The Schizoanalysis Project, Part 3

The Curious Case of Daniel Paul Schreber

NB: The next few entries in my Schizoanalysis Project series will focus on a close reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, perhaps the most in-depth firsthand account of a psychotic experience ever written and one of the most discussed books in the history of psychiatry. For readers who have learned about the Schreber Case before, some of this will likely sound familiar. This entry functions as an introduction to the Schreber Case and the Memoirs, while the next entry will discuss Freud and Lacan’s influential interpretations. I will then examine an alternative, schizoanalytic interpretation of Schreber’s experience and examine how it provides a window into both the mass psychology of fascism today and ways mad and neurodiverse experiences open up avenues of resistance against the same.

“And so I live in the confident faith that the whole confusion was only an episode which will finally lead one way or another to the restoration of conditions in consonance with the Order of the World. Perhaps the personal misfortunes I had to suffer and the loss of the states of Blessedness may even be compensated for, in that mankind will gain all at once, through my case, the knowledge of religious truth in much greater measure than possibly could have been achieved in hundreds and thousands of years by means of scientific research with the aid of all possible intellectual acuity.”

-Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, pp. 67-68

In 1902, after several years of lawsuits and court-ordered psychiatric opinions, the Saxon Supreme Court rescinded the incompetency ruling for one Daniel Paul Schreber, formerly Senatpräsident (presiding judge) of Saxony’s Third Court of Appeals, permitting his release from the Royal Public Asylum at Sonnenstein Castle. The following year, the publishing house Oswald Mutze in Leipzig would publish (with some significant redactions) Judge Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a book that would eventually secure his status as the world’s most famous madman. Before it would become one of the most discussed texts in the history of psychiatry, however, the Memoirs would serve as a critical piece of evidence in the court’s determination of Schreber’s sanity. Depending upon your perspective, Schreber’s Memoirs were either the decisive proof of his incredible recovery, or the final confirmation of his ongoing delusion.

For Dr. Guido Weber, the physician who issued several assessments of the Judge’s condition for the court, the religious import that Schreber placed upon the Memoirs ravings compelled the latter conclusion:

“When one looks at the content of his writings, and takes into consideration the abundance of indiscretions relating to himself and others contained in them, the unembarrassed detailing of the most doubtful and aesthetically impossible situations and events, the use of the most offensive vulgar words, etc., one finds it quite incomprehensible that a man otherwise tactful and of fine feeling could propose an action which would compromise him so severely in the eyes of the public, were not his whole attitude to life pathological, and he unable to see things in their proper perspective” (emphasis added).

Only a madman, Weber reasoned, would even contemplate publishing something so self-incriminating. But if this fact weighed so heavily for Weber, it was only in view of the stark contrast it presented with Schreber’s other behavior at that time, six years after his illness began in 1893: “At the present time, setting aside the psychomotor symptoms that would strike even the fleeting observer as pathological, Justice Dr Schreber appears, then, neither confused nor subject to psychical inhibition, nor of materially diminished intelligence; he is thoughtful; his memory is excellent; he has a considerable measure of knowledge…and is able to reproduce this in an orderly train of thought”. In a later assessment in 1900, Weber observed that Schreber had for nine months, “during meals at the family table,” conversed intelligently and with a “lively interest” on topics in “government and the law, politics, art and literature, the life of society,” and had generally “behaved in a nice and friendly manner in his light banter with the ladies present…[remaining] tactful and decent.”

In the judgment ordering Schreber’s release, the court did not deny his delusional beliefs: “He takes himself to be called to redeem the world and to restore it to its lost bliss. But this he can only do if he has first transformed himself from a man into a woman.” But by then, Schreber had had apparently completed a remarkable recovery from the low point of his paranoid illness, with the exception of his intermittent “bellowing attacks,” and while he would eventually return to the asylum in a final episode of illness in 1907, he by all accounts lived a relatively “normal” life in the interim. If madness, in Foucault’s provocative characterization, is the absence of an oeuvre, then it is surely peculiar to rest the case for insanity on the existence of an intelligible and surprisingly sophisticated oeuvre, however fanciful or obscene some of its contents may seem.

