Daniel Paul Schreber
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Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) was a German judge suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He described his condition in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (original German title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). The book was influential in psychology. Sigmund Freud put his own interpretation on Schreber's case.
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[edit] Schreber's Experiences
Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that it would be pleasant to "succumb" to sexual intercourse as a woman. He was alarmed and felt that this thought had come from somewhere else, not from himself. He even hypothesized that the thought had come from a doctor who had experimented with hypnosis on him; he thought that the doctor had telepathically invaded his mind.
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.
Schreber died in 1911, in an asylum.
[edit] Freud's Interpretation
Although Freud never interviewed Schreber himself, he read his Memoirs and drew his own conclusions from it. Freud thought that Schreber wanted to be turned into a woman so that could be the sole object of sexual desire of God (who represented Schreber's father). This view has been contested by a number of subsequent theorists, most famously Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere. Their reading of Schreber's Memoirs foregrounds the political and racial elements of the text; they see Schreber's written experience of reality abnormal only in its honesty about the experience of power in late capitalism. Elias Canetti also devoted the closing chapters of his theoretical magnum opus Crowds and Power to a reading of Schreber. Finally (though by no means exhaustively), Jacques Lacan's Seminar on the Psychoses is predominantly concerned with reading and evaluating Schreber's text over-against Freud's original and originating interpretation.
[edit] Schatzman's Interpretation
In 1974, Morton Schatzman published a book entitled "Soul Murder" in which he gave his own interpretation of Schreber's psychosis. Schatzman had found child-rearing pamphlets written by Moritz Schreber, Daniel Schreber's father, which stressed the necessity of taming the rebellious savage beast in the child and turning him into a productive citizen. Many of the "techniques" recommended by Moritz Schreber were mirrored in Daniel Schreber's psychotic experiences. For example, one of the "miracles" described by Daniel Schreber was that of chest compression, of tightening and tightening. This mirrored one of Moritz Schreber's "techniques" of an elaborate contraption which confined the child's body, forcing him to have correct posture at the dinner table. The "freezing miracle" mirrors Moritz Schreber's recommendation of placing the infant in a bath of ice cubes beginning at age 3 months.
Daniel Paul Schreber's older brother, Daniel Gustav Schreber, committed suicide in his thirties.
[edit] Dark City
A character named Daniel Paul Schreber appears in the film Dark City. Portrayed by Keifer Sutherland, the Schreber in the film is not, however, a judge, as was the historical Schreber but rather a doctor, ironically enough not unlike Doktor Paul Flechsig, the hostile focus of Schreber's delusion. While the film stops far short of confronting the truly unsettling implications of Schreber's account, and is concerned far more with the status of cinematic film noir stereotypes than with the everyday reality around us, nonetheless, it does echo the paranoid sense of the Memoirs that collectively-experienced reality (the "Big Other" in Lacan's phrase) is in fact malevolent and manipulative, and that its agency - the tuning aliens in the film, the forecourts of God in the Memoirs - cannot understand human subjectivity and the experience of an inner life. Moreover, there are clear parallels in the film with certain Schreberian notions, particularly the "fleetingly improvised men," the "poison of corpses" and the "lung worm."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Daniel Paul Schreber: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (ISBN 0-940322-20-X)
- Sigmund Freud: The Schreber Case (ISBN 0-14-243742-5)
- Morton Schatzman: Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (ISBN 0-394-48148-8)
- Eric Santner: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (ISBN 0-691-02627-0)
- Zvi Lothane: In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry (ISBN 0-88163-103-5)
- W.G. Niederland: Schreber: Father and Son (1959, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 28:151-169). He basically came to same conclusion as Morton Schatzman.
