... the father's child-rearing practices could confuse any child; and that he would have been forbidden as a child to see how confusing his methods are. ...

Irony is everywhere.
An eminent pedagogue has a psychotic son; it does not hurt his reputation.
Freud, an avid reader, neglects (18 books and booklets) on child-rearing (written by Schreber) --- as do his followers --- by a man whose son's childhood experiences he tries to derive. German parents rear their children by the ideas of a man whom many people now (1975) would see as sadistic or mentally ill. ...

... starting about three months after birth cleansing of the infant's skin should be by cold (water) only ... in order to physically toughen up the child. ... if children are awake they should be alert and hold themselves in straight, active positions and be busy: in general each thing which could lead towards laziness and softness (for example the sofa in the children's room) should be kept away from their circle of activity.

He thought children must sleep in a straight position only, flat on their backs; babies under four months must lie on their backs when resting. It is important, he taught, to start with infants ... he presented as medical fact his false idea ....

He invented a device called "Schrebersche Geradhalter" (Schreber's straight-holder) to force children to sit straight .... He also tied a belt to the child's bed which ran across the child's chest to ensure that the child's body remained supine and straight when sleeping. ...

He invented a "Kopfhalter" (head-holder) to prevent the child's head from falling forwards or sideways. The Kopfhalter was a strap clamped at one end to the child's hair and at the other end to his underwear so that it pulled his hair if he did not hold his head straight. ...

(The son) does not see that he is re-enacting his father's behavior towards his body (with his psychosomatic physical responses which he credits to a god which is authoritarian to the point of cruel domination). Schreber (son) suffers from reminiscences. His body embodies his past. He retains memories of what his father did to him as a child; although part of his mind knows they are memories, "he" does not (consciously).

... he remembers, in some cases perfectly accurately, how his father treated him, but he thinks he perceives events occurring in the present of which he imagines God, rays, little men, and so on are the agents. He knows what he most needs to know (in his unconscious), but does not know (consciously) he knows it. When he calls his experiences "miracles," he denies what he knows, denies he is denying anything, and denies there is anything to deny, and he denies those denials too. ....

... when a man cannot see some of the variables of a system, the "system" represented by the remainder may develop remarkable, even miraculous, properties. ...

... My hypothesis is that his father had forbidden him (by hypnotic induction through stern, confident, calm expression) to see the truth about his past. His father had demanded that children love, honor, and obey their parents. ... he taught parents a method explicitly designed to force children not to feel bitterness or anger towards their parents, even when the feelings might be justified. ... (His son) is unable, or unwilling, to violate his father's view of what his father should be.

Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber (the father) ... began associations for calisthenics, gardening, and fresh-air activities. He added moral principles to his precepts ... (believing) a stronger race of men would result. ... He died at fifty-three ... and (went on in the memory of the masses with great esteem for over 150 years). ... (Schreber's son's doctors) later noted that the father suffered from "obsessional ideas with murderous impulses." [He was determined to prove, as a point of pride, that his rationalized mechanistic theories would work at the expense of his children and to the deception of his audience.]

Daniel Gustav (Schreber), his eldest son, three years older (than Judge Schreber) shot and killed himself at thirty-eight. Daniel Schreber's sister thought he had a "progressive psychosis" before his suicide. ...

Dr. Schreber (the father) thought that parents must curtail their children's freedom by harsh disciplines.
... He seemed to believe that children are criminal or ill from the start, or surely would become so, unless rescued in time. ... He considers sensual desires "bad." Bad elements of the mind are "weeds" to be "uprooted" and "exterminated." ... Beginning with babies of five or six months parents must ...

Suppress everything in the child, keep everything away from him which he should not make his own but guide him perseveringly towards everything to which (the social authority believes) he should habituate himself.

