Freud - Complete Works (408 page)
‘But now what follows
reveals the full perfidy¹ of the policy that has been pursued
towards me. Almost every time the need for evacuation was miracled
up in me, some other person in my vicinity was sent (by having his
nerves stimulated for that purpose) to the lavatory, in order to
prevent my evacuating. This is a phenomenon which I have observed
for years and upon such countless occasions - thousands of them -
and with such regularity, as to exclude any possibility of its
being attributable to chance. And thereupon comes the question:
"Why don’t you sh--?" to which the brilliant
repartee is made that I am "so stupid or something". The
pen well-nigh shrinks from recording so monumental a piece of
absurdity as that God, blinded by His ignorance of human nature,
can positively go to such lengths as to suppose that there can
exist a man too stupid to do what every animal can do - too stupid
to be able to sh--. When, upon the occasion of such an urge, I
actually succeed in evacuating - and as a rule, since I nearly
always find the lavatory engaged, I use a pail for the purpose -
the process is always accompanied by the generation of an
exceedingly strong feeling of spiritual voluptuousness. For the
relief from the pressure caused by the presence of the faeces in
the intestines produces a sense of intense well-being in the nerves
of voluptuousness; and the same is equally true of making water.
For this reason, even down to the present day, while I am passing
stool or making water, all the rays are always without exception
united; for this very reason, whenever I address myself to these
natural functions, an attempt is invariably made, though as a rule
in vain, to miracle backwards the urge to pass stool and to make
water.’² (225-7.)
¹
In a footnote at this point the author
endeavours to mitigate the harshness of the word
‘perfidy’ by a reference to one of his arguments in
justification of God. These will be discussed presently.
²
This confession to a pleasure in the
excretory processes, which we have learnt to recognize as one of
the auto-erotic components of infantile sexuality, may be compared
with the remarks made by little Hans in my ‘Analysis of a
Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’.
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Furthermore, this singular God of
Schreber’s is incapable of learning anything by experience:
‘Owing to some quality or other inherent in his nature, it
seems to be impossible for God to derive any lessons for the future
from the experience thus gained.’ (186.) He can therefore go
on repeating the same tormenting ordeals and miracles and voices,
without alteration, year after year, until He inevitably becomes a
laughing-stock to the victim of His persecutions.
‘The consequence is that,
now that the miracles have to a great extent lost the power which
they formerly possessed of producing terrifying effects, God
strikes me above all, in almost everything that happens to me, as
being ridiculous or childish. As regards my own behaviour, this
often results in my being obliged in self-defence to play the part
of a scoffer at God, and even, on occasion, to scoff at Him
aloud.’ (333.)¹
This critical and rebellious
attitude towards God is, however, opposed in Schreber’s mind
by an energetic counter-current, which finds expression in many
places: ‘But here again I must most emphatically declare that
this is nothing more than an episode, which will, I hope, terminate
at the latest with my decease, and that the right of scoffing at
God belongs in consequence to me alone and not to other men. For
them He remains the almighty creator of Heaven and earth, the first
cause of all things, and the salvation of their future, to whom -
not withstanding that a few of the conventional religious ideas may
require revision - worship and the deepest reverence are
due.’ (333-4.)
Repeated attempts are therefore
made to find a justification for God’s behaviour to the
patient. In these attempts, which display as much ingenuity as
every other theodicy, the explanation is based now upon the general
nature of souls, and now upon the necessity for self-preservation
under which God lay, and upon the misleading influence of the
Flechsig soul (60-1 and 160). In general, however, the illness is
looked upon as a struggle between Schreber the man and God, in
which victory lies with the man, weak though he is, because the
Order of Things is on his side (61).
The medical report might easily
lead us to suppose that Schreber exhibited the everyday form of
Redeemer phantasy, in which the patient believes he is the son of
God, destined to save the world from its misery or from the
destruction that is threatening it, and so on. It is for this
reason that I have been careful to present in detail the
peculiarities of Schreber’s relation to God. The significance
of this relation for the rest of mankind is only rarely alluded to
in the
Denkwürdigkeiten
and not until the last phase of
his delusional formation. It consists essentially in the fact that
no one who dies can enter the state of bliss so long as the greater
part of the rays of God are absorbed in his (Schreber’s)
person, owing to his powers of attraction (32). It is only at a
very late stage, too, that his identification with Jesus Christ
makes an undisguised appearance (338 and 431).
No attempt at explaining
Schreber’s case will have any chance of being correct which
does not take into account these peculiarities in his conception of
God, this mixture of reverence and rebelliousness in his attitude
towards Him.
¹
Even in the basic language it occasionally
happened that God was not the abuser but the abused. For instance:
‘Deuce take it! What a thing to have to say - that God lets
himself be f--d!’ (194.)
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I will now turn to another
subject, which is closely related to God, namely, the
state of
bliss
. This is also spoken of by Schreber as ‘the life
beyond’ to which the human soul is raised after death by the
process of purification. He describes it as a state of
uninterrupted enjoyment, bound up with the contemplation of God.
