SOURCE: Santner, Eric L. “Freud, Schreber, and The Passions of Psychoanalysis.” In My Own Private Germany: Daniel Schreber's Secret History of Modernity, pp. 19-62. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Santner identifies Schreber's individual paranoia with a larger German cultural condition that led to the rise of National Socialism in the early twentieth century.]

I

Psychoanalysts have long known about the transferential dimension of literary production, about the ways in which texts provide opportunities for their writers to act out or, ideally, work through, some of the very issues animating the subject matter of the text. This insight applies as much to the texts produced by psychoanalysts as by any other group of writers. And, indeed, Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis to a large extent on the basis of his own self-analysis, was profoundly aware of this transferential dimension of his own literary production. As it turns out, with regard to the text of concern to us here, his study of Daniel Paul Schreber—“Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”¹—Freud left a detailed record of the transferential dynamic informing its composition. A brief look at this record will allow us to appreciate better what we might call the passions of psychoanalysis, namely, the deeper motives and motivations animating its choices of subjects. Among the things that made Schreber matter to Freud, that made his Memoirs a subject matter worthy of a major study based exclusively on a reading of that text, was, it appears, Freud's own defensive struggles with what he would come to see as Schreber's core issue: homosexuality.

According to letters written around the composition of the Schreber essay, Freud was still very much engaged with bringing to emotional closure his homosexually charged relation with Wilhelm Fliess, who, it seems, was able to find new and troubling incarnations in various members of Freud's inner circle. On October 6, 1910, for example, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, who had accompanied him to Italy the previous summer while he was at work on the Schreber material, that this work had helped him to overcome much of his own homosexual inclinations: “since the case of Fliess, with whose overcoming you just saw me occupied, this need has died out in me. A piece of homosexual charge has been withdrawn and utilized for the enlargement of my own ego. I have succeeded where the paranoiac fails.” Several months later, in another letter to Ferenczi, Freud widens the circle, as it were, of the paranoid queers with whom he saw himself struggling: “Fliess—you were so curious about that—I have overcome. … Adler is a little Fliess redivivus, just as paranoid. Stekel, as appendix to him, is at least named Wilhelm.” In an earlier letter to Jung, Freud had already written, “My erstwhile friend Fliess developed a beautiful paranoia after he had disposed of his inclination, certainly not slight, toward me.” Finally, in another letter to Jung written during the Italian journey with Ferenczi (and in the midst of the Schreber project), Freud characterized his traveling companion as being excessively passive and receptive toward him: “He has let everything be done for him like a woman, and my homosexuality after all does not go far enough to accept him as one.”² Peter Gay's conclusion from this series of confessional remarks on Freud's part is fairly typical in the literature on Freud's Schreber essay; it opens up a kind of allegorical reading, one sensitive to traces of Freud's mimetic relation to Schreber, to his own struggle with Schreberian demons:

Freud's rather manic preoccupation with Schreber hints at some hidden interest driving him on: Fliess. But Freud was not just at the mercy of his memories; he was working well and derived much comic relief from Schreber. … Still, Freud's work on Schreber was not untouched by anxiety. He was in the midst of his bruising battle with Adler, which, he told Jung, was taking such a toll “because it has torn open the wounds of the Fliess affair.” … He blamed his memories of Fliess for interfering with his work on Schreber, but they were also a reason for his intense concentration on the case. To study Schreber was to remember Fliess, but to remember Fliess was also to understand Schreber. … Freud used the Schreber case to replay and work through what he called (in friendly deference to Jung, who had invented the term) his “complexes.”³

Although this provisional reading of Freud's “allegorical” presence in his own text is persuasive, there are a number of details in Freud's essay suggesting a different set of emphases, suggesting that if indeed Freud was struggling with Schreberian demons, we may have to rethink their nature, reimagine the “closet” from which they emerged. I am thinking, for example, of Freud's surprising protestation, enunciated toward the end of his essay, concerning the originality of the views presented there. Freud remarks that certain details of Schreber's delusions “sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia.” Apparently concerned by Schreber's analytic prescience, he goes on to reassure the reader that he has at least one witness who can testify “that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber's book” (SE 12:79; my emphasis).⁴

What are we to make of this “masculine protest”—to use the Adlerian term Freud will himself employ in his reading of Schreber—pertaining to possible doubts about the originality of his insights? To anticipate Freud's reading further, we might say that this protest translates a proposition, or rather the negation of one; it is not the case, Freud is claiming, that “I, a scientist, plagiarized a dement.” Against the backdrop of this protest, the anxious irony of Freud's further remark becomes more palpable; he writes that it “remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe” (SE 12:79). What is particularly striking about Freud's somewhat anxious claim not to be, as it were, one of Schreber's epigones—indeed, very early in his essay Freud remarks that one could almost suspect Schreber of being a disciple of the psychoanalytic school⁵—is that this anxiety is uncannily reminiscent of one of the central themes of Schreber's psychotic fantasies, namely a confusion about and concern with the originality of his own thoughts, thought processes, and language. Freud appears, in other words, to exhibit apprehensions about Schreber not unlike those which Schreber had experienced with regard to the maleficent forces assaulting his soul and body, the theological systematization of which makes up the bulk of his Memoirs. Both Schreber and Freud, it would appear, are, albeit with quite different degrees of intensity, concerned that they might only be repeating, might only be parroting back, thoughts, words, and phrases originating elsewhere. If there is indeed a transferential dimension to Freud's passionate involvement with the Schreber material, then it concerns not only matters of same-sex passion but also questions of originality and influence, questions pertaining to the transfer of knowledge and authority in the very domain that Freud was staking out as his own.⁶

II

The extent and intensity of Freud's influence anxieties during his work on Schreber become increasingly evident over the course of his essay. I have already noted that Freud explicitly and uneasily refers to parallels between Schreber's mystical visions and the theory of libido, which at this time formed the centerpiece of Freud's conception of psychic functioning. Alluding to Schreber's notion of nerves and rays as those substantial emanations making possible not only contact between the living and the dead, God and mortals, but also the phenomenon of “soul murder,” which, as we shall see, suggests a traumatic experience of interpersonal influence at the hands of a powerful and trusted figure of authority, Freud remarks, “Schreber's ‘rays of God,’ which are made up of a condensation of the sun's rays, of nerve-fibers, and of spermatozoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and projection outwards of libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a striking conformity with our theory” (SE 12:78).⁷ In the course of his interpretation of Schreber's unwitting contribution to psychoanalytic theory, a contribution that produced for Freud no small degree of what I have called, following Bloom, anxiety of influence, Freud alludes to the work of colleagues who have helped him to come to the views presented in the text.⁸ He notes, for example, at the beginning of the second part of his essay, that C. G. Jung had already made a pathbreaking contribution to the study of dementia praecox.⁹ In the context of Schreber's preoccupation with rays and emanations as the materializations of potentially excessive and dangerous influences, it is interesting to note Freud's language in referring to Jung's priority in the study of the psychoses. He speaks of Jung's “brilliant example” (SE 12:35)—“das glänzende Beispiel”—of interpretation performed several years earlier on what Freud characterizes as a far more severe case of dementia than Schreber's. What Freud, however, does not mention is the fact that Jung also discusses Schreber in the book praised by Freud. It is also very likely that it was Jung who first brought Schreber to Freud's attention.¹⁰

Immediately after his reference to Jung's “brilliant” or “dazzling” example of interpretation, Freud goes on to discuss a hermeneutic principle intrinsic to psychoanalytic modes of interpretation according to which the usual hierarchical relation of principle and example is reversed. In psychoanalysis, Freud suggests, the example enjoys a paradoxical priority over the principle it would only seem to serve as illustration, and this reversal of priority extends to citations, glosses, and footnotes, which, as any reader of Schreber knows, play a rather large role in his text. Regarding the excess of such only apparently ancillary material in the Schreber memoir, Freud advises that “we have only to follow our usual psycho-analytic technique … to take his example as being the actual thing, or his quotation or gloss as being the original source—and we find ourselves in possession of what we are looking for, namely a translation of the paranoic mode of expression into the normal one” (SE 12:35).¹¹ Not surprisingly then, Freud's own footnotes turn out to be a key locus of what I have characterized as the allegorical dimension of the essay—a site where Freud stages some of his own defensive maneuvers against influences that would compromise the originality and integrity of his own authorial voice.

Toward the end of his essay, Freud remarks in a footnote that Karl Abraham's short paper, “Die psychosexuellen Differenzen der Hysterie und der Dementia praecox,” published in 1908, “contains almost all the essential views put forward in the present study of the case of Schreber” (SE 12:70).¹² Freud had, in fact, already noted his debt to Abraham's exemplary paper earlier, upon first introducing the notion of transference into his account. This earlier footnote effects, however, a curious reversal of priority and indebtedness with regard to Abraham: “In the course of this paper its author, referring to a correspondence between us, scrupulously attributes to myself an influence upon the development of his views” (SE 12:41). Influence anxiety on Freud's part is made unnecessary by Abraham's deference to him; if, indeed, the essential views put forward by Freud in his Schreber essay were prefigured in Abraham's earlier work, this turns out to be the result of Freud's own seminal influence on Abraham. An intellectual debt is, thanks to a citation of thanks, converted into more authorial capital.

Freud's admiration for such a scrupulous attribution of influence did not prevent curious lapses in his own practice of paying intellectual debts. I have already noted that despite his homage to Jung's exemplary work in the analysis of the psychoses he failed to indicate that it was Jung who alerted him to the Schreber memoir in the first place. In the final section of his essay, Freud thanks Jung (and Ferenczi) yet again for providing crucial case material to support his hunch that paranoia is as a rule generated by a quasi-natural homophobia: “we [Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi] were astonished to find that in all of these cases a defence against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very centre of the conflict which underlay the disease, and that it was in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief” (SE 12:59). At this point, Freud adds a footnote in which he refers the reader to Alphonse Maeder's analysis of a paranoid patient, “Psychologische Untersuchungen an Dementia praecox-Kranken,” published in August 1910 in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, in which, as it happens, an article of Freud's had also appeared.¹³ In his citation of the paper, Freud expresses regret that his Schreber essay “was completed before I had the opportunity of reading Maeder's work” (SE 12:162). However, as Lothane has pointed out, Freud admitted to Ferenczi in a letter of October 10, 1910, that he had indeed read Maeder's report.¹⁴

Yet another instance in which Freud's own contemporary struggle with issues of priority, authority, and influence comes to haunt his essay from the “preconscious” space of the footnotes comes after proposing his crucial thesis that Schreber's second illness was precipitated by a homosexually charged longing for reunion with his psychiatrist, Paul Flechsig. There Freud notes that “This feminine phantasy, which was still kept impersonal, was met at once by an indignant repudiation—a true ‘masculine protest,’ to use Adler's expression,” but, Freud is quick to add, “in a sense different from his” (SE 12:42). Freud provides a footnote to this, his own “masculine protest” against Adler, in which he elaborates that “According to Adler the masculine protest has a share in the production of the symptom, whereas in the present instance the patient is protesting against a symptom that is already fully fledged” (SE 12:42). In this context, one should recall that when Adler presented his views in detail to the members of the Psychoanalytic Society in January and February 1911, Freud had responded quite critically, suggesting that some of Adler's key ideas, including that of “masculine protest,” were, in essence, misguided appropriations of his own prior insights and ideas—were examples of, to use Gay's phrase, “spurious, manufactured originality.”¹⁵