The father aims to implant "self-determination," "self-reliance," and "free will."
His psycho-logic is peculiar; parents must suppress the child in order to teach him self-determination.
He has no faith that a child could learn when and how to regulate his own behavior without being forced to.
The exact opposite of what he intended occurred with his son. The psychiatrist who was superintendent of the asylum in which (Judge) Schreber was confined years later wrote in a report that Schreber had no "unimpaired self-determination or sensible reasoning, rather the patient was completely under the power of overwhelming pathological influences." (Dr. Schreber wrote ...)

... (at) the first appearance of self-will ....
One has to step forward in a positive manner: by quick distraction of the attention, stern words, threatening gestures, rapping against the bed ... or when all this is of no avail --- by moderate, intermittent, bodily accomplishments consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep ....

Such a procedure is necessary only once or at most twice and --- one is master of the child forever.
From now on a glance, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.
One should keep in mind that one shows the child the greatest kindness in this in that it saves him from many hours of tension which hinder him from thriving and also frees him from all those inner spirits of torment which very easily grow up vigorously into more serious and insurmountable enemies of life.

The parent-child relationship he strives for is like the relationship between a hypnotist and the person he has put in a trance. ...

A psychoanalytic interpretation would be that Dr. Schreber projects "inner spirits of torment" from inside himself into the child; that is, he thinks he wants to master a child but really wants to master "bad" parts of himself. ... (Few researchers) have pondered the experience of the person upon whom someone else projects parts of himself, which he tries to master "in" the other person, for which he imagines is the other's sake. ... Dr. Schreber talks of parents changing children, and nowhere of parents learning from children. ... He employs the term "spite" against a child who refuses a position his parent assigns to him. ...

Is a five- or six-month-old free to choose to express his wants "quietly" as Dr. Schreber seems to think?
An infant at this age is physiologically unable to specify some needs, especially hunger, sometimes, without screaming or waving his arms and legs; a demand for "self-control" would frustrate and confuse him. If his appeals were not endorsed (abandonment), he might stop trying (Oral Character). ...

Why is it salutary" and "indispensable" that a child before the age of one learn how to subordinate his will and receive calmly the denial of his desires? Dr. Schreber does not say. ... Dr. Schreber's method of teaching a baby self-denial is to set up a hierarchy by which he applies his power upon the nurse to apply hers upon the baby. ... A parent's demand does not always need a rationale, he thinks, ... Might makes right. ... The irrelevance of the parent's demand is irrelevant to Dr. Schreber. He never considers it possible that a child who opts to disobey a parent's arbitrary wish may know, better than the parent, what is best for him. ...

Dr. Schreber seems to be saying that as parents raise their power over their children, they will be "rewarded" by the possibility of greater power still; the goal is for the child to be in a sort of trance in which he experiences each glance of the parent as a command.

... Although Dr. Schreber thinks the child must be rewarded or punished not only for his acts, but also for the sentiments underlying them, he thinks the child must not obey in order to get praise or reward. He thinks a wish for praise or reward is a "degraded" and "impure" sentiment. He must obey because he knows it is right to obey, no matter how whimsical his parent's wish. ...

It is generally salutary for the sentiments if the child after each punishment after he has recovered, is gently prodded (preferably by a third person) to offer to shake the hand of the punisher as a sign of a plea for forgiveness .... From then on everything should be forgotten.

After this prodding has occurred a few times the child, feeling his duty, will freely approach the punisher.
This ensures against the possibility of residual spiteful or bitter feelings (in the mind of the punisher) and mediates the feeling of repentance (the next goal of punishment) and the benefit that results from it, and generally gives the child the salutary impression that he still owes the punisher something, not the other way around even if maybe a word or blow more than necessary should have befallen the child ...

Punishment of a child is proof of his guilt.
Although punishment can be excessive, it can never be unwarranted. Its aim is to bring about an acknowledgment of guilt which he calls "repentance."

It is the child's duty, not his choice, to ask for forgiveness.
He is not allowed not to ask to be forgiven, i.e., he cannot harbor a feeling that he has been punished unfairly, even if he has, or, feeling that he has been fairly punished, to endure his feelings privately and to cope with them as he wishes.