This is not very original, but on the other hand it is surprising
to learn that Schreber makes a distinction between a male and a
female state of bliss.¹ ‘The male state of bliss was
superior to the female, which seems to have consisted chiefly in an
uninterrupted feeling of voluptuousness.’ (18.) In other
passages this coincidence between the state of bliss and
voluptuousness is expressed in plainer language and without
reference to sex-distinction; and moreover that element of the
state of bliss which consists in the contemplation of God is not
further discussed. Thus, for instance: ‘The nature of the
nerves of God, is such that the state of bliss . . .
is accompanied by a very intense sensation of voluptuousness, even
though it does not consist exclusively of it.’ (51.) And
again: ‘Voluptuousness may be regarded as a fragment of the
state of bliss given in advance, as it were, to men and other
living creatures.’ (281.) So the state of heavenly bliss is
to be understood as being in its essence an intensified
continuation of sensual pleasure upon earth!
This view of the state of bliss
was far from being an element in Schreber’s delusion that
originated in the first stages of his illness and was later
eliminated as being incompatible with the rest. So late as in the
Statement of his Case, drawn up by the patient for the Appeal Court
in July, 1901, he emphasizes as one of his greatest discoveries the
fact ‘that voluptuousness stands in a close relationship (not
hitherto perceptible to the rest of mankind) to the state of bliss
enjoyed by departed spirits’.²
¹
It would be much more in keeping with the
wish-fulfilment offered by the life beyond that in it we shall at
last be free from the difference between the sexes.
Und jene himmlischen Gestalten
sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib.
[And those calm shining sons of morn
They ask not who is maid or boy.]
²
The possibility of this discovery of
Schreber’s having a deeper meaning is discussed
below.
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We shall find, indeed, that this
‘close relationship’ is the rock upon which the patient
builds his hopes of an eventual reconciliation with God and of his
sufferings being brought to an end. The rays of God abandon their
hostility as soon as they are certain that in becoming absorbed
into his body they will experience spiritual voluptuousness (133);
God Himself demands that He shall be able to find voluptuousness in
him (283), and threatens him with the withdrawal of His rays if he
neglects to cultivate voluptuousness and cannot offer God what He
demands (320).
This surprising sexualization of
the state of heavenly bliss suggests the possibility that
Schreber’s concept of the state of bliss is derived from a
condensation of the two principal meanings of the German word
‘
selig
’ - namely, ‘dead’ and
‘sensually happy’.¹ But this instance of
sexualization will also give us occasion to examine the
patient’s general attitude to the erotic side of life and to
questions of sexual indulgence. For we psycho-analysts have
hitherto supported the view that the roots of every nervous and
mental disorder are chiefly to be found in the patient’s
sexual life - some of us merely upon empirical grounds, others
influenced in addition by theoretical considerations.
¹
Extreme instances of the two uses of the
word are to be found in the phrase ‘
mein seliger
Vater
’ [‘my late father’] and in these lines
from the duet in
Don Giovanni
:
Ja, dein zu sein auf ewig,
wie selig werd’ ich sein.
[Ah, to be thine for ever -
How blissful I should be!]
But the fact
that the same word should be used in our language in two such
different situations cannot be without significance.
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The samples of Schreber’s
delusions that have already been given enable us without more ado
to dismiss the suspicion that it might be precisely this paranoid
disorder which would turn out to be the ‘negative case’
which has so long been sought for - a case in which sexuality plays
only a very minor part. Schreber himself speaks again and again as
though he shared our prejudice. He is constantly talking in the
same breath of ‘nervous disorder’ and erotic lapses, as
though the two things were inseparable.¹
Before his illness
Senatspräsident Schreber had been a man of strict morals:
‘Few people’, he declares, and I see no reason to doubt
his assertion, ‘can have been brought up upon such strict
moral principles as I was, and few people, all through their lives,
can have exercised (especially in sexual matters) a self-restraint
conforming so closely to those principles as I may say of myself
that I have done.’ (281.) After the severe spiritual
struggle, of which the phenomena of his illness were the outward
signs, his attitude towards the erotic side of life was altered. He
had come to see that the cultivation of voluptuousness was
incumbent upon him as a duty, and that it was only by discharging
this duty that he could end the grave conflict which had broken out
within him - or, as he thought, about him. Voluptuousness, so the
voices assured him, had become ‘God-fearing’ and he
could only regret that he was not able to devote himself to its
cultivation the whole day long.² (285.)
¹
‘When moral corruption
("voluptuous excesses") or perhaps nervous disorder had
taken a strong enough hold upon the whole population of any
terrestrial body’, then, thinks Schreber, bearing in mind the
Biblical stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Deluge, etc., the world
in question might come to a catastrophic end (52). - ‘[A
rumour] sowed fear and terror among men, wrecked the foundations of
religion, and spread abroad general nervous disorders and
immorality, so that devastating pestilences have descended upon
mankind.’ (91.) - ‘Thus it seems probable that by a
"Prince of Hell" the souls meant the uncanny Power that
was able to develop in a sense hostile to God as a result of moral
depravity among men or of a general state of excessive nervous
excitement following upon over-civilization.’
(163.)
²
In connection with his delusions he writes:
‘
This attraction, however, lost its terrors for the nerves
in question, if, and in so far as, upon entering my body, they
encountered a feeling of spiritual voluptuousness
in which they
themselves shared. For, if this happened, they found an equivalent
or approximately equivalent substitute in my body for the state of
heavenly bliss which they had lost, and which itself consisted in a
kind of voluptuous enjoyment.’ (179-80.)