This apparent obsession with issues of originality and influence around the composition of the Schreber essay had a particular historical context. These were crucial years in the consolidation of the psychoanalytic movement in the face of increasingly profound internal divisions—the final break with Adler would come in 1911, with Jung two years later—which, of course, only intensified and complicated the ongoing struggle for recognition from the larger scientific and intellectual community. The institution of psychoanalysis was, one could say, in a state of emergency, meaning a state of emergence, of coming-into-being, as well as one of crisis and endangerment. This was a period during which the founding words and concepts—what we might call, with Schreber, the Grundsprache or “basic language” of psychoanalysis—that would establish the shape and intellectual direction of this new and strange science, when the boundaries that would determine the inside and outside of psychoanalytic thought proper, were being hotly and bitterly contested. As I have indicated, these are conditions in which there is, so to speak, maximum exposure to the dimension of “performative magic,” which under normal circumstances—or, as Schreber puts it, under conditions consonant with the Order of the World—provides a necessary though unconscious support to symbolic authority of all kinds. It will be my argument in this book that the crucial features of Daniel Paul Schreber's “nervous illness,” including the central fantasy of feminization, only become intelligible when seen against the background of the issues and questions generated by such institutional and political states of emergency. Freud's passion for the Schreber material takes on an added dimension of internal “necessity” when set in relation to the anxieties of influence made urgent by the crisis in which the institution of psychoanalysis found itself in the years in which Freud was occupied with the case. Freud's preoccupation with originality indicates, in other words, his profound—and defensive—attunement to the performative force of his colleagues' utterances at a moment of heightened contestation of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.¹⁶

Now it could be argued that psychoanalysis exhibits an especially strong dependence on the performative magic that contributes to the symbolic authority of institutional speech in general, that allows that speech to effectuate changes in social reality. With the notion of transference, psychoanalysis has, in essence, formally inscribed the dependence on performativity into its very foundations. An analysis or therapy will be effective only if the analysand at some level believes that it will, only if he or she believes that the analyst enjoys a privileged access to the true meaning of his or her words, stories, and symptoms. This transfer of faith and credit to the analyst and his or her power to decode, appreciate, and ultimately to participate in the analysand's message, is crucial to the production of that power in the analyst.¹⁷ To put it somewhat differently, the analyst, like the classical monarch, has two bodies; the analyst's second, call it “sublime” body, is produced—and produces, in turn, analytical and therapeutic effects—to the extent that the analysand posits the analyst as a subject with special knowledge of one's deepest desires and secrets.¹⁸

The authorization of the analyst's power, his or her accreditation as a privileged subject of the transference in the preceding sense, comes, at least in part, by way of a prior transfer of credit and authority, namely the “consecration” or “investiture” of the analyst by the institution of psychoanalysis itself. As Bourdieu has put it, the efficacy of speech acts performed by delegates of an institution, specifically the ability of these speech acts to effect changes in reality—in this case, in the psychic states of the analysand—depends on the delegate's access to something on the order of a skeptron, some embodiment of institutional power that marks its bearer as an authentic representative of the institution:

It is the access to the legitimate instruments of expression, and therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference—irreducible to discourse as such—between the straightforward imposture of masqueraders, who disguise a performative utterance as a descriptive or constative statement, and the authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the authorization of an institution. The spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron.¹⁹

Whether one is performing the role of psychoanalyst or judge, one's performance must, in other words, be authorized. One cannot invest oneself with the authority to act as analyst or judge, one cannot produce one's own private skeptron; it must be transmitted and the transmission must follow a particular and quasi-public procedure.²⁰ Around the time that Freud was at work on the Schreber case he was himself embroiled in a series of “fiduciary” failures, challenges to his role as the one who passes the skeptron, who authorizes the speech of others as that of legitimate representatives of psychoanalysis.

The importance of these reflections becomes obvious when one recalls the specific occasions that triggered Schreber's two breakdowns. Each one involved an experience of a crisis of symbolic investiture. The first, still relatively mild breakdown occurred in conjunction with Schreber's failure, in 1884, to win a seat in the Reichstag; the second breakdown, the one that initiated the full-fledged psychosis with its strangely sexualized delusions of wasting away, occurred in the wake of his appointment, in 1893, to one of the highest positions of judicial authority in Saxony. What I have been suggesting in these pages is that Freud's attraction to and passion for the Schreber material was above all a function of his own deep involvement with the “rites of institution” at a moment of significant crisis—one might even say at a moment of “signification crisis”—within the institution of psychoanalysis. With these parallels in mind, I turn now to a detailed commentary on Freud's “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).”²¹

III

Freud's essay is divided into three sections, framed on one side by a brief preface, in which he admits his limited experience with the treatment of the psychoses and justifies his use of a text as the basis of a case study, and on the other by a postscript, in which he briefly suggests possibilities of coordinating his findings in the Schreber case with anthropological studies of myth, ritual, and the religious imagination. The first section offers a presentation of the case history, in which Freud lays out the chronology of Schreber's various illnesses and treatments, discusses salient features of his delusional system, and sketches out some preliminary aspects of an interpretation. In the second section, “Attempts at Interpretation,” Freud presents his central thesis regarding the etiology of paranoia as a defense against a sudden and overstimulating influx of homosexual libido. In the third and final part of the essay addressing the “mechanism of paranoia,” Freud touches on, among other things, the role of projection in the formation of paranoid symptoms, the radical nature of repression in psychotic disorders and the metapsychological category of narcissism. In the final pages of the essay, Freud also begins to explore, in a preliminary and tentative fashion, the frontiers between libido theory and what would become the psychology of the ego. This final section also enters into debates on nosology, suggesting his own revisions of current diagnostic terminology.

Already in his initial presentation of the case material, culled in large measure from the judgment of the Saxon Supreme Court rescinding Schreber's tutelage and the reports of Dr. Guido Weber, director of the Sonnenstein Asylum where Schreber was confined from June 1894 to December 1902,²² the general direction of Freud's interpretation begins to take shape. From these documents Freud concludes that the two salient features of Schreber's delusional system are, first, the fantasy of messianic calling, of being chosen by God and the so-called Order of the World to redeem mankind from a condition of cosmic disequilibrium generated in large measure as a consequence of his own nervous agitation; and, second, the imperative to undergo, by way of divine miracles, a process of gender transformation for the purpose of repopulating the world with the issue of his divinely inseminated body. Freud hypothesizes, however, that the fantasy of feminization, which Schreber for the most part refers to as Entmannung or “unmanning,” is the real core and primary symptom of the psychosis and that the soteriological fantasy arrives only after the fact to endow retroactively a condition of abjection and degradation with sublime meaning and purpose:

It is natural to follow the medical report in assuming that the motive force of this delusional complex was the patient's ambition to play the part of Redeemer, and that his emasculation [Entmannung] was only entitled to be regarded as a means for achieving that end. Even though this may appear to be true of his delusion in its final form, a study of the Denkwürdigkeiten compels us to take a very different view of the matter. For we learn that the idea of being transformed into a woman (that is, of being emasculated) was the primary delusion, that he began by regarding that act as constituting a serious injury and persecution, and that it only became related to his playing the part of Redeemer in a secondary way. There can be no doubt, moreover, that originally he believed that the transformation was to be effected for the purpose of sexual abuse and not so as to serve higher designs. The position may be formulated by saying that a sexual delusion of persecution was later on converted in the patient's mind into a religious delusion of grandeur. The part of persecutor was at first assigned to Professor Flechsig, the physician in whose charge he was; later, his place was taken by God Himself.

(SE 12:18)²³

Freud bases this view on the numerous allusions in Schreber's text to the humiliations and abuses to which his transformation into a woman left him exposed. Freud refers, for example, to Schreber's account of Flechsig's machinations in this regard:

Professor Flechsig had found a way of raising himself up to heaven … and so making himself a leader of rays, without prior death and without undergoing the process of purification. In this way a plot was laid against me (perhaps March or April 1894), the purpose of which was to hand me over to another human being after my nervous illness had been recognized as, or assumed to be, incurable, in such a way that my soul was handed to him, but my body—transformed into a female body … was then left to that human being for sexual misuse and simply “forsaken,” in other words left to rot.

(75; cf. SE 12:19)

To support his thesis of the priority and initial autonomy of the feminization fantasy further, Freud emphasizes that something on the order of a feminine identification had already surfaced during what he calls the “incubation period” of the second illness. Freud is thinking, of course, of Schreber's remarkable prodromal premonition, experienced just prior to assuming his post at the Saxon Supreme Court, of feminine jouissance: “one 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” (63; cf. SE 12:20). Schreber adds that he “cannot exclude the possibility that some external influences were at work to implant this idea in me” (63), suggesting, in a way, that Freud was more right than he knew when he called this the “incubation period” of the illness: this was Schreber's first encounter with his “incubus.” How this incubus was called into being, what forces it figured, by what processes of condensation and displacement it was produced—these are the questions Freud proposes to answer in the course of his case study.

After establishing to his satisfaction the centrality of the feminization fantasy,²⁴ Freud goes on to characterize the peculiarities of Schreber's relation to God as presented in the Memoirs. Absolutely central to this relation is the fact, emphasized by Schreber over and over again, that under conditions consonant with the Order of the World—Schreber's term for something like a cosmological rule of law—God does not generally enjoy intimate knowledge of or sustain prolonged contact with living human beings and their affairs. Freud cites a series of passages attesting to this crucial feature of Schreber's universe:

A fundamental misunderstanding obtained however, which has since run like a red thread through my entire life. It is 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.

(75; cf. SE 12:25)

In a later passage describing some of the torments he underwent in the course of his illness, Schreber suggests that the apparent purposelessness of much of the suffering he had to endure in his relation to God “must be connected … with God not knowing how to treat a living human being, as He was accustomed to dealing only with corpses or at best with human beings lying asleep (dreaming)” (127; cf. SE 12:25). And finally, with regard to further episodes of physical and mental suffering, Schreber writes:

Incredibile scriptu I would like to add, and yet everything is really true, however difficult it must be for other people to reconcile themselves to the idea that God is totally incapable of judging a living human being correctly; even I myself became accustomed to this idea only gradually after innumerable observations.

(188; cf. SE 12:25)

Freud concludes from these passages that “as a result of God's misunderstanding of living men it was possible for Him Himself to become the instigator of the plot against Schreber, to take him for an idiot, and to subject him to these severe ordeals” (SE 12:25). Among the ordeals of special interest to Freud were the divine interventions in Schreber's bowel movements, descriptions of which Freud quotes at length, and the so-called Denkzwang, Schreber's compulsion to keep his thoughts in a kind of incessant motion so that God would not consider him to be demented and thus worthy of abandonment. For Freud, these characterizations of God's peculiarly flawed omniscience and authority along with Schreber's equally adamant defense of God as a worthy object of worship and reverence, places in the foreground of the analysis Schreber's deep ambivalence with regard to the deity and whatever other agencies or domains of authority he might eventually be seen to represent: “No attempt at explaining Schreber's case will have any chance of being correct which does not take into account these peculiarities in his conception of God, this mixture of reverence and rebelliousness in his attitude towards Him” (SE 12:28-29). Before going on to provide a more or less comprehensive explanation of these peculiarities, Freud dwells on a feature of Schreber's relation to God that struck Schreber as being especially paradoxical.

IV

In Schreber's cosmology there obtains a deep affinity or near identity between the state of blessedness or Seligkeit that, after a period of purification, awaits the soul after death as it becomes assimilated to the “forecourts of Heaven,” and the state of feminine jouissance or female sexual pleasure called by Schreber weibliche Wollust and produced in him by overexposure to supernatural influences, ultimately identified as God's penetrating rays. As Freud has noted, at a certain point in his illness, Schreber not only reconciles himself to the process of feminization at first experienced as insulting and injurious, but endows it with soteriological purpose and significance. Part and parcel of this shift in perspective so crucial to Schreber's views on the possibility of his and the world's redemption is a transformation in the moral dimension of his relation to sexual pleasure.²⁵

As Freud emphasizes in his presentation of the case material, Schreber considered himself to be a man of distinctly sober if not puritanical and even ascetic habits and attitudes with regard to sensual pleasures of all kinds. At a certain point in the progress of his illness, however, the moral pressure to abstain from such pleasures is transmuted into a moral duty to enjoy:

Few people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I, and have throughout life practised such moderation especially in matters of sex, as I venture to claim for myself. Mere low sensuousness can therefore not be considered a motive in my case. … But as soon as I am alone with God, if I may so express myself, I must continually or at least at certain times, strive to give divine rays the impression of a woman in the height of sexual delight; to achieve this I have to employ all possible means, and have to strain all my intellectual powers and foremost my imagination. … Voluptuous enjoyment or Blessedness is granted to souls in perpetuity and as an end in itself, but to human beings and other living creatures solely as a means for the preservation of the species. Herein lie the moral limitations of voluptuousness for human beings. An excess of voluptuousness would render man unfit to fulfil his other obligations; it would prevent him from ever rising to higher mental and moral perfection; indeed experience teaches that not only single individuals but also whole nations have perished through voluptuous excess. For me such moral limits to voluptuousness no longer exist, indeed in a certain sense the reverse applies.

