SOURCE: Geller, Jay. “Freud V. Freud: Freud's Readings of Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken.” In Reading Freud's Reading, edited by Sandra L. Gilman and others, pp. 180-210. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Geller examines the discrepancies between Freud's reading notes on Memoirs and his subsequent published analysis of the work.

Till near the nucleus [Kern] we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them.

—Sigmund Freud, “Psychotherapy of Hysteria”

Before beginning his analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness)¹ Sigmund Freud admonishes his “readers [first] to make themselves acquainted with the book.”² Despite this advice, virtually all subsequent interpretations of Schreber's dementia have been based upon Freud's selective citations in his “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).”³ Displaced by Freud's case study, Schreber's text...