Schreber's Memoirs Research Articles

Daniel Paul Schreber as Anti-Oedipus: More lessons from the incipit

ContextThe incipit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's book Anti-Oedipus, as well as those who have commented upon this and related incipits, is the focus of this paper. This remarkable first paragraph provides the orientation for the investigation of the figure of President Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and the subject of a case study by Sigmund Freud. ObjectiveThe goal is to show that Schreber, who is named in the incipit, is a key figure of anti-oedipal theory. He is, in fact, anti-oedipal, and anti-Freudian and anti-Lacanian, but in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari, he is also the author of a schizoanalytic masterpiece. MethodComparing and contrasting approaches to Schreber in the secondary literature, as well as looking closely at the text, an analysis is mounted by following one specific line of inquiry, across a variety of disciplines, into the written word and of writing. The combination of the incipit's reference to Schreber and to Georges Bataille is used to expand the inquiry toward the question of the place of pleasure and parody in writing. InterpretationThe turn to writing, suggested in a number of secondary texts, as well as in Schreber's Memoirs, exposes the figure of Schreber as an anti-oedipal writer. Yet the status of Schreber as sovereign author, however, is called into question, and the kind of writing that affords to him a place in the incipit of Anti-Oedipus, is discovered to belong to a mode emphasizing both pleasure and parody.

My life with Paul Schreber

Freud's 1911 and Niederland's 1959 problematic interpretations of Schreber's Memoirs set off a flood of secondary literature. In both selected facts were paired with a plethora of fictions. The narratives of Schreber father and son were misdescribed, misdiagnosed, and misinterpreted, errors have been uncritically copied by commentators ever since. Freud's theory of homosexuality as a cause of paranoia has not stood the test of time. In 1963 Niederland himself stated that the data he collected on Schreber father and son do not explain Schreber's second illness. A further misconception was to totalize both Schreber as person and the content of his book as psychotic, controverted by the fact that Schreber recovered by 1897 and the book is a creative essay with a profound moral message. Schreber's hermaphroditic fantasies were neither homosexual desires toward psychiatrist Flechsig nor morbid delusions but images of an identification with or compassion for his wife who suffered repeated miscarriages and stillbirths. The author revisits the description, diagnosis, dynamics, and deontology of Schreber's story from the perspective of dramatology and narratology and adds new information and insights. The goal of this essay is not only historical, but also a clinical and practical approach to fantasy and delusion.

Clinical Roundtable on Technique

This clinical roundtable features a presentation by Dorothée Bonnigal‐Katz who posits the impairment of the mechanisms of repression as characteristic of psychosis and discusses its consequences for the analyst, especially as regards the place of interpretation. She shows how the analyst's encounter with the psychotic experience radically challenges and paradoxically validates psychoanalytic technique. In response to Bonnigal‐Katz's discussion, Tomasz Fortuna offers an overview of the psychoanalytic tradition's response to psychosis, raising the issue of the relation between psychosis and neurosis. Christos Tombras, on the other hand, invokes Freud's discussion of Schreber's Memoirs from a Lacanian perspective and addresses the question of language and experience.

On Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber– reflection

Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness profoundly influenced many key figures of modern psychiatry, including Bleuler and Jaspers, Freud and Jung. Author Elias Canetti described it as the ‘most important document in psychiatric literature’. To read this work – typically considered a paradigmatic expression of paranoid schizophrenia – is to risk a shaking of one's complacency, especially concerning the key symptom of delusion. For me personally, it was a revelation.

Psychosis as a Disorder of Reduced Cathectic Capacity: Freud's Analysis of the Schreber Case Revisited

Approximately 100 years ago, a prominent German public figure name Daniel Schreber wrote memoirs of his experiences in asylums. His case was diagnosed Dementia Praecox at times and Paranoia at others by his treaters. Freud analyzed Schreber's memoirs from the perspective of his "libido" theory of developmentally organized mental "cathexes" or ideational/emotional investments in self and others. Revisiting Freud's analysis of the Schreber case suggests that it may represent the first theoretical articulation that the pathophysiologic core of psychosis is one of deficit, i.e., of diminished (organic) cathectic capacity for normal mental and affective investments in life.

