Yeah I’ll be discussing the childhood trauma angle in a later entry. What’s interesting isn’t just that Schreber suffered abuse from his father, but also the nature of the abuse and its biopolitical side. Moritz Schreber’s health obsession and the kinds of imagery of health it involved seem to have had an important impact on the content of Schreber’s fantasy (e.g. the heavy focus on nerves), and it’s also relevant that Flechsig’s approach to mental illness was similarly reductionist.
While the neglect of childhood treatment/ mistreatment/ paternal fanatical sadism is glaring and consistent with freud's rejection of the seduction theory, I do think that schizoanalysis might be onto something with thr rejection of etiology as deterministic causality. What is important might be the political normalization of mistreatment and the suppression of any narrative of surviving violence and then overcoming it as a present moment pathway of change and challenging status quos of patriarchal child hatred in all forms. Laing caught my attention when he said that if you are in prison what is the point of finding out why you are there your attention should be on how to get out - etiology and family system/abuse determinism may not function on that pragmatic way. But I wonder what kinds of creativity Schreiber and the people surrounding him and reading his story might elaborate if he were considered in light of his childhood mistreatment and oppressions, as the liberation of children has never been a concern of psychiatry but may be a natural affinity for schizoanalysis.
Do you see any merit in Alice Miller's work on Schreber? Seems pretty convincing!
Yeah I’ll be discussing the childhood trauma angle in a later entry. What’s interesting isn’t just that Schreber suffered abuse from his father, but also the nature of the abuse and its biopolitical side. Moritz Schreber’s health obsession and the kinds of imagery of health it involved seem to have had an important impact on the content of Schreber’s fantasy (e.g. the heavy focus on nerves), and it’s also relevant that Flechsig’s approach to mental illness was similarly reductionist.
While the neglect of childhood treatment/ mistreatment/ paternal fanatical sadism is glaring and consistent with freud's rejection of the seduction theory, I do think that schizoanalysis might be onto something with thr rejection of etiology as deterministic causality. What is important might be the political normalization of mistreatment and the suppression of any narrative of surviving violence and then overcoming it as a present moment pathway of change and challenging status quos of patriarchal child hatred in all forms. Laing caught my attention when he said that if you are in prison what is the point of finding out why you are there your attention should be on how to get out - etiology and family system/abuse determinism may not function on that pragmatic way. But I wonder what kinds of creativity Schreiber and the people surrounding him and reading his story might elaborate if he were considered in light of his childhood mistreatment and oppressions, as the liberation of children has never been a concern of psychiatry but may be a natural affinity for schizoanalysis.