Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/357

 closer psychological investigation. This he was enabled to do by means of an analytic technique perfected through his rich experiences with neurotics. He selected the famous autobiography of P. Schreber, “Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken.” The patient could not be analysed personally, but having published his most interesting autobiography all the material wanted for an analysis was to be found in it.

In this study Freud shows out of what infantile forms of thought and instincts the delusional system was built up. The peculiar delusions which the patient had about his doctor whom he identified with God or with a godlike being, and certain other surprising and really blasphemous ideas, Freud was able to reduce most ingeniously to his infantile relationship to his father. This case also presented similar bizarre and grotesque concatenations of ideas as the one I have described. As the author himself says, his work confines itself to the task of pointing out those universally existent and undifferentiated foundations out of which we may say every psychological formation is historically developed. This reductive analytical process did not, however, furnish such enlightening results in regard to the rich and surprising symbolism in patients of this kind, as we had been accustomed to expect from the same method in the realm of the psychology of hysteria. In reading certain works of the Zurich school, for example, Maeder, Spielrein, Nelken, Grebelskaja, Itten, one is powerfully impressed by the enormous symbol-formation in dementia praecox.

Some of the authors still proceed essentially by the method of analytic reduction, tracing back the complicated delusional