(208)

And further, attempting to explain his exceptional status as a man compelled by moral duty to “imagine myself as man and woman in one person having intercourse with myself,” Schreber writes,

This behaviour has been forced on me through God having placed Himself into a relationship with me which is contrary to the Order of the World; although it may sound paradoxical, it is justifiable to apply the saying of the Crusaders in the First Crusade to myself: Dieu le veut (God wishes it). God is inseparably tied to my person through my nerves' power of attraction which for some time past has become inescapable; there is no possibility of God freeing Himself from my nerves for the rest of my life—although His policy is aimed at this—except perhaps in case my unmanning were to become a fact. On the other hand God demands constant enjoyment, as the normal mode of existence for souls within the Order of the World. It is my duty to provide Him with it in the form of highly developed soul-voluptuousness, as far as this is possible in the circumstances contrary to the Order of the World.

(208-9)

Finally, Schreber summarizes this peculiar reversal in the moral universe by noting that in “my relation to God … voluptuousness has become ‘God-fearing’ [gottesfürchtig], that is to say it is the likeliest satisfactory solution for the clash of interests arising out of circumstances contrary to the Order of the World” (210).

Passages such as these were so crucial to Freud's reading of the Schreber case because they seem to underline the connection between mental illness and disturbances in the domain of sexuality, the connection that, as we have seen, Freud was so hard at work defending against doubts raised by Jung, Adler, and others at the time of his work on the essay. As Freud notes,

we psychoanalysts have hitherto supported the view that the roots of every nervous and mental disorder are chiefly to be found in the patient's sexual life. … The samples of Schreber's delusions that have already been given enable us without more ado to dismiss the suspicion that it might be precisely this paranoid disorder which would turn out to be the “negative case” which has so long been sought for—a case in which sexuality plays only a very minor part. Schreber himself speaks again and again as though he shared our prejudice. He is constantly talking in the same breath of “nervous disorder” and erotic lapses, as though the two things were inseparable.

(SE 12:30-31)

Freud's recruitment of Schreber as a disciple avant la lettre was, as we have seen, a gesture not without certain disturbing resonances for Freud. More important, his own struggles within what I have called the state of emergency of the institution of psychoanalysis kept him from seeing in the paradoxes of Schreber's sexualized relation to God the breakdown products of what I have referred to as an investiture crisis—a crisis pertaining to the transfer of symbolic power and authority. Schreber's paradoxical experience that the Order of the World—Schreber's term for cosmic rule of law and regulation of individual boundaries—became the locus of a carnevalesque command to transgress all boundaries and proprieties would seem to point beyond the “repressive hypothesis” that shapes Freud's view of the conflictual relations between psychic systems and agencies and which would become the object of Michel Foucault's powerful critique in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Schreber discovers that power not only prohibits, moderates, says “no,” but may also work to intensify and amplify the body and its sensations. Put somewhat differently, Schreber discovers that symbolic authority in a state of emergency is transgressive, that it exhibits an obscene overproximity to the subject: that it, as Schreber puts it, demands enjoyment. Schreber's experience of his body and mind as the site of violent and transgressive interventions and manipulations, which produce, as a residue or waste product, a kind of surplus enjoyment, is, I am suggesting, an index of a crisis afflicting his relation to the exemplary domain of symbolic authority to which his life was intimately bound, namely the law.²⁶

V

Freud, we recall, begins the second section of his essay with an homage to Jung's “dazzling example” followed by a methodological reflection on the privileged status of examples in psychoanalytic interpretation. He then goes on to apply his method to the example of the talking birds in Schreber's text. These miraculous birds are introduced in chapter 15 of the Memoirs and rehearse a number of themes and motifs played out in other, equally striking incarnations in earlier chapters. Schreber notes early in the chapter that although, since the end of 1895 and the beginning of 1896, he “could no longer doubt that a real race of human beings … did in fact exist,” it was “still perfectly clear … that, in Hamlet's words, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark—that is to say in the relationship between God and mankind” (163-64). Despite his restored confidence in the existence of the world, he thus continues to experience his body, mind, and environment as the site of divine interventions and manipulations. Perhaps the most striking feature of Schreber's illness is that his manipulation by divine rays—in Schreber's system “rays” are God's nerves—occurs above all in a linguistic register. As Schreber puts it, “it seems to lie in the nature of rays that they must speak as soon as they are set in motion; the relevant law was expressed in the phrase ‘do not forget that rays must speak,’ and this was spoken into my nerves innumerable times” (121). Here one should add that the rays speak a sort of dialect—the Grundsprache or “basic language,” which is “a somewhat antiquated but nevertheless powerful German, characterized particularly by a wealth of euphemisms” (50). Schreber's experience of voices and fragments of speech being projected into his body by way of a kind of miraculous ventriloquism is among the torments that most directly endangers his capacity to experience himself as a source of individual agency and initiative. Schreber's initial definition of the “nerve-language” at the beginning of chapter 5 forms the basis of all later characterizations of this unnerving experience of divine ventriloquism:

Apart from normal human language there is also a kind of nerve-language of which, as a rule, the healthy human being is not aware. In my opinion this is best understood when one thinks of the processes by which a person tries to imprint certain words in his memory in a definite order, as for instance a child learning a poem by heart which he is going to recite at school, or a priest a sermon he is going to deliver in Church. The words are repeated silently … that is to say a human being causes his nerves to vibrate in the way which corresponds to the use of the words concerned, but the real organs of speech … are either not set in motion at all or only coincidentally. … Naturally under normal (in consonance with the Order of the World) conditions, use of this nerve-language depends only on the will of the person whose nerves are concerned; no human being as such can force another to use this nerve-language. In my case, however … my nerves have been set in motion from without incessantly and without respite.

(69)

Schreber situates this peculiar ventriloquism within the framework of a more global anxiety of influence:

Divine rays above all have the power of influencing the nerves of a human being in this manner; by this means God has always been able to infuse dreams into a sleeping human being. I myself first felt this influence as emanating from Professor Flechsig. The only possible explanation I can think of is that Professor Flechsig in some way knew how to put divine rays to his own use; later, apart from Professor Flechsig's nerves, direct divine rays also entered into contact with my nerves. This influence has in the course of years assumed forms more and more contrary to the Order of the World and to man's natural right to be master of his own nerves, and I might say become increasingly grotesque.

(69-70)

The miracle of the talking birds that so intrigued Freud is but one example of a divine violation that reduces Schreber's body to a condition of abjection and putrescence (“One probably … believed that at least one could choke me through the mass of poison of corpses [Leichengift] which in this manner was daily heaped upon my body”). The link between the birds and dead matter is secured by Schreber's view that “the nerves which are inside these birds are remnants … of souls of human beings who had become blessed” (167). Schreber then makes the association of the birds with language, and more precisely, with a language produced under conditions of mechanical reproduction:

I recognize the individual nerves exactly by the tone of their voices from years of hearing them; I know exactly which of the senseless phrases learnt by rote I can expect of each one of them. … Their property as erstwhile human nerves is evidenced by the fact that all the miraculously produced birds without exception, whenever they have completely unloaded the poison of corpses which they carry, that is to say when they have reeled off the phrases drummed into them, then express in human sounds the genuine feeling of well-being in the soul-voluptuousness of my body which they share, with the words “Damned fellow” or “Somehow damned,” the only words in which they are still capable of giving expression to genuine feeling.

(167)

Schreber extends these metalinguistic reflections by noting the unexpected affinity between these privileged moments of genuine feeling, and the poetic dimension of language:

It has already been mentioned that the miraculously created birds do not understand the meaning of the words they speak; but apparently they have a natural sensitivity for the similarity of sounds. Therefore if, while reeling off the automatic phrases, they perceive either in the vibrations of my own nerves (my thoughts) or in speech of people around me, words which sound the same or similar to their own phrases, they apparently experience surprise and in a way fall for the similarity in sound; in other words the surprise makes them forget the rest of their mechanical phrases and they suddenly pass over into genuine feeling.

(168-69)²⁷

After noting these peculiarities of the “miracled birds”—Schreber's phrase is “gewunderte Vögel”—Freud draws a stunning conclusion: “As we read this description, we cannot avoid the idea [kann man sich des Einfalles nicht erwehren; my emphasis] that what it really refers to must be young girls” (SE 12:36). I call this conclusion stunning not in view of the peculiar blend of patriarchal complacency and rhetorical virtuosity with which Freud supports his claim.²⁸ Rather, what is striking here is the way in which Freud's deduction repeats the crucial structural features of the object under investigation: the experience is one of an irresistible linguistic or ideational “implantation.” With Freud's reading of the miracled birds we have encountered, once more, his allegorical presence in the text, the point at which his own analytic language mimes the processes being analyzed. To be seized by an “Einfall” against which one cannot defend, is, at a formal level, not unlike the situation described by Schreber as a kind of intoxication—having toxic matter, the “poison of corpses,” unloaded into one's body. Schreber, for his part, is very clear about the nature of these toxins: they are bits of linguistic matter, phrases learned by rote and repeated mechanically without concern for meaning. These toxins materialize what I will call the drive dimension of signification; they link to abjection that aspect of signification that is purely “dictatorial” in that it positions its bearer as a kind of bird-brained stenographer taking dictation. Although Freud clearly senses that the “feminine” aspect of the miracled birds—Freud notes that Schreber eventually makes this association explicit²⁹—is tied to a particular relation to and experience of the signifier, he seems at this point to want to quarantine the example from the larger consequences to be drawn from such a connection. But if “femininity” is in some sense linked to this drive dimension of signification, then Freud's own experience of ideational implantation—of being dictated to by foreign thoughts and linguistic associations—might indeed be viewed as an instance of feminization not unlike that experienced by Schreber under the overwhelming influence of the voices and language particles entering his body.³⁰

VI

Freud continues his reading by noting the constraints placed upon any attempt to interpret the Memoirs by the fact that the crucial third chapter, in which Schreber ostensibly discussed details of his family history, was withheld from publication.³¹ Although Freud could have made inquiries at the Sonnenstein asylum and possibly even tracked down an extant copy of the missing chapter in the asylum's records, he chose instead to “be satisfied … in tracing back … the nucleus of the delusional structure … to familiar human motives” (SE 12:37). According to Freud, one is thereby led to the centrality in Schreber's delusional system of his first psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig. As Freud notes, “the first author of all … acts of persecution was Flechsig, and he remains their instigator throughout the whole course of the illness” (SE 12:38).

Freud emphasizes the vagueness and obscurity of the charges leveled against Flechsig, a prominent neuroscientist and forensic psychiatrist known above all for his work on the myelination of nerve fibers.³² Given Freud's decision to perform a close reading of Schreber's text rather than engage in more extratextual, historical research,³³ it is, perhaps, not quite so surprising that he should have failed to consider the possibility that Schreber's fixation on Flechsig could have derived at least in part from the actual interpersonal dynamics between patient and doctor. But it is a surprise nonetheless. For in his open letter to Flechsig appended to the beginning of the Memoirs, Schreber makes an explicit connection between soul murder and medical malpractice.

