The “remarkable Schreber family”: From father to son, a story and its exegeses
Gavarini, Laurence
The “remarkable Schreber family”: From father to son, a story and its exegeses - 2022.
71
With “The Remarkable Schreber Family,” the author revisits the readings that have defined the Schreber case as a paradigm of paranoia over the last century. These span Freud and Lacan’s analyses as well as newer interpretations from the 1960s to the 1980s, which extended the question of the subject’s mental illness to family, and more precisely paternal, upbringing, as construed in this article’s subtitle: “From Father to Son, a Story and its Exegeses.” Initially focused on the study of a pathology, its event-driven origin, its etiology, and its medical pre-history, the focus of the study of the Schreber case shifts and expands to include what makes a subject delirious, i.e., the psychological state of a father, his tyrannical parenting. Thus, epistemological trends in the analysis of the Schreber case diverge. Some impute the psychic state of the patient to the subject’s own agency and the failure of the Nom-du-Père. Others, to an external factor, at the crossroads of transgenerational problematics and the father’s parenting style. The latter has been classed as “black pedagogy” and strongly denounced in Germany and in the English-speaking world since the 1970s. The article reviews these different readings and questions their shortcomings; in particular, the function of women in the “remarkable family.”
The “remarkable Schreber family”: From father to son, a story and its exegeses - 2022.
71
With “The Remarkable Schreber Family,” the author revisits the readings that have defined the Schreber case as a paradigm of paranoia over the last century. These span Freud and Lacan’s analyses as well as newer interpretations from the 1960s to the 1980s, which extended the question of the subject’s mental illness to family, and more precisely paternal, upbringing, as construed in this article’s subtitle: “From Father to Son, a Story and its Exegeses.” Initially focused on the study of a pathology, its event-driven origin, its etiology, and its medical pre-history, the focus of the study of the Schreber case shifts and expands to include what makes a subject delirious, i.e., the psychological state of a father, his tyrannical parenting. Thus, epistemological trends in the analysis of the Schreber case diverge. Some impute the psychic state of the patient to the subject’s own agency and the failure of the Nom-du-Père. Others, to an external factor, at the crossroads of transgenerational problematics and the father’s parenting style. The latter has been classed as “black pedagogy” and strongly denounced in Germany and in the English-speaking world since the 1970s. The article reviews these different readings and questions their shortcomings; in particular, the function of women in the “remarkable family.”
Réseaux sociaux