u/DiegoArgSch

I found a good discussion on YouTube, in Spanish. It’s about the case of Ana Rau described by the German psychiatrist Wolfgang Blankenburg (1928–2002) in his book The Loss of Natural Self-Evidence (1971). I made a transcription of the video in English and created a PDF about; I’ll leave it at the end.

As I understand it, Blankenburg diagnosed this patient with Simple Schizophrenia, and the video discusses the meaning of this diagnosis, which includes symptoms such as hyper-reflexivity. The title of Blankenburg’s book was taken from the exact words Ana Rau used to explain what was going through her mind.

In the video, while describing her case, they say:

“After this voluntary resignation, she began an internship in a hospital just to keep herself occupied. She was also unable to adapt to this activity at all. The same previous state reappeared: a constant need to think, with thoughts and problems continuously present.

What she herself called “natural evidence” was no longer available.

She could no longer feel how other people are or how one becomes an adult. She had too many thoughts at the same time, extremely strange ones. She did not understand anything and failed everywhere. She doubted everything and had no relationship with anything or anyone.”

I guess that’s part of something written in the book; I’m not sure. They also talk about how to think about diagnosis. The main speaker says:

“In short, then, there are typical cases and atypical cases, and with the atypical ones we even go on describing them as atypical forms. For example, we say: this is a cycloid psychosis, or this is a sensitive delusion, or whatever it may be—we are already placing them into typologies that are not the standard ones, right?

And then there would be another type of cases, which are unclassifiable cases, cases for which we will die without ever having known how to classify them, because they are unclassifiable with respect to our classification systems. Others classify them quickly, but our classifications always have blind spots, and there are many cases we cannot classify. Many—I mean, quite a few—but there will be at least about 10% more cases that are unclassifiable, and well, if one wants to classify them here or there, one can place them wherever one likes, but they are, let’s say, things that must remain in the realm of the unclassifiable, mainly to maintain coherence within the field in which we work, which is very complex.

(...)

But even so, there are still cases—so, we have:

_ the typical,

_ the atypical,

_ the unclassifiable,

_ and then there is a number of cases, according to my clinical experience, very small in number, which I would call exceptional cases."

This is the link of the video in Spanish: https://youtu.be/9qI6QUOimlI?si=hzno-Y2f-PsW1Ku-

And this the full transcription in English: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:6f586a79-8d2b-4a02-8d6d-c6ea3d7b26cb

I'm sure nowadays there must be programs where you can upload the text or use some option to turn it into audio easily.

Many years ago, a teacher who was teaching us classical Freudian theory told us: “Do you want to know how to make an adult person to be an obsessive? Pamper them (touch them a lot, give them a lot of affection, be constantly physically attentive) when they’re baby.”

(She actually used the words “mañosearlos” and “franelearlos,” but they don’t have direct translations from Spanish to English; they’re localisms.)

What I understood at the time was something along the lines of “overstimulating them sexually at an early age” (would make them become an obsessive as an adult).

I guess she kept talking, but I don’t remember the rest.

Why do you think our teacher told us this?

Of course, she didn’t mean that if you do this and that the person will necessarily end up like that, but I guess there was some underlying logic behind her example.

Transcript of a seminar: Wolfgang Blankenburg, Ana Rau's case, The Loss of Natural Self-Evidence (1971), Simple Schizophrenia, hyper-reflexivity