In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schreber's illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schreber's troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schreber's illness.

Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schreber's two psychiatrists, Paul Flechsig and Guido Weber, Zvi Lothane offers a stunning reappraisal of the Schreber case that overturns virtually all previous opinion. Lothane examines both the man and his milieu in a way that allows the reader
fresh access not only to the tragedy of Schreber's illness but also to his heroic, if doomed, attempts to come to terms with his condition through writing. In the process, he persuasively demonstrates that important issues of both psychiatric diagnosis and psychoanalytic interpretation have heretofore been compromised by a failure to pay sufficient attention to Schreber's interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts.

D.C. Henry Zvi Lothane is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, N.Y., and a psychoanalyst renowned for his books on Daniel Paul Schreber and papers on Sabina Spielrein.

Acknowledgments, List of some abbreviations used in this book, Man in Search of a Soul, Paul Schreber's Story, The Life and Legacy of Moritz Schreber, Moritz Schreber's Philosophy of Medicine and Education, Paul Flechsig and the First Biological Psychiatry, Guido Weber and the First Antipsychiatry, How Others Interpreted Schreber, Schreber as Interpreter and Thinker, The Dreams and Dramas of Love, Appendix: Paul Schreber's Clinical Chart, References, Index