Whatever damage the Memoirs might do to Schreber’s reputation, the book exploded onto the scene of early psychoanalysis shortly after its release because the Judge’s account of his experiences was not only lucid and perceptive, but seemed to exhibit an uncanny awareness of certain themes that Freud and his disciples were still struggling to articulate. As one reviewer put it: “Never before have the symptoms of paranoia been offered in such detail and so completely…because of his high intelligence and logical training, Schreber’s presentation must be called perfect by the well-informed physician.” Freud would go so far as to conclude his 1911 account of “The Schreber Case” with the disclaimer that he had not plagiarized his theory of paranoia from the Memoirs. “It will be for posterity to decide,” Freud admits, “whether there is more delusion in the theory than I might like, or more truth in the delusion than others today are willing to believe.”

Nonetheless it is not a coincidence that Freud did not encounter Schreber’s book until years after its publication, well behind others in his circle, including Jung and Adler. In his clinical experience, Freud had almost exclusively treated neurotics, just as he had developed the central categories of psychoanalysis out of his interpretation of the neuroses. By contrast, he had remained fairly quiet on the problem of the psychoses. From Freud’s standpoint, which he insisted on grounding in analytic practice, the reason was easy to summarize: neurotics wanted treatment; psychotics didn’t. “Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics,” Deleuze and Guattari warn, “He doesn’t like their resistance to being oedipalized” (AO, 23). Perhaps this is because he too “is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena” (AO, 14). Or perhaps what is galling to the psychoanalyst, in his assumed position of mastery, is that “they resemble philosophers–‘an undesirable resemblance.’”

Why should Freud find the resemblance between psychotics and philosophers to be so undesirable? Is it because, in this very comparison, he comes too close for comfort to acknowledging the real reason for the psychotic’s purported resistance to treatment? For it seems that the entire psychoanalytic cure depends upon a certain contrast between surface and depth, situating itself between the two in the effort to make perspicuous the truth of that which, hidden in the depths of the unconscious, appears on the surface only in the distorted form of the symptom. What, then, is the psychoanalyst to make of this psychotic, Judge Schreber, in whom not only the unconscious and its desires but also the very theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis itself seems revealed, in its truth, on the very surface, such that the contrast between surface and depth appears to lose all meaning?

Schreber’s Memoirs is today, as it was in Freud’s time and again in Deleuze and Guattari’s time, a palimpsest whose arcane and cryptic text is again and again effaced and overcoded with the deepest anxieties and most perverse fantasies of our era. Though Anti-Oedipus finds in Schreber’s delusions a model for desiring-machines and a promise of emancipation in the schizophrenic process, they do not hesitate to acknowledge the fascistic elements of his paranoid fantasy that Elias Canetti first identified in his 1960 study of mass psychology, Crowds and Power. What Schreber’s delusions exemplify, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, is the way that desire directly and immediately invests the social and political field, without requiring any mediation, sublimation, or triangulation in the Oedipal schema of “daddy-mommy-me.” And this fact is not irrelevant to Saxon Supreme Court’s 1902 decision to give Schreber his freedom: “There is room for doubting that the decision would have been the same if Schreber had been schizophrenic rather than paranoiac, if he had taken himself for a black or a Jew rather than a pure Aryan, if he had not proved himself so competent in the management of his wealth, and if in his delirium he had not displayed a taste for the socius of an already fascisizing libidinal investment” (AO, 364).

In Schreber’s delirium the entire spectrum of desiring-production is on display, from its schizophrenic pole to its fascist-paranoid pole. It is for this reason that the Memoirs remain fertile terrain for examining that contradiction between rebellious urges and desire for repression that Wilhelm Reich placed at the center of the mass psychology of fascism. Indeed, according to Eric Santner’s 1996 study, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, “Schreber’s breakdown and efforts at self-healing introduced him into the deepest structural layers of the historical impasses and conflicts that would provisionally culminate in the Nazi catastrophe.” If the Memoirs remain relevant for us in a time of resurgent fascism, however, it is not because it can be read as a direct precursor to Mein Kampf, as Canetti argues, but instead because it is imperative for us to understand “how Schreber, who no doubt experienced the hollowing out of [the bourgeois-liberal order] in a profound way, managed to avoid, by way of his own series of aberrant identifications, the totalitarian temptation.”