My summer reading

Does anyone, now that the publishing industry seems to have become another platform for sleb publicity, still read books? If you do, you'll know that some of the best of them are being published on the other side of the Atlantic. The New York Review of Books , a left-liberal fortnightly current affairs digest and book review which is read not just by the cultured but (as its ad claims) the powerful, is also an imprint: its lower-case initials now decorate the monochrome spines of several hundred trade paperbacks. The Classics list offers fiction and non-fiction from all ages and around the world, such as Robert Burton's great remedial study The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632), one of the great works of ‘sick lit’, Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903), classic collections of stories by Chekhov, Maupassant, and Cesare Pavese, Simenon's darker ‘psychological’ novels, as well as Elizabeth David's cookbooks, one or two poetry collections, and unclassifiable but brilliant memoirs such as JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip . The NYRB also publish Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence , a series of observations on what it takes to hold a monkish …

Schreber's “Bellowing Miracle”

Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness has, in the 100 years since its publication, generated a substantial hermeneutic literature in psychiatry. It is 30 years since the first major content analysis was performed and published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. This study, using a simple frequency count approach to the Memoirs, has revealed that the term "bellowing miracle" (das Brüllwunder) is the most frequently mentioned of all of Schreber's celebrated neologisms. The prevalence of the "bellowing miracle" in the text of the Memoirs, psychiatric charts, and court reports warrants closer examination and attempts at explanation. It is clear that the manifest symptoms of the bellowing miracle had a significant influence on Schreber's treatment and struggle to secure his release from the asylum. It is suggested that adult tic disorder may explain the symptoms of the bellowing miracle.

Gaze, dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case

In this paper the author reviews Freud's study of Schreber's Memoirs and the Memoirs themselves from a perspective of nearly 100 years. He argues that Schreber's illness began as a melancholic depression but quickly developed paranoid features which subsequently escalated into a gross paranoia which nevertheless retained its depressive and hypochondriacal base. Finally the chaotic fragmentation became organized under the dominance of an omnipotent narcissistic organisation which led to a clinical improvement without any relinquishment of his delusional beliefs. As a subsidiary theme he examines the role of gaze in Schreber's object relations and argues that gaze was used to project into his objects, then to scrutinise the object to see if the projections had been received and tolerated, and finally as an expression of dominance. His urgent demand for relief provoked an omnipotence in his objects which he was then able triumphantly to frustrate and which ushered in a struggle over dominance in the course ofwhich Schreber was abused and humiliated. He was unable to find an object who could contain his distress and these factors contributed to the failure to tolerate guilt and to work through his depression.

Gaze, dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case.

In this paper the author reviews Freud's study of Schreber's Memoirs and the Memoirs themselves from a perspective of nearly 100 years. He argues that Schreber's illness began as a melancholic depression but quickly developed paranoid features which subsequently escalated into a gross paranoia which nevertheless retained its depressive and hypochondriacal base. Finally the chaotic fragmentation became organized under the dominance of an omnipotent narcissistic organisation which led to a clinical improvement without any relinquishment of his delusional beliefs. As a subsidiary theme he examines the role of gaze in Schreber's object relations and argues that gaze was used to project into his objects, then to scrutinise the object to see if the projections had been received and tolerated, and finally as an expression of dominance. His urgent demand for relief provoked an omnipotence in his objects which he was then able triumphantly to frustrate and which ushered in a struggle over dominance in the course of which Schreber was abused and humiliated. He was unable to find an object who could contain his distress and these factors contributed to the failure to tolerate guilt and to work through his depression.

SCHREBER'S SOUL-VOLUPTUOUSNESS: MYSTICISM, MADNESS AND THE FEMININE IN SCHREBER'S MEMOIRS

AbstractFreud's 1911 case study based on Schreber's (1903) Memoirs of My Nervous Illness provides the investigator with the opportunity to reexamine Freud's interpretation through a return to the original data Freud used. This study reveals both the insights and limitations of Freud's theory of paranoia. An alternative interpretation of the case is overed from an existential-phenomenological perspective which aims both to expand upon and transform Freud's study without negating its value. Freud draws on the mythologies of the sun to argue for his hypothesis that the "father-complex" lies behind Schreber's God. By following some of the many other mythological themes in Schreber's memoirs, Freud's interpretation is opened to a larger, socially and historically situated context. An examination of cross-cultural and historical studies of mystical experience shows how Schreber's psychosis is simultaneously a form of madness and spiritual breakthrough. Schreber's is viewed as a narcissistic experience of the infant-child in which the imaginal has been exiled from rational, modern adulthood and is inaccessible to Cartesian language. Instead of recognizing the soul-full world of "miracles," Schreber envisions the absorption of the entire world into himself and he thus becomes an inflated caricature of the "heroic ego" at its extreme .

