), 31–2.
80. Ibid., 37.
81. Ibid., 39.
82. S. Freud, ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, E. Jones (ed.), Collected Papers, Vol. II.,
trans. Joan Riviere (1924; London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1953), 250–4: 251.
83. Ibid., 252.
84. Ibid., 253.
85. Ibid., 253.
86. Ibid., 254.
87. Perceval’s memoir was originally in two volumes, the first of which was
written in 1835 and published in 1838, while the second was published
in 1840. The original title was A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by
a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement: Designed to Explain
the Causes and the Nature of Insanity, and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct
Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under That Calamity. Bateson
edited and combined the two volumes, eliminating a ‘long invective Preface’
and passages he considered repetitive. See G. Bateson, ‘Introduction’, Per-
ceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832, xx-xxi.
88. In a 1910 letter to Jung, Freud refers to ‘the wonderful Schreber, who ought
to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospi-
tal’. Quoted in Chabot, op. cit. (note 5), 34.
89. Ibid., 93–107.
90. E. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of
Prozac (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 177.
91. J. Read, F. Seymour and L.R. Mosher, ‘Unhappy Families’, in J. Read, L.R.
Mosher, and R.P. Bentall (eds.), Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and
Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia (London: Routledge, 2004), 253–8: 253.
169
Mary Elene Wood
92. Ibid., 258.

93. Ibid., 258. See also V. Aderhold and E. Gottwalz, ‘Family Therapy and
Schizophrenia’ in Read, Mosher, and Bentall (eds.), op. cit. (note 88), 335–
47: 340. They also include Bateson in a history of family systems theory
that moves from Palo Alto in the 1960s to Milan in the 1970s (Palazzoli)
and then Heidelberg in the early 2000s (Retzer and Simon).
94. J.H. Jenkins, ‘Schizophrenia as a Paradigm Case for Understanding
Fundamental Human Processes’, in J.H. Jenkins and R.J. Barrett (eds.),
Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience (London:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32.
95. J. Hoffmeyer’s essay collection A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as
Precursor to Biosemiotics (New York: Springer, 2008) is concerned not with
Bateson’s theories of mental illness but with his influence on concepts in
contemporary biology that compare the dynamic interconnectedness of life
forms to the functioning of linguistic sign systems. N.G. Charlton’s Under-
standing Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth Understanding
Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth (Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press, 2008) examines Bateson’s legacy in relation
to aesthetics and ecological theory. Other works on Bateson focus on his
communications theories. See R.W. Rieber (ed.), The Individual, Com-
munication, and Society: Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1989).
96. M.C. Bateson, ‘Angels Fear Revisited’, in J. Hoffmeyer (ed.), A Legacy for
Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics. (New york:
Springer. 2008), 21.
97. G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psy-
chiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), xxii.
98. At the same time that he abhorred fundamentalist doctrine that posited a
mind external to the phenomenal world, Bateson ‘was stimulated by expo-
sure to religious images, metaphors and poetry that demanded a different
kind of understanding’. M.C. Bateson, op. cit. (note 93), 19. According to
Mary Catherine Bateson, ‘For him, as a scientist, to begin to talk about reli-
gion and aesthetics was to step onto dangerous ground–Where Angels Fear to
Tread–paces he felt it was essential to venture, but where he was going to get
into trouble with his colleagues, and he knew it. Yet the exclusion of certain
170
ideas–the Cartesian partition of ways of knowing–seemed to him damag-

ing’. Idem., 20.
99. Meyer had a profound influence on early twentieth-century American
psychiatry. His focus on the conscious mind and observable behavior largely
determined the course of American psychiatry away from Freudianism and
towards more empiricist theories and methods of treatment. See N. Hale,
The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Ameri-
cans, 1917-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 167–72.
100. H.S. Sullivan, Schizophrenia as a Human Process (New York: W.W. Norton,
1962), 15.
101. For Bateson, the ‘sacred’ refers less to God or religious doctrine than to that
very interconnectedness, the web of living systems, that serves as foundation
for his psychological theories.
102. J. Perceval, 328.
103. Ibid., 329.
104. G. Bateson, Steps, op. cit. (note 97), 153.
105. Ibid., 154.
106. Ibid., 150–1.
107. Ibid., 151.
108. Ibid., 84.
109. Ibid., xxix.
110. Ibid., 246.
111. Ibid., 246.
112. Ibid., 246.
113. Ibid., 250.
114. Ibid., 251.
115. Ibid., 251.
116. Ibid., 260.
117. Ibid., 261.
118. This tension between psychoanalytic narrative projected by the analyst and
the façade of free dialogue runs throughout psychoanalysis. In Bateson’s
case, it appears particularly in his ‘Metalogues’ with his young daughter, in
which he highlights the dialogic nature of their communication without
fully acknowledging the power difference between himself and his daughter,
a difference intrinsic to their age difference, familial relationship, and status
as studier–object of study. See Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind,
171
Mary Elene Wood
op. cit. (note 97), 3–58.