In the letter, Schreber confesses to Flechsig that “the first impetus to what my doctors always considered mere ‘hallucinations’ but which to me signified communications with supernatural powers, consisted of influences on my nervous system emanating from your nervous system” (34). Schreber admits the possibility, and even likelihood, that such an influence, understood on the model of hypnotic suggestion, was originally initiated for strictly therapeutic purposes. He suggests, however, that once realizing the uniqueness of the case, Flechsig was unable to resist the temptation to maintain a telepathic connection with him “out of scientific interest” (34). Schreber surmises that in the midst of this already transgressive contact with the patient—transgressive because no longer constrained by the demands of the therapy—“it is possible that … part of your own nerves—probably unknown to yourself—was removed from your body … and ascended to heaven as a ‘tested soul’ and there achieved some supernatural power” (34). Once cut off from Flechsig and, as it were, the law of healing, this outlaw soul “simply allowed itself to be driven by the impulse of ruthless self-determination and lust for power, without any restraint by something comparable to the moral will power of man” (34). Given such a scenario, Schreber is willing to consider that “all those things which in earlier years I erroneously thought I had to blame you for—particularly the definite damaging effects on my body—are to be blamed only on that ‘tested soul’” (34). The gist of this scenario is, according to Schreber, that

there would then be no need to cast any shadow upon your person and only the mild reproach would perhaps remain that you, like so many doctors, could not completely resist the temptation of using a patient in your care as an object for scientific experiments apart from the real purpose of the cure, when by chance matters of the highest scientific interest arose. One might even raise the question whether perhaps all the talk of voices about somebody having committed soul murder can be explained by the souls (rays) deeming it impermissible [als etwas Unstatthaftes] that a person's nervous system should be influenced by another's to the extent of imprisoning his will power, such as occurs during hypnosis; in order to stress forcefully that this was a malpractice [Unstatthaftigkeit] it was called “soul murder,”

(34-35)

It is clear, I think, that Schreber's purpose here and throughout his Memoirs is to tell the story of the catastrophic effects that ensue when a trusted figure of authority exercises a surplus of power exceeding the symbolic pact on which that authority is based.³⁴ Schreber's Memoirs attempt to bring into a narrative and theological system the crisis of authority—the rottenness in the state of Denmark, the breach in the Order of the World—which manifests itself at least in part as a demonic imbalance in the “professional” relationships imposed on him by his illness. Much of the difficulty faced by the reader of Schreber to make sense of this “system,” which very quickly takes on Wagnerian proportions, is a function of Schreber's own difficulty in isolating and identifying this transgressive surplus, locating its origin and articulating its patterns of expansion and proliferation into what ends up as a generalized state of emergency of human relations and of relations between humans and God. The energies for this global expansion derive from structural homologies between the collapse of symbolic exchange (with Flechsig) into direct, “experimental” power over body and soul, on the one hand, and Schreber's investiture crisis, on the other (the fact that his symbolic investiture did not “take hold,” was unable to seize him in his self-understanding). What becomes manifest in Flechsig-qua-“tested soul” is the inner “rottenness” of every symbolic investiture insofar as it remains dependent on a dimension of performative force, compulsion, drive. Schreber's fixation on Flechsig indicates that he materializes for him the emergence of this normally secret dependence—a dependence normally “secreted” in the unconscious—into the field of conscious experience. The “directness” of Flechsig's alleged influence and manipulations is thus correlative to Schreber's relation of exteriority to the symbolic operations governing his own investiture.³⁵

Freud, for his part, is confident that he has discovered the true and, ultimately, erotic, origins of this “extrajuridical” surplus of power/influence that disturbs Schreber's relations first with Flechsig and then with God. He prepares his discovery by introducing the formula he and other researchers and clinicians have found to be key to deciphering persecutory anxieties in general:

It appears that the person to whom the delusion ascribes so much power and influence, in whose hands all the threads of the conspiracy converge, is, if he is definitely named, either identical with some one [sic] who played an equally important part in the patient's emotional life before his illness, or is easily recognizable as a substitute for him. The intensity of the emotion is projected in the shape of external power, while its quality is changed into the opposite. The person who is now hated and feared for being a persecutor was at one time loved and honoured. The main purpose of the persecution asserted by the patient's delusion is to justify the change in his emotional attitude.

(SE 12:41)

Noting that Schreber seemed to have had a quite positive impression of Flechsig at the time of his first illness, Freud's application of this formula suggests that Schreber's anxiety dreams of a recurrence of his illness along with the prodromal fantasy of feminine jouissance—“that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse”—which occur after being named to his new post as Senatspräsident, are to be understood as signs of a profound, though unconscious, longing for Flechsig. This longing, combining infantile dependency and homosexual desire, generates what Freud calls “the feminine phantasy”: “The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his doctor, Flechsig; and his struggles against the libidinal impulse produced the conflict which gave rise to the symptoms” (SE 12:43). According to Freud, the strange surplus of power/influence that precipitates the unmaking of Schreber's world is nothing other than an outburst of homosexual libido on Schreber's part, originally felt for his psychiatrist, Flechsig. Flechsig's ostensible transgression of the law of the cure regulating the “boundaries” between patient and doctor is, in other words, a projection of Schreber's own “perverse” desires. Freud stresses that his admittedly speculative claims concerning Schreber's homosexuality must be understood in the context of a theory of the unconscious, a theory implied by Schreber's own formulations.³⁶ Freud is thinking here of Schreber's distinction between Flechsig the real person and Flechsig-as-tested-soul; only the latter is of interest to Freud as the placeholder of the surplus value assigned to Flechsig in the unconscious. That this surplus value is produced by homosexual libido is indicated, for Freud, by several details in the Memoirs.

First, Freud argues that in the numerous passages linking feminization to sexual exploitation, there is little question that Flechsig is the intended beneficiary of this perverse enjoyment: “It is unnecessary to remark that no other individual is ever named who could be put in Flechsig's place” (SE 12:44). Furthermore, in one of his attempts to explain the meaning of “soul murder,” which is, of course, the main charge brought against Flechsig in the Memoirs, Schreber refers to folkloric and literary examples of what appears to be at stake in this strange crime of taking “possession of another person's soul in order to prolong one's life at another soul's expense, or to secure some other advantages which outlast death.” He adds that “one has only to think … of Goethe's Faust, Lord Byron's Manfred, Weber's Freischütz, etc.” (55). The special importance of Byron's Manfred is indicated, for Freud, by an earlier reference to that dramatic poem in a footnote apropos of Schreber's use of the Persian Gods Ariman and Ormuzd to refer to the lower and upper Gods, respectively, who in Schreber's theological system together constitute the so-called posterior realms of God: “The name Ariman occurs by the way also in Lord Byron's Manfred in connection with a soul murder” (53). Regarding Byron's play, Freud suggests that “the essence and secret of the whole work lies in—an incestuous relation between a brother and a sister” (SE 12:44).³⁷ Freud's crucial point here is that soul murder is connected with incest; Flechsig-as-soul-murderer becomes a figure of incestuous enjoyment. The surplus of power/influence that Schreber sees as emanating first from Flechsig and then from God is thereby linked to that most powerful and primordial of transgressive stains on the “lawful” structure of kinship relations.

Freud appeals, finally, to another detail of Schreber's story to support his thesis that an outburst of homosexual libido was the basis of Schreber's illness. One will recall that Schreber's illness took a turn for the worse in February 1894, when Sabine Schreber went to Berlin for four days to visit her father, interrupting for the first time her routine of daily visits to her husband. After this interruption, Schreber's condition deteriorated so rapidly that he no longer accepted visits from her and indeed came to see her as one of those phantom beings produced by miracle in the manner of the “fleeting-improvised-men” [flüchtig hingemachte Männer]. It was, according to Schreber, at this turning point that the structure of the plot against him, with all its supernatural manifestations, took on its definitive shape. One will also recall the sexual dimension of this peripeteia: “Decisive for my mental collapse was one particular night; during that night I had a quite unusual number of pollutions (perhaps half a dozen)” (68). Freud concludes from this concatenation of events

that the mere presence of his wife must have acted as a protection against the attractive power of the men about him; and if we are prepared to admit that an emission cannot occur in an adult without some mental concomitant, we shall be able to supplement the patient's emissions that night by assuming that they were accompanied by homosexual phantasies which remained unconscious.

(SE 12:145)³⁸

VII

Citing a lack of sufficient historical and biographical information, which, as I have indicated, he might have been able to acquire, Freud acknowledges an uncertainty pertaining to his hypothesis that Schreber's breakdown was triggered by homosexual panic following his appointment to the position of Senatspräsident: “The question of why this outburst of homosexual libido overtook the patient precisely at this period (that is, between the dates of his appointment and of his move to Dresden) cannot be answered in the absence of more precise knowledge of the story of his life” (SE 12:45-46). Curiously, Freud never seems to consider the possibility of a connection between Schreber's “perversion” and this important change in his symbolic status. In a sense, Schreber undergoes two changes in his symbolic status, which taken together constitute the full extent of what I have characterized as his investiture crisis: Ernennung or nomination to a powerful position of juridical authority—the Senatspräsident of the highest court in Saxony—and Entmannung or unmanning, which Freud reads as an outburst of homosexual libido. A connection between these two symbolic mutations is made plausible not simply by the obvious temporal contiguity, suggesting a causal sequence, but also by the fact that Schreber's gender transformation is at a crucial moment itself associated with an act of naming or nomination, that is, with a performative utterance endowing the subject with a new symbolic status.

The performative utterance I have in mind here is of a very particular kind; it is an insult, and indeed one issued by no less an authority than God Himself in a scene of high operatic drama:

I believe I may say that at that time and at that time only, I saw God's omnipotence in its complete purity. During the night … the lower God (Ariman) appeared. The radiant picture of his rays became visible to my inner eye … that is to say he was reflected on my inner nervous system. Simultaneously I heard his voice; but it was not a soft whisper—as the talk of the voices always was before and after that time—it resounded in a mighty bass as if directly in front of my bedroom window. The impression was intense, so that anybody not hardened to terrifying miraculous impressions as I was, would have been shaken to the core. Also what was spoken did not sound friendly by any means: everything seemed calculated to instil fright and terror into me and the word “wretch” [Luder] was frequently heard—an expression quite common in the basic language to denote a human being destined to be destroyed by God and to feel God's power and wrath.

(124)

In spite of the insulting content of this quasi-operatic epiphany of divine power, the effects produced by its form, or more precisely by the performative force of its enunciation, turn out to be, as Schreber insists, strangely beneficial:

Yet everything that was spoken was genuine, not phrases learnt by rote as they later were, but the immediate expression of true feeling. … For this reason my impression was not one of alarm or fear, but largely one of admiration for the magnificent and the sublime; the effect on my nerves was therefore beneficial despite the insults contained in some of the words.

(124-25)

The most important of these words, “Luder,” has especially rich connotations in the context of Schreber's torments. It can indeed mean wretch, in the sense of a lost and pathetic figure, but can also signify a cunning swindler or scoundrel; whore, tart, or slut; and, finally, the dead, rotting flesh of an animal, especially in the sense of carrion used as bait in hunting. The last two significations capture Schreber's fear of being turned over to others for the purposes of sexual exploitation as well as his anxieties, which would seem to flow from such abuse, about putrefaction, being left to rot. The latter anxieties merge at times with fantasies of being sick with the plague, leprosy, or syphilis.³⁹ I would like to suggest that this insulting nomination issued by the lower God Ariman stands in a direct relation to the crisis precipitated by that other nomination or official Ernennung that—inexplicably for Freud⁴⁰—appears to “secrete” the unexpected by-product of feminine jouissance, itself bearing associations with abjection.

