with scientific or causal. Looked at from within, however, constructive understanding means redemption.
“Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering and easiness of living.”[1]
Starting from these considerations as to the psychology of those mental patients to whom the Schreber case belongs, we must, from the “objective-scientific” standpoint, reduce the structural phantasy of the patient to its simple and most generally valid elements. This Freud had done. But that is only half of the work to be done. The other half is the constructive understanding of Schreber’s system. The question is: What end, what freedom, did the patient hope to achieve by the creation of his system?
The scientific thinker of to-day will regard this question as inappropriate. The psychiatrist will certainly smile at it, for he is thoroughly assured of the universal validity of his causalism, he knows the psyche merely as something that is made, descendent, reactive. Not uncommonly there lurks the unconscious prejudice that the psyche is a brain-secretion.
Looking at such a morbid system without preconception, and asking ourselves what goal this delusional system is aiming at, we see, in fact, firstly, that it is endeavouring to get at something, and secondly, that the patient also devotes all his will-power to the service of the system. There are patients who develop their delusions with scientific thoroughness, often dragging in an immense material of comparison and proof. Schreber certainly belongs to this class. Others do not proceed so thoroughly and learnedly, but content themselves with heaping up synonymous expressions for that at which they are aiming. The case of the patient I have described, who assumes all kinds of titles, is a good instance of this.
The patient’s unmistakable striving to express something through and by means of his delusion, Freud conceives retrospectively, as the satisfaction of his infantile wishes by means of imagination. Adler reduces it to the desire for power.
- ↑ Nietzsche, “Thus spake Zarathustra.”