119. Bateson, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., (note 87), v.
120. Ibid., v.
121. Ibid., v-vi.
122. Ibid., vi.
123. Ibid., viii.
124. Ibid., viii.
125. Ibid., xiv.
126. Ibid., xiii.
127. Ibid., xiii.
128. Ibid., x.
129. Ibid., xi.
130. Ibid., xv.
131. Ibid., xv.
132. Ibid., vi.
133. Ibid., xvi.
134. Ibid., xvi.
135. Ibid., x.
136. Ibid., xvi.
137. Ibid., xviii.
135. Ibid., ix.
136. Ibid., xix.
137. Writes Manghi, ‘Sacrifice converts a scenario of dis-orderly symmetrical rec-
iprocities from a threatening crescendo—a schismogenetic scenario, Bateson
would say—into an orderly social scenario. No longer stickily, violently
grey’. S. Manghi, ‘Traps for Sacrifice: Bateson’s Schizophrenia and Girard’s
Scapegoat’, World Futures 62 (2006), 561-75: 571.
138. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004), 24.
139. Ibid., 24.
172

Life Writing and Schizophrenia Encounters at The E... - (3 A Striking Similarity With Our Theory' Freud and Bateson Read Memoi... )

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Life Writing and Schizophrenia Encounters at The E... - (3 A Striking Similarity With Our Theory' Freud and Bateson Read Memoi... )

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Life Writing and Schizophrenia Encounters at The E... - (3 A Striking Similarity With Our Theory' Freud and Bateson Read Memoi... )

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

3

‘A Striking Similarity with our Theory’:

narrative coherence and continuity. As psychoanalyst and literary critic

Sigmund Freud and psychosis

In popular understandings of schizophrenia and other forms of psycho-

In the early 1900s, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and treatments based

Freud remarks that ‘in this collapse of everything valuable…the dream

The contrast between Freud’s early hopefulness about using psychoanalysis

conviction that his job was that of interpreter, knowledgeable reader of

dreams, going so far as to say that ‘the complexes as developed by Jung

Following Jung’s taxonomy of dementia praecox and related disorders,

an unusual keenness alike of intellect and of observation’, remarking in a

Freud’s emphasis on story runs counter in early twentieth-century

Freud, Schreber’s Memoir, and the voice of the narrator

Daniel Paul Schreber had suffered a brief episode of hypochondria from

Judge in the Court of Appeals in Leipzig. He began to experience insom-

homosexual feelings, and the countertransference that might as a result

The most essential feature of his mission of redemption is that it must be

Freud’s focalization through Schreber here is marked by both ironic dis-

possession of what we are looking for—a translation of the paranoic mode

Flechsig, according to the patient, committed, or attempted to commit,

In relation to the larger narrative in the essay, this paragraph is striking

Schreber’s ‘rays of God’, which are made up of a condensation of the sun’s

sumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can

heritance and belonging within a particular group.65 Freud supports this

of ethnology’,70 he substitutes the narrative of science for that of the man

ber, where Freud’s narrator intermittently dissolves into Schreber’s point

developed from pathological processes helps construct the person expe-

to his Schreber essay, it continues as a strong thread in his discussions of

Gregory Bateson and the ‘infinite regress of contexts’

In his introduction to John Perceval’s early nineteenth century memoir en-

to dynamic familial relations evolving within larger, interconnected worlds

When Gregory spoke about the two great stochastic processes—learning,

While for Sullivan the environmental etiological factors for schizo-

Schizophrenia and different logical types

As a narrator who is not necessarily reliable or conscious of his own com-

In a 1967 essay entitled ‘Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive

In the conventional interpretation of dream, another set of relata, often sexu-

Moving from this argument about dream interpretation to a discussion

in the world of communication the only relevant entities or ‘realities’ are

The individual psyche is a place of message retrieval and intersection. Con-

For the individual identified as schizophrenic, messages of at least two

Their behavior seems characterized by conspicuous or exaggerated errors

Gregory Bateson reads John Perceval’s memoir

Bateson’s understanding of schizophrenia as rooted in communication-

Here Bateson introduces the main threads of Perceval’s memoir as he un-

tered primary acceptance accompanied by doubt or criticism.’124

By using this interpretive lens, in which schizophrenia leads the patient

which he could build delusional explanations’.127

in which Perceval progresses in his understanding of his own illness. He

He discovered what we would today call the Freudian Unconscious and

schizophrenia. In other words, he returns to the assertion of a diachronic

Yet the desire implicit in Bateson’s rational assertions is allowed to lin-

view, schizophrenia is defined as that which dwells in this ‘continuous,

1. ‘Psychotherapies’, National Institute of Mental Health, accessed 20 April,

Freud identified Schreber as having a paranoid form of dementia praecox, the

Geller, ‘Freud v. Freud: Freud’s Reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwür-

schizophrenias in general. For further discussion on Freud’s distinction

29. Jung, Psychogenesis, op. cit. (note 27), 7.