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If our painter’s repugnance to accepting castration made it impossible for him to appease his longing for his father, it is perfectly understandable that he should have turned for help and salvation to the image of his mother. This is why he declared that only the Holy Mother of God of Mariazell could release him from his pact with the Devil and why he obtained his freedom once more on the day of the Mother’s Nativity (September 8). Whether the day on which the pact was made - September 24 - was not also determined in some similar way, we shall of course never know.

Among the observations made by psycho-analysis of the mental life of children there is scarcely one which sounds so repugnant and unbelievable to a normal adult as that of a boy’s feminine attitude to his father and the phantasy of pregnancy that arises from it. It is only since Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge presiding over a division of the Appeal Court of Saxony, published the history of his psychotic illness and his extensive recovery from it,¹ that we can discuss the subject without trepidation or apology. We learn from this invaluable book that, somewhere about the age of fifty, the Senatspräsident became firmly convinced that God - who, incidentally, exhibited distinct traits of his father, the worthy physician, Dr. Schreber - had decided to emasculate him, to use him as a woman, and to beget from him ‘a new race of men born from the spirit of Schreber’. (His own marriage was childless.) In his revolt against this intention of God’s, which seemed to him highly unjust and ‘contrary to the Order of Things’, he fell ill with symptoms of paranoia, which, however, underwent a process of involution in the course of years, leaving only a small residue behind. The gifted author of his own case history could not have guessed that in it he had uncovered a typical pathogenic factor.

¹ Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903. See my analysis of his case (1911c).