About the Book: Mankind has long searched for the cause and meaning of madness. The 639 quotations in this book, each followed by an explanatory comment, point inexorably to the factor of unconscious bisexual conflict/gender confusion as forming the basic etiological role in all functional mental illness, including schizophrenia.Since madness has been the instigator of so much suffering and destruction in the world throughout the ages it is vitally important to uncover its mechanisms, for without doing so it will never be possible to eradicate it.This volume provides numerous documented case histories and theoretical constructs which clearly illuminate the origins of madness. Furthermore, it is interesting and challenging reading and an excellent source for future research.Daniel Paul Schreber, who has often been called psychiatry’s most famous patient, wrote in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness that “I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus, or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter.†In this brief observation, Dr. Schreber, a prominent German jurist in the late 1800’s before his severe psychosis made it necessary for him to be institutionalized, unearthed the answer to a puzzle which has bedeviled mankind since its beginning, namely, What is it that causes a person to become mentally ill?It is doubtful Dr. Schreber realized that the profound truth contained in his observation about the cause of mental illness in men applies equally to women by simply reversing the gender roles in his statement.J. Michael MahoneySchreber describes what happened to him and in him from the beginning of his illness, including two years during which he was so violent and noisy that - to his great indignation - he had to be confined to a padded cell at night, be accompanied by three attendants in the Asylum's garden, and forcibly fed; when he was negativistic, withdrawn, mute and immobile for long periods, impulsive, repeatedly attempted suicide, massively hallucinated and deluded about his own body and his surroundings, suffered from unbearable insomnia, tortured by compulsive acting and obsessive thinking. We follow the intense struggle with his delusions, his first glimpses of insight, and how he slowly resumed contact with “the outside world.†Finally we see a transvestite emerge from this state of “acute hallucinatory insanity,†with a complicated system of delusions side by side with unimpaired capacity for clear and logical reasoning, which allowed him to play a decisive part in having his tutelage rescinded. With great acuity and keen logic he argued “right from wrong premises" (Locke, 1690), so that as Dr. Weber said in court, “little would be noticeable†of his insanity “to an observer not informed of his total state.â€So manifold were the symptoms he displayed at one time or another that almost the whole symptomatology of the entire field of psychiatric abnormality is described. Comparison with the items listed in a current textbook on psychiatry (Henderson and Gillespie. 1951) in the chapter on 'Symptomatology', allowed us to tick off nearly all as touched on in the Memoirs."—Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Translated. Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Discussion by Ida Macalpine, M.D. and Richard A. Hunter, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., WM. Dawson & Sons Ltd. London, 1955, pp. 7,8.To write such a frank autobiographical account required Judge Schreber's intellect, his determination to grapple with his madness, his training in logical thinking, his inborn quest for truth, his integrity, absolute frankness, and finally admirable courage in laying his innermost thoughts and feelings bare before other people, knowing that they thought him mad.—Ibid., p. 7.Copyright © 2007 Schizophrenia Sitemap