Daniel Paul Schreber’s troubles began in 1884. Not long after his landslide defeat in an election to the German Reichstag, in which he ran as the National Liberal Party candidate for the Saxon city of Chemnitz, the Doctor of Jurisprudence and then Landgerichtsdirektor (administrative director) suffered an attack of severe hypochondria, resulting in his admission to the psychiatric clinic at the University of Leipzig under the care of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig. This first illness, Schreber reports, “passed without any occurrences bordering on the supernatural,” and through Flechsig’s treatment he was “rapidly cured” by the end of 1885 and able to resume his work. Schreber left the clinic “most grateful to Professor Flechsig,” and his wife even kept a photograph of their benefactor on her desk to commemorate her husband’s recovery. According to Schreber, the eight years separating this illness from his second passed mostly without difficulty.

The second and far more serious illness followed Schreber’s appointment in October 1893 as Senatpräsident, or presiding judge, of the Superior Court in Dresden. Overburdened by the workload of his new position and struggling with severe insomnia to the point of attempted suicide, Schreber readmitted himself to Flechsig’s asylum in November, where he would quickly descend into the depths of paranoid illness detailed in the Memoirs. Recalling the days leading up to his nervous collapse, however, Schreber reports “several dreams to which I did not then attribute any particular significance,” one of which would prove pivotal for the experiences that followed:

“[O]ne morning while still in bed (whether still half asleep or already awake I cannot remember), I had a feeling which, thinking about it later when fully awake, struck me as highly peculiar. It was the idea that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse. This idea was so foreign to my whole nature that I may say I would have rejected it with indignation if fully awake; from what I have experienced since I cannot exclude the possibility that some external influences were at work to implant this idea in me” (Memoirs, p. 46).

The complex, paranoid fantasy that Schreber subsequently developed would apparently organize itself around this core sexual anxiety over “unmanning,” or the castration that Schreber would suffer when transformed into a woman by the divine rays of God Himself. It is not difficult to see why the author of The Interpretation of Dreams should be so struck by this recollection of Schreber’s, nor why Freud might see in the Memoirs the perfect test case for demonstrating the validity of psychoanalysis as a paradigm for understanding the psychoses. Early on in his reconstruction of Schreber’s case history, Freud confidently declares that “[o]n the basis of the samples of the Schreber delusion given thus far, we can dismiss the concern that this paranoid illness could emerge as the ‘negative case’ so long sought for, where sexuality plays an all too minor role. Schreber himself expresses himself on countless occasions in the manner of a follower of our prejudice. He always speaks of ‘nervosity’ and erotic lapses in the same breath, as if the two were inseparable” (Freud, The Schreber Case, pp. 20-21). To be sure, sexual themes are pervasive in Schreber’s Memoirs, but Deleuze and Guattari are not being entirely hyperbolic when they point out the critical defect in Freud’s approach: “From the enormous political, social, and historical content of Schreber’s delirium, not one word is retained, as though the libido did not bother itself with such things” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 57). What makes the Schreber Case so elusive, and such fertile ground for enduring psychoanalytic speculation, is that it can just as easily be read as disconfirmation of Freud’s sexual theory, and confirmation instead of Jung’s emphasis on mythological archetypes and the collective unconscious. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, “starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 58). Freud’s anxieties about his disciples’ deviations from his own psychoanalytic orthodoxy, grounded in the “dogma” and “unshakable bulwark” of the theory of sexuality, surface again and again throughout his interpretation of the Schreber Case. To determine whether his containment strategy is successful, however, we must first be willing to encounter Schreber on his own terms, before his posthumous Oedipalization at Freud’s hands.

The main features of Schreber’s delusional system would crystallize between the months of March and May of 1894, which Schreber describes as “the most gruesome time of my life” but also “the holy time of my life, when my soul was immensely inspired by supernatural things…when I was filled with the most sublime ideas about God and the Order of the World” (Memoirs, p. 69). Schreber outlines these religious insights in the opening pages of the Memoirs, before beginning to recount the details of his personal experience. “The human soul is contained in the nerves of the body,” he explains, “and…the total mental life of a human being rests on [the nerves’] excitability by external impressions” (Memoirs, p. 19). The source of Schreber’s affliction lies in the unprecedented “hyper-excitability” of his nerves and the overwhelming attractive power they thereby exert upon other souls, and more importantly, upon God Himself.