In a first approach, one can point to the structural similarities of the two speech acts. An official interpellation of the kind issued by the Ministry of Justice functions in much the same way as an insult issued in a quasi-public setting. Both share what Bourdieu has called the “performative or magical intention,” both indicate to someone—often in the name of a group—that he “possesses such and such a property, and indicates to him at the time that he must conduct himself in accordance with the social essence which is thereby assigned to him.”⁴¹ But there is more at stake here than a formal symmetry or homology between the performative magic whereby one becomes a Senatspräsident (i.e., because the Saxon Ministry of Justice has declared it to be the case) and the effectivity of a divine interpellation. Indeed, I would like to make the stronger claim that in the second assignation Schreber experiences the secret of the first, that in the second performative utterance Schreber experiences what the first nomination begins to secrete when the institutional authority behind it is in crisis, no longer consonant with the Order of the World, as Schreber would say. With Ariman's epiphany, we are, in a word, in the midst of that dimension of symbolic function that Benjamin characterized as an internal, structural rottenness.⁴²

Michel de Certeau's brief reflections on Schreber's text address precisely this “secret” relation between Schreber's two crucial encounters with the force of the performative or magical intention. Certeau translates, in effect, Benjamin's notion of “law-making violence” into the Lacanian notion of the master signifier:⁴³

In addition the name imposed by the other is authorized by nothing, and that is its special trait. … The name is not authorized by any meaning; on the contrary, it authorizes signification, like a poem that is preceded by nothing and creates unlimited possibilities for meaning. But this occurs because the word Luder plays the role of that which cannot deceive. It compels belief more than it is believed. … Naming does in effect assign him a place. It is a calling to be what it dictates: your name is Luder. The name performs.⁴⁴

The privileged performativity of this name—what distinguishes it from an ordinary insult—is the fact that “in circumscribing the object of belief, it also articulates the operation of believing. … The signified of the word, which oscillates between decomposition and slut, designates the overall functioning of the signifier, or Schreber's effective relation to the law of the signifier.”⁴⁵ Certeau's crucial point, which goes a long way in explaining why Schreber has continued to attract readers, is that this “madness is not a particular madness. It is general. It is a part of any institution that assures a language of meaning, right or truth. The only odd thing about Schreber, the jurist, is that he knows its hard and ‘insulting’ secret. He is not someone who can go on knowing nothing about it.”⁴⁶

As Certeau has emphasized, torture has much the same function in political contexts as the lower God's transformation of Schreber into a Luder, a process that, as the reader of Schreber well knows, makes ample use of a rich and varied technology of mental and physical torture: the production in the subject of a heightened experience of abjection. Torture is the way an institution simultaneously confesses and represses its deepest secret: that its consistency, its enjoyment of recognition as a really existing social fact, ultimately depends on the magic of performative utterances, on the force of their own immanent process of enunciation. The abjection produced in the torture victim, his betrayal of everything that matters and is dear to him, his confession of his own putrescence, is, as it were, the “substance” that stands in for the lack of substantial foundations to which the institution might appeal for final and ultimate legitimation. The torture victim's abject body is the “privileged” site of a politicotheological epiphany, for it is there that the reality of institutions and the social facts they sponsor—contracts, titles, money, property, marriages, and the like—bottoms out, touches on a dimension of vicious circularity that cannot be avowed if these social facts are to continue to enjoy credibility, if the social field structured by them is to remain consistent for the subject.⁴⁷ One could say, then, that the practice of torture serves to keep localized and off-scene the chronic state of emergency that, in effect, haunts all institutions insofar as they are dependent on the reality effects of performative utterances—utterances that bring about the propositional content of the social facts they pretend merely to certify. The torture victim's body is one of the places where, as it were, the knowledge is secreted that crucial constative utterances on which any social ontology depends really mask a performative, the form of which is, ultimately, that of a tautology—for example, “the law is the law.”⁴⁸

The Kafkan dimension of these reflections immediately strikes the eye. One could say that Josef K. encounters, but fails to comprehend, this insulting secret of the law, as the exemplary locus of symbolic power and authority, when, in the fifth chapter of The Trial, he stumbles upon the strangely sexualized—indeed, homosexualized—scene of sadomasochistic torture in the storage room hidden among the offices of the bank where he works. At such moments, it is as if the taint of tautological nonsense, the performative force that pertains, at some level, to all institutions and the social facts they sponsor, has begun to leak beyond its “normally” circumscribed space and to dissolve the institution's capacity to provide a credible context of meaningful reality. At such moments we are at the threshold of a psychotic universe where the subject has become unable to forget, unable (primordially) to repress, the drive dimension of symbolic function, which expands into a general state of rottenness and decay. The sense of surreal corruption in Kafka's texts would appear to derive from getting too close to this dimension of social reality.⁴⁹

When one considers Kafka's own struggles with his sexuality, another, perhaps more obvious reading of this scene—and one in the spirit of Freud's reading of Schreber—suggests itself: Josef K., this typical Kafkan bachelor, has simply stumbled upon his own—and his society's—closet, the social space where homosexuality is constituted as a refused yet insistent possibility. Josef K.'s entire story becomes thereby the unfolding of a kind of litigious paranoia generated by homosexual panic. The curious fact that everyone K. encounters knows about his trial would serve to underline the dimension of open secrecy constitutive of the “epistemology of the closet.”⁵⁰ Josef K.'s guilt could then be read as an indication that he ceded his homosexual desire and naively presupposed the unproblematic efficacy and stability of the closet. My argument about Schreber would, however, serve as a critique of this otherwise cogent reading of Kafka as well. By too quickly specifying the ideological content of the “closet” before sufficiently analyzing the closet as form, as a place where such ideological meanings can be inscribed, such a reading remains at the level of the cultural discourses, in this case homophobic ones, it sets out to undermine (a similar critique could be made of Freud's always disappointing specification of the contents of the unconscious). As a fantasy frame in which various ideological meanings can be inscribed and command a maximum of fascination, the closet is, I am suggesting, first and foremost a site where the drive dimension of symbolic functioning becomes manifest. Every ideological content borrows the “stuff” secreted within or, perhaps better, as this fantasy frame. When, in other words, an ideology captures the imagination, comes to matter for an individual or collective in a profound way, its “matter” has a share in, is animated by, this drive dimension of symbolic function. The importance of the Schreber material for the analysis of ideology is that it offers a glimpse of this “matter” of ideological fascination in a quasi-pure state, that is, at the moment of its inscription within a field of cultural values.⁵¹

VIII

These remarks on what we might call Schreber's Ludertum, his elaboration of a kind of abject femininity, were evoked by an impasse in Freud's argument. He was, we recall, unable to understand why an overstimulating outburst of homosexual libido should occur in conjunction with Schreber's nomination to the position of Senatspräsident of the Supreme Court of Saxony. After briefly alluding to the lifelong oscillation on the part of most adults between heterosexual and homosexual desire and the possibility of biological causation—a disturbance in sexual function as a consequence of male menopause—Freud returns to the main thread of his argument, which focuses on the role of Flechsig in Schreber's illness. What needs to be explained is, as Freud puts it, “that a man's friendly feeling towards his doctor can suddenly break out in an intensified form after a lapse of eight years and become the occasion of such a severe mental disorder” (SE 12:46). To put it in the terms I have been suggesting here, Freud's question is this: What was the nature of this dangerous surplus of power/influence that threatened Schreber's sanity and bodily integrity and how did it come to attach itself to Flechsig? Freud's answer to the question of the origin and dissemination of this dangerous “surplus value” leads him to the crucial notion of the transference:

But for the benefit of those who … regard our hypothesis as altogether untenable, it is easy to suggest a possibility which would rob it of its bewildering character. The patient's friendly feeling towards his doctor may very well have been due to a process of “transference,” by means of which an emotional cathexis became transposed from some person who was important to him on to the doctor who was in reality indifferent to him; so that the doctor will have been chosen as a deputy or surrogate for some one much closer to him. To put the matter in a more concrete form: the patient was reminded of his brother or father by the figure of the doctor, he rediscovered them in him; there will then be nothing to wonder at if, in certain circumstances, a longing for the surrogate figure reappeared in him and operated with a violence that is only to be explained in the light of its origin and primary significance.

(SE 12:46-47)

The place that Flechsig came to occupy in Schreber's imagination and psychic economy was, in other words, already carved out in the course of his earlier relationships with significant male others. Although Freud alludes to the importance of an older brother, he identifies the father as the original locus of the disturbing surplus that only later gets transferred to Flechsig.⁵² Wherever Schreber encounters this surplus he finds himself, as if by miracle, subject to a process of feminization, of unmanning, which Freud characterizes as homosexualization—the stimulation of a “feminine (that is, a passive homosexual) wishful phantasy” (SE 12:47). According to Freud, this surplus is a surplus of desire, of a primitive and overpowering longing for the father, against which Schreber defends by means of a paranoid delusion: “The person he longed for now became his persecutor, and the content of his wishful phantasy became the content of his persecution” (SE 12:47).

Freud supports his thesis of the paternal origins of the surplus that, once transferred to him, transfigures Flechsig into a demonic persecutor, by following the path whereby Flechsig comes to be displaced by God as the main focus of Schreber's persecutory anxieties. As Freud already noted, the latter displacement prepares the way for a triumphant reconciliation with what had at first appeared as a humiliation, his feminization: “Emasculation was now no longer a disgrace; it became ‘consonant with the Order of Things,’ it took its place in a great cosmic chain of events, and was instrumental in the re-creation of humanity after its extinction” (SE 12:48); Schreber would give birth to a new race of human beings by divine insemination. At a formal level, this displacement of Flechsig by God is made possible by the natural tendency of paranoia to split and divide up identifications into constituent parts, which may then, in turn, engage in struggles for predominance:

the persecutor is divided into Flechsig and God; in just the same way Flechsig himself subsequently splits up into two personalities, the “upper” and the “middle” Flechsig, and God into the “lower” and the “upper” God. … A process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. Or rather, paranoia resolves … into their elements the products of the condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious. The constant repetition of the decomposing process in Schreber's case would … be an expression of the importance which the person in question possessed for him. All of this dividing up of Flechsig and God … had the same meaning as the splitting of the persecutor into Flechsig and God. They would all be the duplications of one and the same important relationship.

(49-50)⁵³

That this “same important relationship” (i.e., Schreber's relationship with his father) should have been able to generate such an opulent array of phantasmagorical duplications and splittings, was, according to Freud, a function not simply of the senior Schreber's “normal” status as a figure of paternal authority, but rather of a certain surplus authority attributable to his professional status as a physician and, as Freud seems to suggest, to the particular kinds of professional activities in which he engaged. “Now the father of Senatspräsident Dr. Schreber was no insignificant person,” Freud notes. “He was the Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber whose memory is kept green to this day by the numerous Schreber Associations which flourish especially in Saxony; and, moreover, he was a physician.” Such a father, whose “activities in favour of promoting the harmonious upbringing of the young, of securing co-ordination between education in the home and in the school, of introducing physical culture and manual work with a view to raising the standards of health … exerted a lasting influence upon his contemporaries”; such a father, whose “great reputation as the founder of therapeutic gymnastics is still shown by the wide circulation of his Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik [Medical Indoor Gymnastics] …”; such a father, Freud finally insists, “was by no means unsuitable for transfiguration into a God in the affectionate memory of the son from whom he had been so early separated by death” (SE 12:51). That is, Schreber senior was not simply an average bourgeois father toward whom the typical “infantile attitude of boys,” composed as it is—or at least as Freud understood it—of a “mixture of reverent submission and mutinous insubordination,” would suffice to explain the peculiarities of Schreber's relation with his God; by virtue of his status as a physician, someone who, like God, “performs miracles … effects miraculous cures” (SE 12:52), Moritz Schreber was, in a sense, more father than the typical father: he embodied a surplus of paternal power, influence, and authority that predisposed him for the transfiguration effected in his son's deranged imagination.

