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| Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family
| | Morton Schatzman
| Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), an eminent German judge, went mad at the age of forty-two, recovered, and eight and a half years later went mad again. It is uncertain if he was ever fully sane, in the ordinary social sense, again. His father, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber (1808-1861), who supervised his son’s upbringing, was a leading German physician and pedagogue, whose writings on child-rearing techniques influenced these practices during his life and after his death. The father thought his age to be morally ‘soft’ and ‘decayed’ owing mainly to laxity in educating and disciplining children at home and at school. He proposed to ‘battle’ the ‘weakness’ of his era with an elaborate system aimed at making children obedient and subject to adults. He expected that his precepts, if followed, would lead to a better society and ‘race’. The father applied these same basic principles in raising his own children, including Daniel Paul and another son, Daniel Gustav, the elder who also went mad and committed suicide in his thirties. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts consider the case of the former, Daniel Paul, a classic model of paranoia and schizophrenia, but Freud and Bleuler in their analyses of the son’s illness failed to link the strange experiences of Daniel Paul, for which he was thought mad, to his father’s child-rearing practices.
Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family connects the father’s methods with the elements of the son’s experience, and vice versa. It gives a detailed analysis and a comparison of Daniel Paul’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, an account written during his second long confinement, with his father’s published writings on child-rearing. The findings touch on many domains: education, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, religion, sociology, and politics - the micro-politics of child-rearing and family life and their relation to the macro-politics of larger human groups.
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