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Schreber’s book, Freud now was convinced thatpsychotic delusions were little more than waking dreams—brought on by the same causes as everyday neuroses, and interpretable in the very same way.All the same symbols and metaphors that Freud had famously noticed in dreams, he wrote, were all right there in the memoir, plain as day. Schreber’s gender switch and his immaculate conception, Freud argued, were abouta fear of castration. Schreber’s fixation with his psychiatrist, Dr. Flechsig, he concluded, had to do with the Oedipus complex. “Don’t forget that Schreber’s father was a doctor,” Freud wrote, triumphantly connecting the dots. “The absurd miracles that are performed on him (Schreber) are a bitter satire on his father’s medical art.”
    No one seemed more tied up in knots over what Freud wrote than Carl Jung. From his home in Burghölzli, Switzerland, Jung read an early copy and wrote his mentor at once, in March 1911, to say he found it “uproariously funny” and “brilliantly written.” There was just one problem:Jung fundamentally disagreed with him. At the heart of Jung’s objection was the question of the nature of delusional mental illness: Is schizophrenia something you’re born with, a physical affliction of the brain? Or is it acquired in life, after one has become scarred somehow by the world? Is it nature or nurture? Freud stood apart from most other psychiatrists of his time by being sure that the disease was entirely “psychogenic,” or the invention of the unconscious, which had most likely been molded or scarred by formative childhood experiences—quite often of a sexual nature. Jung, meanwhile, held a more conventional opinion: that schizophrenia was at least partially an organic, biological illness—a disease that was quite likely inherited from one’s family.
    The protégé and his mentor had beensparring about this on and off for years. But for Jung, this was the last straw. He told Freud that not everything was about sex—that sometimes people go insane for other reasons, maybe because it is just something they’re born with. “In my view the concept of libido…needs to be supplemented by the genetic factor,” Jung wrote.
    In several letters,Jung made that same case again and again. Freud never took the bait; he did not respond, which Jung found infuriating. By 1912, Jung exploded. He got personal. “Your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder,” Jung wrote. “In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies….Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty.”
    Later that same year, before an audience at Fordham University in New York City, Jung spoke out against Freud in public, specifically blasting his interpretation of the Schreber case. Schizophrenia, he declared, “cannot be explained solely by the loss of erotic interest.” Jung knew that Freud would consider this to be heresy. “He went terribly wrong,” Jung later reflected, “because he simply doesn’t know the spirit of schizophrenia.”
    The great break between Freud and Jung took place largely over the issue of the nature of madness itself. Early psychoanalysis’s greatest partnership was over. But the argument over the origins and nature of schizophrenia was only just beginning.
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    A CENTURY LATER, across the world,schizophrenia affects an estimated one in one hundred people—or more than three million people in America, and 82 million people worldwide. By one measure, those diagnosed take upa third of all the psychiatric hospital beds in the United States. By another,about 40 percent of adults with the condition go untreated entirely in any given year.One out of every twenty cases of schizophrenia ends in suicide.
    Academia is filled with hundreds of papers about Schreber now, each venturing far from Freud and Jung with their own takes on the patient and the illness that tormented him.Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and godfather