A feature of this transfiguration of particular interest to Freud is Schreber's appropriation of various elements of solar myth to symbolize the complex terrain of paternity on which he apparently faltered. That for Schreber the sun should be associated or even identified with God is already implied in the characterization of God's nerves as rays, which, according to Schreber, “have … the faculty of transforming themselves into all things of the created world.” Schreber adds that the “light and warmth-giving power of the sun, which makes her the origin of all organic life on earth, is only to be regarded as an indirect manifestation of the living god,” and notes that the “veneration of the sun as divine by so many peoples since antiquity contains a highly important core of truth” (46).⁵⁴ And later, after introducing a more detailed account of the heavenly architecture, Schreber notes that at a certain point early on in his stay at Sonnenstein—literally Sun-Stone—“the sending forth of the sun's rays was taken over directly by God, and in particular by the lower God (Ariman); the voices that talk to me now (since July 1894) identify him with the sun” (95). Freud concludes from these passages that the sun “is nothing but another sublimated symbol for the father” (SE 12:54). He develops this point more fully in the postscript to his essay in which he briefly enters the domain of comparative religion and mythology that would occupy him more fully in Totem and Taboo. Noting that in one of his footnotes Schreber claims that the sun pales before him if he addresses it in a loud voice and that he is furthermore able to stare into the sun without being blinded by its brilliance (cf. 126), Freud remarks that it is “to this delusional privilege of being able to gaze at the sun without being dazzled that the mythological interest attaches”:⁵⁵

the natural historians of antiquity attributed this power to the eagle alone, who, as a dweller in the highest regions of the air, was brought into especially intimate relation with the heavens, with the sun, and with lightning. We learn from the same sources, moreover, that the eagle puts his young to a test before recognizing them as his legitimate offspring. Unless they can succeed in looking into the sun without blinking they are thrown out of the eyrie.

(SE 12:81)

Freud concludes that “this is merely ascribing to animals something that is a hallowed custom among men. The procedure gone through by the eagle with his young is an ordeal, a test of lineage, such as is reported of the most various races of antiquity” (SE 12:81).⁵⁶ This ordeal or test of lineage is one of the ways in which a culture frames or encodes what Kierkegaard proposed as the fundamental question of social existence: “How does the single individual reassure himself that he is legitimate?”⁵⁷ Given the rigidly partriarchal society in which Schreber lived and in which Freud developed his own theoretical elaborations of the codes of social and existential legitimation and the ways in which they can be “jammed,” it is no surprise that Freud concludes that “in the case of Schreber we find ourselves once again on the familiar ground of the father-complex” (SE 12:55). For reasons that Freud is unable to fathom but which he assumes more biographical and historical research would reveal, Schreber is unable to make “normal” use of, to inherit in an unimpeded way, the paternal resources that would have allowed him to reassure himself that he was, indeed, “legitimate.”

That it was, indeed, the resources of legitimation and the paths and modalities of their transmission that were in crisis in Schreber's case, is underlined by Schreber's preoccupation with names, titles, and lineage. We read, for example, that “Both the Flechsigs and the Schrebers belonged, it was said, to ‘the highest nobility of heaven’; the Schrebers had the particular title ‘Margraves of Tuscany and Tasmania,’ according to the souls' habit of adorning themselves with high-sounding worldly titles from a kind of personal vanity” (55). Indeed, Schreber himself seems to suggest that the crisis afflicting the Order of the World, beginning with the transgression which he calls “soul murder,” may be understood as a disturbance first and foremost within the domains of symbolic power represented and transmitted by names; his very first formulation of the crisis, which his text frenetically, though never quite successfully, tries to endow with a narrative structure, points in this direction:

This “miraculous structure” has recently suffered a rent, intimately connected with my personal fate. … I want to say by way of introduction that the leading roles in the genesis of this development, the first beginnings of which go back perhaps as far as the eighteenth century, were played on the one hand by the names of Flechsig and Schreber (probably not specifying any individual member of these families), and on the other by the concept of soul murder.

(54)⁵⁸

Earlier, in his open letter to Flechsig, Schreber writes:

I have no doubt that your name plays an essential role in the genetic development of the circumstances in question, in that certain nerves taken from your nervous system became “tested souls” … and in this capacity achieved supernatural power by means of which they have for years exerted a damaging influence on me and still do to this day. … I still feel daily and hourly the damaging influence of the miracles of those “tested souls”; the voices that speak to me even now shout your name again and again at me hundreds of times every day in this context.

(33)

Freud, for his part, draws Schreber's preoccupation with names and titles into the domain of issues pertaining to homosexuality:

His marriage, which he describes as being in other respects a happy one, brought him no children; and in particular it brought him no son who might have consoled him for the loss of his father and brother and upon whom he might have drained off his unsatisfied homosexual affections. His family line threatened to die out, and it seems that he felt no little pride in his birth and lineage.

(SE 12:57-58)

The first clause of the last sentence of this passage is one of the more remarkable and telling formulations in Freud's essay. In German it reads: “Sein Geschlecht drohte auszusterben. …”⁵⁹ Schreber's Geschlecht, that which threatens to exhaust itself, waste away, can, of course, signify not only lineage, family line, stock, or race, but also gender as well as sex. If we take the pun seriously—more seriously than Freud apparently did—it suggests that Schreber discovered, no doubt unwittingly and unwillingly, something quite remarkable about the relationship between symbolic function and sexuality: a crisis of symbolic function—one's inscription within a symbolic network by means of names and titles—can manifest itself in the realm of, or, to put it in more Foucauldian terms, as sexuality. It is almost as if Schreber himself were half-aware that his florid sexual fantasies were elaborations of the breakdown products of those symbolic resources which might have reassured him that he was legitimate in the “eyes” of the symbolic community, or what Lacan refers to as the “big Other.”

A good example of Freud's failure to appreciate Schreber's “marvelous” discovery that symbolic power in distress “secretes” a kind of sexuality occurs just prior to the passage cited earlier dealing with Schreber's endangered Geschlecht. Here we find Freud luxuriating in a sort of intellectual homecoming to the “familiar ground of the father-complex”:

None of the material which in other cases of the sort is brought to light by analysis is absent in the present one: every element is hinted at in one way or another. In infantile experiences such as this the father appears as an interferer with the satisfaction which the child is trying to obtain; this is usually of an auto-erotic character, though at a later date it is often replaced in phantasy by some other satisfaction of a less inglorious kind. In the final stage of Schreber's delusion a magnificent victory was scored by the infantile sexual urge; for voluptuousness became God-fearing, and God Himself (his father) never tired of demanding it from him. His father's most dreaded threat, castration, actually provided the material for his wishful phantasy (at first resisted but later accepted) of being transformed into a woman.

(SE 12:55-56)

With this reading of God-the-Father's paradoxical demand that Schreber cultivate feminine jouissance, we have encountered once again the limits of the “repressive hypothesis” guiding Freud's analysis. The fact that voluptuousness had become, as Schreber put it, God-fearing—gottesfürchtig—leads us not to the masturbator's triumph, as Freud would have it, but rather, I would suggest, to the domain of symbolic power in distress and the secret of names revealed therein.

Fear-(of)-God—Fürchtegott—is, as we know, an important name for Schreber.⁶⁰ Immediately after noting the “souls' habit of adorning themselves with high-sounding worldly titles,” Schreber continues his genealogy of the rupture in the miraculous structure of the world by listing the names of Flechsig family members implicated in the crisis:

Several names of both families are concerned: of the Flechsigs particularly Abraham Fürchtegott Flechsig, Professor Paul Theodor Flechsig, and a Daniel Fürchtegott Flechsig; the latter lived towards the end of the eighteenth century and was said to have been an “Assistant Devil” because of something that had happened in the nature of a soul murder. … The only knowledge I possess of the Flechsig family tree comes from what was said by the voices that talk to me; it would therefore be interesting to find out whether there had actually been a Daniel Fürchtegott Flechsig and an Abraham Fürchtegott Flechsig among the forebears of the present Professor Flechsig.

(55-56)

The resonances of this genealogy with Schreber's later claim that jouissance had become gottesfürchtig suggest that the middle names of these delusional forebears of Schreber's psychiatrist need to be understood not so much as indications of Schreber's deification of Flechsig—such a reading still remains within the orbit of Freud's analysis of the case—but rather as placeholders of the surplus of power/influence that Schreber experienced in his encounters with Flechsig's institutional authority. Schreber's own text indicates that he experienced this surplus as a kind of sexual transgression, as an obscene, even incestuous, indifference to his well-being culminating in a global condition of corruption and decadence. The middle name of (at least two of) Flechsig's imagined ancestors is thus both more and less than a name; it is the exceptional name that holds the place of a kind of state secret, which marks the place where the symbolic power and authority normally represented by the name secrete a kind of obscene, though gottesfürchtig, enjoyment.⁶¹

I would certainly agree with Freud that Schreber's extreme response to Flechsig—his perhaps excessive sensitivity to this other dimension of power, which “stains” Flechsig's institutional authority as a man of medicine—must have been in part the result of a transferential dynamic, the origins of which need to be sought in Schreber's relation to his own Geschlecht and above all to his father, Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber.⁶² Schreber's uncertainty as to the identity of the original “soul murderer,” his inability to isolate the original trauma and to provide a linear narrative of its sequelae, leads him to the vague supposition “that at one time something had happened between perhaps earlier generations of the Flechsig and Schreber families which amounted to soul murder” (55). My own conclusion from these difficulties in isolating the originary traumatic encounter is that the obscene dimension of power, which seemed to migrate, as a kind of transferential daimon, from Moritz Schreber to Paul Flechsig, enjoyed wide circulation throughout Schreber's Gründerjahre society, leaking, as it were, beyond the boundaries of either the Schreber family home or the psychiatric institutions in which Schreber lived, although these particular locations were no doubt sites of especially high “toxicity,” of especially high concentrations of this other form or dimension of power.

Schreber tends to characterize the maddening fact that agencies and institutions entrusted with the care of individual and social well-being exert a sexualizing pressure in the language that dominated cultural analyses of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. In one of Schreber's many attempts to explain the nature of the cosmic trauma to which his individual illness was tied, he cites topoi familiar from critiques of decadence and degeneration:

The realms of God may always have known that the Order of the World however great and magnificent, was yet not without its Achilles' heel, inasmuch as the human nerves' power of attracting God's nerves constituted some danger for the realms of God. These dangers were likely to become more acute when somewhere on earth or on any other star nervousness or moral depravity gained the upper hand.

(140)

Schreber adds that such “a general spread of nervous overexcitement” might be understood as a “consequence of over-civilization” (140). Earlier, Schreber had offered a similar view in language underlining his deep affinity with Wagner:

Not even God Himself is or was a being of such absolute perfection as most religions attribute to Him. The power of attraction, this even to me unfathomable law, according to which rays and nerves mutually attract one another, harbours a kernel of danger for the realms of God; this forms perhaps the basis of the Germanic saga of the Twilight of the Gods [Götterdämmerung]. Growing nervousness among mankind could and can increase these dangers considerably.

(59)

What distinguishes Schreber's delusional “analysis” of decadence from the work of other bourgeois theorists of cultural decline is that Schreber was unable to maintain a safe distance from the “symptoms” of degeneration. Indeed, the force of Schreber's neurotheological analysis is inseparable from his “perverse” capacity for identifying with, acting out, and, so to speak, enjoying these symptoms.

IX

Toward the beginning of the final section of his essay, “On the Mechanism of Paranoia,” Freud introduces what could be understood as his own theory of decadence. He claims, in effect, that Schreber's psychosis compels him to experience in direct fashion the real “glue” of social relations in nineteenth-century bourgeois society: sublimated homoerotic desire. On this reading, “decadence” or “degeneration” would be that condition in which the social glue assumes the properties of a solvent, a condition in which the homosexual component of social relations and fellow feeling begins to separate out from its place within a system of “higher” cultural purposes and becomes autonomous and purposeless. Summarizing his conclusion that Schreber, like other paranoids, had come to grief in an attempt “to master an unconsciously reinforced current of homosexuality” (SE 12:59), Freud writes:

So long as the individual is functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional relations to his neighbours in society have anything to do with sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense of the word [im vulgären Sinne].