Schreber’s constant “nerve-contact” with God, through which he attracts the unrelenting attention of “divine rays,” is both his blessing and his curse. He became aware of it “relatively early in the form of compulsive thinking,” or the inner voices produced by a multitude of souls impressing thoughts directly upon his nerves. Though God’s divine rays are the source of Schreber’s holy experiences, their attachment to him has also precipitated a crisis in what Schreber calls the “Order of the World” that is closely related to the rays’ primary effect upon Schreber’s person: turning him into a woman. The problem is not simply that Schreber experiences himself being castrated by God’s power (which, as we shall see, is accompanied by important ambiguities); it is also that God’s extreme proximity to Schreber’s soul is inherently fraught with danger. The “miraculous structure” of the Order of the World “has recently suffered a rent, intimately connected with my personal fate,” Schreber explains (Memoirs, p. 33). By the end of the Memoirs, it appears that the complex apparatus of Schreber’s cosmology is fundamentally oriented towards elucidating, and finally resolving, this basic contradiction between the Order of the World and his encounter with God’s divine presence.

In the Order of the World, God makes nerve-contact with living human beings only sporadically and with caution. For God to have become so captivated by Schreber’s nerves, then, was highly unusual and in conflict with a cosmic order to which even God Himself was subject. If this excessive nerve-contact constituted a crisis so profound as to cause a rent in the very fabric of the universe, it was not because of the suffering that he, Schreber, was forced to endure as a result; it was because “the nerves of living human beings particularly when in a state of high-grade excitation, have such a power of attraction for the nerves of God that He would not be able to free Himself from them again, and would thus endanger His own existence” (p. 24). God’s endangerment within Schreber places him in the paradoxical position of Destroyer and Redeemer, both the Pandora’s box through which an apocalyptic threat escapes into the world and the one destined to overcome this cataclysm and thereby restore the Order of the World. He will survive his ordeal because it is God, not he, who contravenes the cosmic order:

“I am inclined to regard the whole thing as a matter of fate, in which neither on God’s nor on my part can there be a question of moral infringement. On the contrary, the Order of the World reveals its very grandeur and magnificence by denying even God Himself in so irregular a case as mine the means of achieving a purpose contrary to the Order of the World. All attempts at committing soul murder, at unmanning me for purposes contrary to the Order of the World (that is to say for the sexual satisfaction of a human being) and later at destruction of my reason have failed. From this apparently so unequal battle between one weak human being and God Himself, I emerge, albeit not without bitter sufferings and deprivations, victorious, because the Order of the World is on my side” (p. 67).

As the “Open Letter to Professor Flechsig” that opens the Memoirs makes clear, Schreber has come to believe that God’s excessive nerve-contact and the corresponding breach in the Order of the World are responsible for the persecution fantasies directed towards Schreber’s former benefactor early in his illness. Through Schreber admits some uncertainty about how Flechsig’s nerve-contact with him came about and the degree to which Flechsig himself was responsible, he is certain “that Professor Flechsig must have had some idea of this tendency, innate in the Order of the World, whereby in certain conditions the unmanning of a human being is provided for” (Memoirs, p. 62). Flechsig’s crime, however, is not simply that he has abused God’s divine rays in order to manipulate Schreber’s nerves, but even more so the end towards which he has so abused them. With his power over Schreber’s nerves, Flechsig intends to commit “soul-murder”: to evacuate Schreber’s soul from his body so that the latter, in its castrated, feminized form, can be subjected to sexual abuse. God, in His turn, would reenact this crime in His continual efforts to “forsake” Schreber and escape the attraction of his nerves, which had the goal of destroying Schreber’s reason.

Schreber’s fears of persecution reached a fever pitch when in “perhaps mid-June 1894” he was briefly transferred to a new asylum that the voices called “Devil’s Kitchen.” By this time, Schreber had become convinced that “I was the last real human being left [on Earth], and that the few human shapes whom I saw apart from myself…were only ‘fleeting-improvised men’ created by miracle” (Memoirs, pp. 76-77). Schreber’s fantasy now takes on increasingly cosmological dimensions. God, who is divided into a lower and upper incarnations named Ariman and Ormuzd, respectively, inhabits the sun as they vehicle for delivering divine rays, just as Flechsig, identified with God, divides into the “superior Flechsig’ and “middle Flechsig” (Memoirs, p. 121). At first Schreber vehemently resists these influences and the unmanning they effect, “[suppressing] every feminine impulse by exerting my sense of manly honor and also by the holiness of my religious ideas,” for he “felt the danger of unmanning for a long time as threatening ignominy, especially while there was the possibility of my body being sexually abused by other people” (Memoirs, pp. 124-125). Yet despite these supernatural assaults, Schreber will find that the resolution of his crisis lies not in resisting his unmanning, but in affirming it in a new way.