Psychosis and the Law: Legal Responsibility and Law of Symbolisation

This paper argues for the practical importance ofpsychoanalysis for criminology, an importancewhich finds its raison d'etre in thenecessity that a subject be response-able for there tobe full legal responsibility. In recognising therequirement for a certain linguistic constellation tobe in evidence – namely that there be a subject ofenunciation who is able to answer for what hearticulates at the level of his statement – thecorrespondence between legal responsibility and thelaw of symbolisation, Lacan's term for theOedipus complex, is addressed. Starting from thefictitious structure of truth and its corollary, thefact that `truth is grounded on the fact that itspeaks', the unconscious emerges as a grammaticalapparatus for the production of meaning. The logic ofexception, indexed on the signifier of theName-of-the-Father, is exposed as the mechanism forthe operation of this grammatical apparatus as it isbrought to bear on the trace of subjective division.I then demonstrate the importance of division for thesubject of law by presenting the deleterious effectsof the dysfunctional grammar of psychosisthrough a study of President Schreber's Memoirs and his use of grammatical devices in orderto institute a constitutional democracy in the realmof God – and thus submit the Father to his Name.

Philosophy and Madness: Sass's the Paradoxes of Delusion

This article explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy, through discussion of a recent book in which announced interpretation of Schreber's Memoirs is cross-articulated with Wittgenstein's analysis of philosophical solipsism. It shows how many of the `intellectual diseases' which preoccupied Wittgenstein have strong affinities with the symptoms described by Schreber and questions some basic assumptions which tend to be made within the psychoanalytic field.

Computer content analysis of the Schreber case.

The text of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness was analyzed by computer at the level of the individual word. These words then were grouped into 17 rational categories, and the categories were checked for reliability. The contents of Schreber's work then were compared with three other documents. In general, the Memoirs showed much greater delusional content than the other documents. Interestingly, sexual matters did not appear to be Schreber's principal problem at this atomistic level.

Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan's Hamlet

T HE TRAGEDY HAMLET, Lacan says, tragedy desire.' winding path Hamlet's desire will take Lacan through territory familiar to his readers, perhaps new to others: from object petit a, to to foreclosure and mourning, and finally to death. How these views add to our understanding how far they go beyond Lacan's own indictment the sort hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of (p. 20) remains to be seen. Lacan's own text, titled and Interpretation Desire in Hamlet, is a text edited from transcripts his seminar for academic year 1958-59 on and Its Interpretation. Its themes resonate with some related essays in Ecrits: A Selection:2 The signification phallus, delivered in May, 1958; The subversion subject and dialectic desire in Freudian unconscious, presented in September, 1960; and On a question preliminary to any possible treatment psychosis, his analysis Schreber's Memoirs, completed in January, 1958, and to which we will return.3 Norman Holland notes that psychoanalysts seem to take to Hamlet like kittens to a ball yarn.4 Lacan is no exception. Lacan's basic thesis can be summarized as follows: Hamlet's

Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History

One message of psychoanalysis that finds its echo or development in contemporary literary theorizing is that life is story production, that identity (ego) is a product of the story one (always already) invents to explain/connect the data of one's past. Story production in turn involves two elements: a characterology, or structure of personae in their relations to each other, and a plot, through and in which this characterology is manifested/constituted. For example (and there is nothing random about it), the Oedipus complex, a triangle of relations, and the Oedipal scenario, a dream of incest and parricide, are synchronic and diachronic representations of the individual subject's insertion into our culture. Perhaps the most elaborate schematization of this characterology-of-insertion is Lacan's schema R,I presented in connection with a re-analysis of Freud's analysis of Dr. Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903). Lacan's schema presents a kind of from which Schreber's psychosis differs, a culturally determined norm depending, for example, on a Cartesian conception of the (skeptical) ego. Contemporary with Schreber's madness (and Freud's early work), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) exhibits an elaborate narrativization of Lacan's characterology. What follows is a demonstration of a mapping of the characters in Dracula onto the intersections of schema R by way of Freud's Group Psychology. The value of this demonstration is two-fold: in one light, it is an explanation-by-example of the sense of schema R; in another, it is one of a set of demonstrations on Gothic texts which outline the rise of the Oedipus complex as a determinant of bourgeois psychology in the nineteenth century. In the beginning of Dracula we are introduced to six young people and to the monster who is to threaten the peacefulness of their lives. These young people are all biologically unrelated, but connected as friends or friends' friends. After Lucy is killed and Mina attacked, as Maurice Richardson says,

Conceptual thinking in schizophrenics and their relatives.

It probably goes without dispute at the present time that the precise content of a schizophrenic's thought, like that of anyone else, is derived from experience. Even the remarkable mélange of Schreber's memoirs could in large part be traced to his childhood experiences (Niederland, 1959). There is generally little doubt that the exact form and the course may be determined by age and experience; the effects of genetically determined intellectual endowment are uncertain (Elsässer, 1952; Rosenthal, 1963). The very occurrence of schizophrenia as a clinical phenomenon challenges the investigator, and there are many who question whether experience alone could result in schizophrenia in any and all human beings. They ask rather to what extent and by what mechanisms is the occurrence of schizophrenia determined by genetic factors.