(SE 12:60)

Freud goes on to situate this claim within a developmental theory according to which the human subject's sense of inherent relatedness to a world of objects is constituted across a series of differentiated stages of psychosexual organization. In this developmental model, one's sense of, to use Heidegger's phrase, Being-in-the-World, of involvement in a spatially, temporally, and symbolically complex network of social facts and relations, is made real (i.e., into a matter of profound existential care and concern) by way of an incremental and conflictual process of maturation in which the human child finds him- or herself increasingly implicated and interested in the affairs of other human subjects and the world more generally. At this point in his thinking about such matters, Freud proposes that this complex process of initiation into the world of “object relations” passes through a stage of extreme, even absolute, narcissism. This is a mode of libido organization in which the incipient self “unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself as his object” (SE 12:60-61). Narcissism is in this view a kind of psychosexual holding pattern in which the human subject gathers its energies and prepares, as it were, to make the inevitable choice of throwing its lot with the world of other subjects, which in a certain sense is created in and through that forced choice. That is, only by positing the world himself does the human subject begin effectively to take up positions, assume symbolic mandates, within the complex organization of social space, and it is Freud's view that this act of positing—of repeating the forced choice of being-in-the-world—has its own proper time or moment within an ontogenetic sequence.⁶³ Furthermore, Freud suggests, the path from a narcissistic libido organization to one allowing for a passionate engagement with the dimension of otherness, often, if not always, traverses a stage of homosexual object-love. Homosexuality functions in this schema as a kind of transitional compromise formation between narcissism and libidinal cathexis of otherness: I love an other, but one who is (anatomically) not too other—too “hetero”—from me (Freud's allusion to his idea that infants “theorize” that all people have the same genitals suggests that a pre-oedipal boy's love for his mother must in some sense be considered homoerotic). Freud concludes his brief summary of psychosexual development by returning to his thesis of the homoerotic nature of the social glue holding together human society:

After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses. They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts and, as “attached” components, help to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general.

(SE 12:61)

Appealing to the notion of “fixation” points put forth in his earlier Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud now suggests that Schreber, and paranoids more generally, have never fully succeeded in negotiating the passage beyond a narcissistically tinged homosexuality. The residues of this unfinished process mark the subject as one “exposed to the danger that some unusually intense wave of libido … may lead to a sexualization of their social instincts and so undo the sublimations which they had achieved in the course of their development” (SE 12:62). Freud then famously suggests that the various kinds of paranoid responses whereby an individual whose development has been arrested in this fashion defends against libidinal intensities “can all be represented as contradictions of the single proposition: ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’ …” (SE 12:63). According to this remarkable transformational grammar of symptom formation, delusions of persecution are generated by negating the verb: “‘I do not love him—I hate him, because he persecutes me.’” The final clause is necessary because “the mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia requires that internal perceptions—feelings—shall be replaced by external perceptions” (SE 12:63). Feelings are thus not only negated; the homophobic law of this disorder demands that they also be disavowed and projected onto external reality.⁶⁴

Eve Sedgwick has translated Freud's formula into terms much closer to my own emphasis on Schreber's crisis of initiatory investiture. She writes that “the usefulness of Freud's formulation, in the case of Dr. Schreber, that paranoia in men results from the repression of their homosexual desire” has primarily “to do with the foregrounding … of intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds.”⁶⁵ Expanding upon Freud's thesis, she argues that in nineteenth-century bourgeois society the normal patterns and procedures of male entitlement demand from men a high degree of homosocial desire that can only be distinguished from homosexuality im vulgären Sinne by means of arbitrary and inconsistent cultural mappings. As a result, the very procedures of investiture that inserted Judge Schreber into a powerful homosocial elite would have exposed him to the chronic threat of homosexual panic (which can in turn function only when homosexual desire signifies dysfunctional masculinity):

If such compulsory relationships as male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the middle distance of male homosocial desire, then it appears that men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain may always, just as arbitrarily and with just as much justification, be foreclosed.⁶⁶

My claim here, as in my earlier discussion of Freud's struggle with the homosociality pervading the inner circle of psychoanalytic pioneers, is that homosexual panic was only one of the chronic breakdown products of symbolic power and authority in Schreber's Germany. But as any reader of the Memoirs knows—and as the following chapters will develop in more detail—Schreber experienced what threatened his rights/rites of institution under a number of different “ideological” signs: as a feminization not always reducible to homosexualization; as the threat of contamination by machine-like, depersonalized linguistic operations; as the prospect of “Jewification” (metamorphosis into the Wandering Jew). What I call Schreber's “own private Germany” consists of his attempts, using the available repertoire of cultural values and valences, to interpret and to assign meaning to a maddening blockage in meaning that prevented him from assuming his place as a master of juridical hermeneutics and judgment. The gesture of ideological specification—of historical and cultural content analysis—that reads Schreber's breakdown as homosexual panic may in fact serve to occlude the more primary question as to the nature of the semiotic blockage at the core of Schreber's troubles. And it is to Freud's credit, I think, that his attention to this more primary matter compelled him to question his own previous “queer” reading.

X

After presenting his remarkable grammar of homophobic negation, Freud turns to the mechanism of repression (a promise to address the “more general psychological problems … involved in the question of the nature of projection” [SE 12:66] is never honored). After a brief presentation of the dynamic structure of repression as it functions in the sorts of neurotic disorders that had been the main focus of Freud's work up to this time, he proposes to explore the particular profile of this pathogenic mechanism as it functions in the more extreme case of paranoia. This path of investigation leads him to a consideration of one of Schreber's central delusions, namely the conviction that the world as he knew it had come to a catastrophic end.

In the sixth chapter of the Memoirs, Schreber writes of the period in the spring of 1894 while still a patient in Flechsig's clinic, which, though “the most gruesome time of my life … was also the holy time of my life, when my soul was immensely inspired by supernatural things, which came over me in ever increasing numbers amidst the rough treatment which I suffered from the outside” (79-80). During these months, Schreber came to believe that the whole of mankind had perished or that an end of the world was imminent:

It was repeatedly mentioned in visions that the work of the past fourteen thousand years had been lost … and that approximately only another two hundred years were allotted to the earth. … During the latter part of my stay at Flechsig's Asylum I thought this period had already expired and therefore thought I was the last real human being left, and that the few human shapes whom I saw apart from myself—Professor Flechsig, some attendants, occasional more or less strange-looking patients—were only “fleeting-improvised-men” created by miracle.

(85)

Schreber associates these phenomena with various political and religious conflicts, in particular with Protestant Germany's struggle against Catholic, Slavic, and Jewish forces arrayed against it and seeking to convert it.⁶⁷

In the next chapter of the Memoirs, Schreber develops more fully the fantasy of the end of the world:

Varying with the suggestions I received I formed different opinions about the manner in which it might have come about. In the first place I always thought of a decrease in the warmth of the sun through her moving further away, and consequently a more or less generalized glaciation. In the second place I thought of an earthquake or suchlike. … I further thought it possible that news had spread that in the modern world something in the nature of a wizard had suddenly appeared in the person of Professor Flechsig and that I myself, after all a person known in wider circles, had suddenly disappeared; this had spread terror and fear amongst the people, destroying the bases of religion and causing general nervousness and immorality. In its train devastating epidemics had broken upon mankind.

(97)

Among the diseases contributing to the apocalyptic demise of mankind, the abject signs of which had already become visible on his own body, Schreber mentions the plague along with several varieties of leprosy: “Lepra orientalis, Lepra indica, Lepra hebraica, and Lepra aegyptica” (97).

Freud takes his cue for interpreting these eschatological fantasies from Schreber's belief, expressed after he had reassured himself that the world had in fact not come to an end, that “a very profound inner change has taken place nevertheless” (93). On the basis of his theory of libido, Freud writes, “we shall not find it difficult to explain these catastrophes”:

The patient has withdrawn from the people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and has to be explained by means of a secondary rationalization as being “miracled up, cursorily improvised.” The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.

(SE 12:70)⁶⁸

Freud's reading of this delusion culminates in a remarkable claim that gives the psychic mechanisms of paranoia a nearly kabbalistic cast; if Freud is right, it is as if Schreber had recreated, in debased form, the Lurianic “procedure” of tikkun, the recollection of divine sparks scattered into earthly exile through the cosmic trauma of the “breaking of the vessels”:

And the paranoiac builds [the world] again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusion-formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is successful to a greater or lesser extent, but never wholly so. … But the human subject has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense one, to the people and things in the world, even though the relation is a hostile one now, where formerly it was hopefully affectionate. We may say, then, that the process of repression proper consists in a detachment of the libido from people—and things—that were previously loved. It happened silently; we received no intelligence of it, but can only infer it from subsequent events.

(SE 12:70-71)

As I've already indicated, Freud's reading of Schreber's “internal catastrophe” initiates a revision of his previous claim regarding homophobic negation/projection:

What forces itself so noisily upon our attention is the process of recovery, which undoes the work of repression and brings back the libido again on to the people it had abandoned. In paranoia this process is carried out by the method of projection. It was incorrect of us to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without.

(SE 12:71)

Like a tiny thread that, once pulled, unravels an entire garment, this seemingly modest revision inaugurates a long series of reservations, doubts, confessions of confusion and ignorance, speculations on (possibly) related issues, and calls for further research. The crux of Freud's dissatisfaction is the fit between his interpretations of what he sees as the two central delusions described by Schreber, the one dealing explicitly with sexuality and the sexed body, the other with the unmaking and making of the world as a space of meaningful social facts and relations. Freud reads the delusion of unmanning as a wishful fantasy to occupy a feminine position vis-à-vis key male figures of authority and power and the delusion of cosmic disaster as a generalized withdrawal of libidinal cathexes from the world, which serves as a defense against the intensity of the “homosexual” fantasy.

After noting that only a more thorough examination of the process of projection “will clear up our remaining doubts on this subject” (SE 12:71), Freud admits that his analysis of paranoid mechanisms do not sufficiently delimit them from other psychic disturbances in which libido is withdrawn from the world, such as occurs, for example, in mourning. His own answer to this difficulty, however, defines paranoia in language that almost exactly matches the way in which he would soon characterize melancholia in his famous essay on the subject. In paranoia, thanks to a fixation point at the stage of narcissism, the free-floating libido withdrawn from the world becomes the source of a pathologically heightened secondary narcissism: “we can assert that the length of the step back from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism is a measure of the amount of regression characteristic of paranoia” (SE 12:72).⁶⁹

Another problem raised by Freud's dependence on libido theory concerns what appears to be the paradoxical temporality of the relation between the two central delusional complexes, for, as Freud notes, “it can be urged that the delusions of persecution … made their appearance at an earlier date than the fantasy of the end of the world; so that what is supposed to have been a return of the repressed actually preceded the repression itself—and this is patent nonsense” (SE 12:72-73). Freud's answer to this more serious objection is also far more equivocal; for the ear attuned to Schreber's diction, it has all the markings of one of Schreber's speculations on the mechanisms of soul murder or one of the many miraculous “systems” by which he was tormented:

We must admit the possibility that a detachment of the libido such as we are discussing might just as easily be a partial one. … The process may then stop at the stage of a partial detachment or it may spread to a general one, which will loudly proclaim its presence in the symptoms of megalomania. Thus the detachment of the libido from the figure of Flechsig may nevertheless have been what was primary in the case of Schreber; it was immediately followed by the appearance of the delusion, which brought back the libido on to Flechsig again (though with a negative sign to mark the fact that repression had taken place) and thus annulled the work of repression. And now the battle of repression broke out anew, but this time with more powerful weapons.

