During his second illness he was treated by Paul Flechsig (Leipzig University Clinic), Reginald H. Pierson (Lindenhof), and, from 29 June 1894 to 20 December 1902, Guido Weber (Royal Public Asylum, Sonnenstein).

Throughout his life, his family suffered from various mental illnesses: his father experienced lifelong depression and his older brother committed suicide in 1877.

[5] Schreber graduated from St. Thomas School in 1860, began work as a judge for the Ministry of Justice in 1867, and received a doctorate in jurisprudence from University of Leipzig in 1869.

[13][page needed] As his psychosis progressed, he believed that God was turning him into a woman, sending rays down to enact 'miracles' upon him, including little men to torture him.

For Schreber, this was focused upon his personal and institutional relationship with Flechsig, who became a rebellious "nerve specialist" by virtue of his psychiatric power in contrast to the "Omnipotence" of God.

The rays had the capacity for independent activity, though they were distinguished from souls and nerves (generally identical) which emanated from other human beings deceased or living.

Within Schreber's cosmology the universe as an observable reality, and the Sun especially, was a partially independent realm which God merely communicated through, using rays and miracles to influence at times when the "Order of the World" needed to be adjusted.

Although Sigmund Freud never interviewed Schreber himself, he read his Memoirs and drew his own conclusions from it in an essay entitled "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" (1911).

Schreber indicates November 1895 as the period in which the connection between the fantasy of "unmanning" and the idea of having been invested by God with the role of redeemer of corrupt humanity was established.

Therefore, Freud concluded, it may be necessary to introduce a new diagnostic notion: paranoid dementia, which does justice to polymorphous mental disturbances such as those exhibited by the judge.

Freud's interpretation has been contested by a number of subsequent theorists, most notably Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere.

Schreber fantasized that he was the only man to have survived the plague and leprosy epidemics, thanks to "divine rays", and this, for Canetti, is "the extreme and final stage of power".

This can be seen as analogous to one of Moritz Schreber's techniques of using an elaborate contraption that confined the child's body, forcing him to have a "correct" posture at the dinner table.

Similarly, the "freezing miracle" might mirror Moritz Schreber's recommendation of placing the infant in a bath of ice cubes beginning at age three months.