Only the punisher can forgive the punished child.

Repression, in a psychoanalytic view, is an intrapersonal defence built to ward off real, imagined, or fantasied harm. Freud said that a person represses experience if he fears it may lead him to act in ways for which he remembers (or imagines, or fantasies) he has been punished, or for which he perceives (or imagines, or fantasies) he will be punished. ... can also be a transpersonal (experience) ....

A person (often a parent) orders another person (often a child) to forget thoughts, feelings, or acts that the first person cannot, or will not, allow in the other. This is a standard practice in some relationships (especially in families with schizophrenic offspring).

Freud thought

... Consequently the proposition "I hate him" becomes transformed by projection into another one:
"He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him."
And thus the impelling unconscious feeling makes its appearance as though it were the consequence of an external perception:
"I do not love him --- I hate him, because HE PERSECUTES ME."

... (Note: When I say "is persecuted," I also mean has been persecuted.
Some persons, persecuted by parents in childhood, are also persecuted by them in adulthood.
Some unwittingly find, or induce, others to persecute them, often in ways remarkably similar to their childhood experience. And many, like Schreber, are persecuted by memories of past persecution.)

... What is clinically called paranoia is often the partial realization --- as through a glass darkly --- that one has been or is being persecuted. ...

Paranoia (para -- beside, beyond + nous -- mind) means literally the state of being besides, or out of, one's mind.
If a person called paranoid sees the truth that he is persecuted (without seeing by whom, or how), he is partly "in" his mind; the label is partly a misnomer. It is ironic that one may be regarded as ill for the first time in one's life, just upon the emergence from a lifelong, deeper ignorance.

Some people do not see who their real persecutors are or the methods of persecution, because their persecutors do not let them. The persecutors may persuade or force their victims to see their persecution as love, especially if they are the parents, siblings, spouses, or children, of their victims. It is easier for the persecutors to lie if they believe the lies are true. The persecutor may see his persuasion or force as an act of love also, and may try to convince his victim of it. ...

Parent tells child: "Dishonesty is wicked. I will punish you, for your own good, if you lie."

A variation is: "You cannot hide you feelings from me." ...

The first is an order; the second an attribution that masks an order.
The second is like the hypnotist's induction and is a stronger technique of control, probably because the order is hidden. ...

(The forgoing) would shed light on why (some paranoid persons) so mistrust others.
... what the father saw as love, his son saw as persecution.

.. the child should be permeated by the feeling of the impossibility of locking up something in his heart knowingly and permanently from you. Without this unconditional openheartedness, any upbringing will lack a safe foundation. But to get there, an additional condition must be fulfilled. You have to come to the help of the child so that he can take in and secure the courage often necessary to hold strictly to the truth, i.e., this means in the case of a freely offered, open and full confession of guilt must be judged and punished recognizably more mildly, taking account of the openness, but in the opposite case the guilt is punished onefold, the untruth connected with it is punished tenfold.

This is how an able persecutor controlled his victims in the name of truth, openheartedness, and courage. Big Brother ... some of these people have been taught by their families that they should not, or cannot, live with an "I," ...

Remember that Hitler and his peers were raised when Dr. Schreber's books, preaching household totalitarianism, were popular. ...

... many paranoid persons properly realize that they are being isolated and excluded by concerted interaction, or that they are being manipulated. However, they are at a loss to estimate accurately or realistically the dimensions and form of the coalition arrayed against them. ... In failing to see the conspiracy, they sustained it unwittingly.

(Elias Canetti) wrote of Judge Schreber, the younger son ...

... a very distinct picture of God; he is a despot and nothing else.
His realm contains provinces and factions. "God's interests," as they are bluntly and summarily designated, demand the increase of his power. This, and only this, is why he would not deny any human being the share of blessedness due to him; human beings who hinder him are done away with.