God does not subject Schreber to castration out of a desire to torment him, but due to “[a] fundamental misunderstanding..based upon the fact that, within the Order of the World, God did not really understand the living human being and had no need to understand him, because, according to the Order of the World, He dealt only with corpses” (Memoirs, p. 62). As with many features of Schreber’s fantasy, God’s misuse of his body and soul is predicated upon this misunderstanding, which prevents Him from recognizing that continual unmanning is not an effective way of freeing Himself from his entrapment in Schreber’s nerves. Schreber’s “moral obliquity” therefore “lay in God placing Himself outside of the Order of the World by which He Himself must be guided” due to the temptations of the impure souls lodged within Schreber (Memoirs, p. 66). Thus early on in the Memoirs, Schreber already hints that his solution may lie in a second kind of castration: unmanning in consonance with the Order of the World. Schreber’s becoming-woman has been forced upon him by God acting contrary to the Order of the World; but even so, “Dieu le veut (God wishes it),” and therefore rather than rejecting God’s demand for “constant enjoyment,” Schreber must transfigure it in such a way as to restore the Order of the World: “To be unmanned could have served a different purpose–one which was in consonance with the Order of the World–and this was not only within the bounds of possibility, but may even have provided the likely solution of the conflict” (Memoirs, p. 67 n. 34).

Early in the Memoirs, Schreber associates this redemptive unmanning with the figure of the “Eternal Jew,” who after an apocalyptic catastrophe “had to be unmanned (transformed into a woman) to be able to bear children” of God and repopulate the devastated Earth. Indeed, the “main purpose” of the fleeting-improvised men and their “miracled” world seems to have been maintaining and providing for the Eternal Jew “until his offspring were sufficiently numerous to be able to sustain themselves” (p. 61). If Schreber is to assume this role, he must establish a balance between the tendency of God’s nerve-contact to transgress the Order of the World on the one hand, and the need to affirm and enjoy God’s nerve-contact in order to reestablish the Order of the World on the other.

By the end of the Memoirs, Schreber informs his reader of his success in achieving this equilibrium and regaining his mental functionality:

“The art of conducting my life in the mad position I find myself–and I do not mean here the relationship with my environment but the absurd relation between God and myself which is contrary to the Order of the World–consists in finding a fitting middle course in which both parties, God and man, fare best; in other words, if divine rays find soul-voluptuousness in my body which they can share…while I retain the necessary rest for my nerves of intellect, particularly at night, and the capacity to occupy myself in a manner commensurate with my intellectual needs” (p. 251, emphasis added).

For a long time Schreber “lived in the certain expectation that one day my unmanning (transformation into a woman) would be completed; this solution seemed to me absolutely essential as preparation for the renewal of mankind, particularly while I thought the rest of mankind had perished” (pp. 254-255). But if this tentative compromise Schreber has established between God’s violation of his person and the Order of the World is the best he can hope for, then he fears that the world, too, will remain in a compromised state, the redemptive process of unmanning never complete. “It is therefore possible, indeed probable, that to the end of my days there will be strong indications of femaleness, but that I shall die as a man” (p. 255). In concluding his account, Schreber is defiant, victorious: “there must be an equalizing justice and it can never be that a morally unblemished human being with feet firmly planted in the Order of the World should have to perish as the innocent victim of other people’s sins in a struggle carried on against him by hostile powers” (Memoirs, p. 257).

It is true that in 1911, the same year that Freud published his study, Schreber’s life would end in yet another asylum after suffering a third and final nervous illness following his wife’s death in 1907. But it is also true that until then Schreber enjoyed several happy years with his wife and an adoptive daughter after his release in 1903, even though neither his experience of God’s nerve-contact nor his belief in its reality ever relented.

Therefore we must not underestimate the strength of Schreber’s cure, which was sufficiently efficacious to enable him to write one of the most significant texts in the history of psychiatry and secure his own freedom in a court of law. Even when disputing Freud’s theory that Schreber’s psychosis was a product of repressed homosexuality, most interpreters of the Memoirs have nonetheless followed him in posing the question, “what does the fantasy mean?”, without first examining the logic of Schreber’s own effort, premised upon taking the fantasy literally, to fashion an Ariadne’s thread out of his labyrinth. If we insist on continuing to treat psychosis as an illness, then we must not be surprised if the only real cure is the one offered by the illness itself.