In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schreber's illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schreber's troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schreber's illness.
Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schreber's two psychiatrists, Paul...

As it entered the 1960s, American institutional psychiatry was thriving, with a high percentage of medical students choosing the field. But after Thomas S. Szasz published his masterwork in 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness, the psychiatric world was thrown into chaos.

Szasz enlightened the world about what he called the -myth of mental illness.- His point was not that no one is mentally ill, or that people labeled as mentally ill do not exist. Instead he believed that diagnosing people as mentally ill was inconsistent with the rules governing pathology and the...