Le cas du Président Schreber. Un exemple de délire d’influence

Abstract

This article revisits Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the case of President Schreber and explores specifically the clinical notion of “delirium of influence”. The importance of Freud’s essay on the Schreber case is widely recognized, representing as it does one stage in the thinker’s inquiries into paranoia and the progressive understanding of the mechanism of neurosis. This article seeks to reposition Schreber’s delirium—reconsidered here not as a fantasy of transsexualism but as a fantasy of dominant power—in a more complex context allying the patient’s family history, the period in which his cosmogonic delirium occured and a consideration of the semantic potential of the German language in which President Schreber framed his delirium.