Daniel Paul Schreber

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. He believed his primary psychiatrist, Prof. Paul Flechsig, had contact with him using a "nerve-language" of which Schreber said humans are unaware. He believed that hundreds of people's souls took special interest in him, and contacted his nerves by using "divine rays", telling him special information, or requesting things of him. During one of his stays at the Sonnenstein asylum, he concluded that there are "fleeting-improvised-men" in the world, which he believed were divinely fabricated men, as miracles to provide Schreber with "play-with-humans" in light of a depopulation of the world.[3]

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 was released from psychiatric hospitals around 1902, shortly before the publication of his book. He resumed his private activities, which he conducted very well up until 1907, when his mother died. He then went through a final hospitalisation. Schreber died on 14 April 1911 in the Leipzig-Dosen asylum.[4]

Although 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). Freud thought that Schreber's disturbances resulted from repressed homosexual desires, which in infancy were oriented at his father and brother. Repressed inner drives were projected onto the outside world and led to intense hallucinations which were first centred on his physician Dr. Flechsig (projection of his feelings towards his brother), and then around God (who represented Schreber's father, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber). During the first phase of his illness Schreber was certain that Dr. Flechsig persecuted him and made direct attempts to murder his soul and change him into a woman (he had what Freud thought to be emasculation hallucinations, which were in fact, according to Schreber's words an "unmanning" (Entmannung) experience. In the next period of his ailment he was convinced that God and the order of things demanded of him that he must be turned into a woman so that he could be the sole object of sexual desire of God. Consideration of the Schreber case led Freud to revise received classification of mental disturbances. He argued that the difference between paranoia and dementia praecox is not at all clear, since symptoms of both ailments may be combined in any proportion, as in Schreber's case. 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. Their reading of Schreber's Memoirs is a part of their wider criticism of familial orientation of psychoanalysis and it 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, Jacques Lacan's Seminar on the Psychoses and one of his écrits "On a Question prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" are predominantly concerned with reading and evaluating Schreber's text over-against Freud's original and originating interpretation.

In 1974, Morton Schatzman published Soul Murder, in which he gave his own interpretation of Schreber's psychosis. Schatzman's interpretation was in turn based on W. G. Niederland's research from the 1950s, (Niederland had previously worked with survivors of Nazi concentration camps).[5] 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 can be seen as analogous to one of Moritz Schreber's techniques of an elaborate contraption which 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. Daniel Paul Schreber's older brother, Daniel Gustav Schreber, committed suicide in his thirties. Han Israels argued against the interpretations of Niederland and Schatzman, claiming that Schreber's father had been unfairly criticized in the literature, in his 1989 book Schreber: Father and Son.[6]

More recently, Henry Zvi Lothane has argued against the interpretations of Niederland and Schatzman in his book In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry.[7] Lothane's Schreber research included the study of archival records concerning the relationship between Schreber and the other significant people in his life, including his wife and his doctors. On Lothane's account, the existing literature on Schreber as a rule (1) leaves substantial gaps in the historical records which careful archival research could in some measure fill; (2) leaves out psychoanalytically significant relationships, such as that between Schreber and his wife and (3) overstates the purportedly sadistic elements in Schreber's father's child-rearing techniques.[8] Lothane's interpretation of Schreber also differs from previous texts in that he considers Schreber a worthwhile thinker.[9]

• Schreber's Memoirs are the starting point and main topic of the 1972 radio play Schreber's Nervous Illness by British playwright Caryl Churchill.
• Roberto Calasso's first book, and only novel, L'impuro folle (1974), is about Schreber.
• A character of the same name appears in the 1988 book Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker.
• A character of the same name appears in the 1998 film Dark City, played by Kiefer Sutherland.
• In the 2006 film Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, based on Schreber's 1903 journal of the same name, Schreber is portrayed by Jefferson Mays.
• The 2011 docudrama film, Shock Head Soul follows Schreber's demise and later life.
• Schreber is the first person narrator of Swedish writer Fabian Kastner's novel Lekmannen (The Layman, 2013).
• In Jenny Davidson's The Magic Circle: A Novel (2013), Lucy uses Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as a text for the seminar she is teaching on "Madness and Literature."
• The song "Dementia Praecox" from the 2014 album White Deer Park by Papa vs Pretty is about Daniel Paul Schreber.
• Schreber is the subject of British writer Alex Pheby's novel Playthings, (2015).
• BBC documents record that Anthony Burgess wrote in 1975 for Burt Lancaster a screenplay of Schreber's Memoir. Never filmed, it was adapted for radio and performed by Christopher Eccleston 22 March 2020.

• David B. Allison et al., "Psychosis and Sexual Identity: Toward a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case" (ISBN 0-88706-617-8): State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1988. A collection of essays by theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Alphonso Lingis, Jean-François Lyotard, as well as several previously unpublished texts written by Schreber after the publication of the Memoirs.
• Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1984.
• Thomas Dalzell: Freud's Schreber: Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: London: Karmec: 2011.
• Han Israels: Schreber: Father and Son: Madison: International Universities Press: 1989.
• Erin Labbie & Michael Uebel: "We Have Never Been Schreber: Paranoia, Medieval and Modern," in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory. Ed. Andrew Cole & D. Vance Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 127-58.
• Jacques Lacan: 'The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, 1955-56', Routledge (ISBN 0-415-10183-2). An analysis of Schreber's Memoirs in the context of Freud's analysis. "[P]sychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment."
• Jacques Lacan: 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis', Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
• William Guglielmo Niederland: The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality: New York: Quadrangle: 1974.
• Eric Santner: My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (ISBN 0-691-02627-0) Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996.
• Morton Schatzman: Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (ISBN 0-394-48148-8) Random House, New York, 1973.
• Anke Junk: Macht und Wirkung eines Mythos - die mythenhaften Vorstellungen des Daniel Paul Schreber. Hannover, Impr. Henner Junk 2004. OCLC 1122576567
• Alexander van der Haven: "The War and Transcendental Order: Critique of Violence in Benjamin, Canetti and Daniel Paul Schreber" in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 43 (2015): 115-144.
• Alexander van der Haven: "God as Hypothesis: Daniel Paul Schreber and the Study of Religion" in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Working Papers from Hannover. Supplements to Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8. Ed. Steffen Führding. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 176–98.
• Alexander van der Haven: "Beyond the Modern Self: Madness and Divine Communion in fin-de-siècle Germany" in Religion und Wahnsinn um 1900: Zwischen Pathologisierung und Selbstermächtigung. Religion and Madness Around 1900: Between Pathology and Self-Empowerment. Diskurs Religion: Beiträge zur Religionsgeschichte und religiösen Zeitgeschichte 14. Ed. Lutz Greisiger, Sebastian Schüler, Alexander van der Haven. Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2017. 69–100.

• Saxon Psychiatric Museum collected documents about life history of the court president Daniel Paul Schreber.
• Daniel Paul Schreber: A Guide to Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. An introduction to Schreber's work.