(SE 12:73)

The third and final objection that Freud entertains apropos of his insistence on the primacy of libido theory proves to be the most far-reaching and in fact returns us to some of the issues raised at the very beginning of our discussion. For this final objection concerns the ongoing conflict between Freud and the dissident members of the psychoanalytic circle—above all Adler and Jung—who were pushing beyond the limits of Freud's conception of libidinal cathexis. This final objection was anticipated in a footnote that Freud appended to his initial reading of the delusion of the end of the world. Freud writes there: “He has perhaps withdrawn from [the world] not only his libidinal cathexis, but his interest in general—that is, the cathexes that proceed from his ego as well” (SE 12:70; my emphasis). What is at stake here is nothing less than the question of the primacy of the domain of sexuality for understanding the emergence and nature of the self's cognitive, moral, and existential involvement with the social world. How does the human subject come to have a rapport with other subjects and the world more generally, how does the human subject come to inhabit a world of institutions and social facts (money, marriage, laws, governments, etc.) that profoundly matter, that are experienced as real, vital, and meaningful, and how does such a rapport come to be shattered? These questions, it would seem, push beyond the limits of the theory of libidinal cathexis that had guided Freud throughout his reading of the Schreber case. Indeed, given Freud's ultimate dependence on this theory and his sense that the very identity and integrity of the institution of psychoanalysis stands or falls with it, one can only agree with Robert Jay Lifton's astute remark that “Freud's views on imagery of the end of the world [in Schreber's text] were in some measure a defense of—or at least a warding off of a beginning attack on—his own ideological world.”⁷⁰ With the questions raised by Schreber's apocalyptic visions we have, in other words, encountered once again what I earlier characterized as Freud's allegorical presence in the text. The rhythm of equivocation and doubt that informs these final pages of Freud's essay registers the degree of “seismic” unrest provoked by the task of applying libido theory, and the “repressive hypothesis” to which it is committed, to the sort of radical disturbance in one's sense of (one's right to) being-in-the-world manifest in the delusion of world destruction. Confessing his helplessness in the face of such matters, Freud summarizes the central theoretical questions in the following terms:

We can no more dismiss the possibility that disturbances of the libido may react upon the ego-cathexes than we can overlook the converse possibility—namely, that a secondary or induced disturbance of the libidinal processes may result from abnormal changes in the ego. Indeed, it is probable that processes of this kind constitute the distinctive characteristic of psychoses.

(SE 12:75)

Following a series of speculative interventions into current debates concerning diagnostic categories and the remarkable confession, noted previously, of a structural homology between libido theory and Schreber's delusional cosmology, Freud concludes by giving the final word of the essay not to the libido but rather to the ego, the Ich. It is the developmental history of the ego and, ultimately, of that more amorphous locus of agency, the self, which, Freud seems to suggest, holds the key to understanding the sort of profound disturbance registered in Schreber's apocalyptic delusions. This disturbance is, I would suggest, best understood not in the context of the ego psychology that was to emerge from these final reflections,⁷¹ but rather in one attuned to the operations and crises of symbolic power and authority.

XI

Freud shows his greatest sensitivity to these crises in the postscript to the case study, published a year after the original essay. In these reflections on Schreber's deep affinities with totemistic patterns of thought and on what Lifton has aptly termed the “disquieting border area of theology and psychopathology,”⁷² Freud demonstrates a keen awareness of the problems pertaining to the historical transmission of legacies of social and existential legitimation. If Freud is right about Schreber's obsessions with names, titles, and lineage (i.e., the dimension of legitimacy ultimately transmitted by way of the patronymic—the Name-of-the-Father, as Jacques Lacan puts it), then it behooves us to attend more closely to the clues Schreber gives as to what has gone awry in the transmission of those symbolic resources with which he might have reassured himself that he was, in a deep and dependable sense, legitimate. Schreber himself indicates that the disturbance or blockage in question and the various aberrations in the psychic and cosmic order that follow from it, are the results not so much of an absence or lack of access to sites and resources of legitimation as of a kind of uncanny surplus of power and influence secreted by them. If Lacan is right about Schreber—that his psychosis is the result of a “foreclosure” of the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father, in short, what I have been referring to as the symbolic resources allowing for a deep and dependable sense of existential legitimacy—then this default would seem to be a function not of a “too little” but rather of a “too much,” not of an excessive distance from the attentions of a solicitous authority but rather of an excessive proximity. Nowhere is Schreber clearer about this than in his repeated references to the fact that God normally remains distant from and ignorant of living human beings.

Freud's reading of Schreber's conception of God's lack of omnipotence as a critique or attack and thus as a sign of rebellion, hostility, and aggression vis-à-vis God and the paternal agency Freud sees him as representing, has become the standard reading of this peculiar element of Schreber's theological system. And yet we should recall Schreber's quite emphatic insistence that this lack is precisely what is demanded by, or better, what constitutes the so-called Order of the World, that reign of cosmic law the transgression of which is figured as excessive and prolonged “nerve contact” between God and Schreber. “As a rule,” Schreber writes, “God did not interfere directly in the fate of peoples or individuals—I call this the state of affairs in accordance with the Order of the World” (48). This rule served, it seemed, to protect not only mortals from the overwhelming force of divine immediacy but also God Himself from the dangers of too much nerve contact, “because for reasons which cannot be further elucidated, the nerves of living human beings particularly when in a state of high-grade excitation, have such 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” (48). For these reasons, God entered into nerve contact with living human beings only in exceptional circumstances, for example, in dream states, states of poetic inspiration, or in moments of political and social crisis of entire nation-states, such as in war. The law regulating distances and proximities between the sacred and the profane—the Order of the World—deemed that “regular contact between God and human souls occurred … only after death” (48). Schreber notes that, from the perspective he is presenting, “‘the Order of the World’ may appear as something impersonal and higher, more powerful than God or even as ruling God.” “In fact,” he continues, “there is no obscurity. ‘The Order of the World’ is the lawful relation which, resting on God's nature and attributes, exists between God and the creation called to life by Him” (79).⁷³ Schreber admits that such a view implies the paradox that

God, whose power of rays is essentially constructive in nature, and creative, came into conflict with Himself when he attempted the irregular policy against me, aimed solely at destroying my bodily integrity and reason. … Or perhaps, using an oxymoron, God Himself was on my side in His fight against me, that is to say I was able to bring His attributes and powers into battle as an effective weapon in my self-defence.

(79)

If Freud is right, that God stands in for the father, then Schreber has discovered a remarkable feature of this figure, a feature absolutely central to the emergence of Schreber's paranoid universe. Indeed, with his insight into God's internal division, Schreber may have discovered the key to that aspect of paranoia that, according to Freud, was typical for the illness, namely a certain tendency toward splitting (the father into God and Flechsig; God into the upper and lower God; Flechsig into multiple Flechsig-souls, etc.)⁷⁴ The father figure, it seems, undergoes a kind of self-division into two distinct paternal agencies: the one distant and marked by a peculiar ignorance about living human beings and their bodily functions—an ignorance that, as Schreber takes pains to emphasize, accords with the law—and the other, once lured by the right bait, the right Luder, obscenely involved in the affairs of sentient human beings: their sexual pleasures, their most private thoughts and dreams, even their bowel movements. One might say that the entire “plot” of the Memoirs revolves around Schreber's attempt to integrate these two fathers, to find a way to reconcile the “outlaw” or extralegal paternal presence—this “surplus father”—with the father identified with the Order of the World and the law of proper distances.

.....

Notes

1. Citations of Freud's work in English will be taken from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74). References to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text (SE with volume and page). Citations of the German text of Freud's works will be taken from the Studienausgabe, 12 vols., ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982).

2. Cited in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 275, 274, 275. In his monumental study of the Schreber case, Zvi Lothane suggests that Freud had wanted Ferenczi to collaborate on the Schreber essay and that the latter politely refused when it became clear that Freud really wanted him to serve as a kind of personal secretary. See Zvi Lothane, In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1992), 362.

3. Gay, Freud, 279. Zvi Lothane suggests more radically that Freud's focus on homosexuality in his reading of Schreber was entirely a product of a transferential dynamic on Freud's part and without a counterpart in Schreber's life or text: “scientific formulations about paranoia aside, latent homosexuality played a role in Freud and in the relations among the pioneers [of psychoanalysis] themselves: it was both an overt and a covert current in the early days of the history of the psychoanalytic movement, when it was an exclusively male club and a mutual admiration—and interpretation—society. The earliest personal linkage between paranoia and homosexuality was made by Freud himself in relation to Fliess. … In addition, homosexual concerns repeatedly came up as countertransference in the psychotherapy of male patients. Thus, Freud's attribution of homosexuality to Schreber is, among other motives, a projection onto Schreber of his own sexual conflicts and emotions” (Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 338-39).

4. Freud's witness is Sandor Ferenczi.

5. Freud notes in the first section of his essay that Schreber associates mental illness with disturbances in the domain of sexual function “as though he shared our prejudice” (SE 12:31). Even earlier, in the preface to his essay, Freud explicitly cites Schreber's justification of publishing what might appear to the reader as indiscretions or even libelous speech about his first psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Flechsig, as a moral cover for his own publication of the case study: “He urges upon Dr. Flechsig … the same considerations that I am now urging upon him” (SE 12:10).

6. Freud's relationship with Fliess was, of course, in its own way overdetermined by a preoccupation with influence and originality with regard to theoretical insights about the nature of human sexuality. The correspondence between Freud and Fliess ended in a dispute over Fliess's claim that Freud had passed along his own unpublished theories on bisexuality to Otto Weininger (perhaps by way of Hermann Swoboda, a patient of Freud's and friend of Weininger), who then published them in his notorious volume Sex and Character in 1903. In his discussion of this affair, Gay defends Freud's forthrightness in matters of intellectual property: “Intellectual robbery is after all easily done, but, he [Freud] protested, he had always acknowledged the work of others, never appropriated anything that belonged to anyone else. This was not the best place or time for Freud to assert his innocence in the contentious arena of ideas competing for priority. But to forestall further disputes, he offered Fliess a look at the manuscript of his still-unfinished Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, so that Fliess might study the passages on bisexuality and have any offending ones revised. Freud even offered to postpone publishing the Three Essays until Fliess had brought out his own book. These were decent gestures, but Fliess chose not to take them up. … This was the end of the Freud-Fliess correspondence” (Gay, Freud, 155). For a brilliant reading of yet another chapter in Freud's intense preoccupation with questions of originality and influence, see Neil Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman,” in his The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 97-121.

7. Lothane has noted even more striking parallels between Schreber's delusional sexology and Freud's earlier Project for a Scientific Psychology. See Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 366 n. 32.

8. My understanding of “influence anxiety” has been enriched not only through Harold Bloom's programmatic presentation of that notion in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), but also through his extensions and elaborations of the concept in Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1983) and Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). The classic text in the psychoanalytic literature on influence anxiety and mental illness is, of course, Victor Tausk's famous essay on the influence machines of schizophrenics, “Über die Entstehung des ‘Beeinflussungsapparates’ in der Schizophrenie,” first published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse 5 (1919): 1-33.

9. See C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907), in The Psychogenesis of Mental Illness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

10. In his postscript to the Schreber case in which Freud ventures on the Jungian terrain that would occupy him more centrally in Totem and Taboo, Freud refers in a footnote to another work of Jung's as well as an essay by Sabina Spielrein, both of which deal to some extent with Schreber and both of which appeared, thanks to a “freundlicher Zufall,” a “happy coincidence,” as Freud put it, in the same issue of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (3, no. 1 [1911]) as Freud's Schreber text.

11. In an earlier footnote, Freud anticipates this larger hermeneutic claim concerning the proper interpretation of footnotes and other such material: “It not infrequently happens in the Denkwürdigkeiten that an incidental note upon some piece of delusional theory gives us the desired indication of the genesis of the delusion and so of its meaning” (SE 12:22).

12. In a letter to Abraham, Freud even joked that “I have of course to plagiarise you very extensively in this paper” (cited in Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 337).

13. Maeder, a close associate of Jung's, is known for his racialist interpretation of the break between the Viennese and Swiss schools, which he expressed in a letter to Ferenczi in 1913. Freud's advice to Ferenczi on how to respond to Maeder's insistence on fundamental differences between the Jewish and Aryan spirit is particularly interesting when seen against the background of Schreber's preoccupations with these very racial differences, a matter that Freud left unaddressed in his Schreber study: “Certainly there are great differences between the Jewish and the Aryan spirit. We can observe that every day. Hence there would be here and there differences in outlook on life and art. But there should not be such a thing as Aryan or Jewish science. Results in science must be identical, though the presentation of them may vary. If these differences mirror themselves in the apprehension of objective relationships in science there must be something wrong.” Cited in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 325.

14. Lothane sees this lapse as part of a larger failure on Freud's part to integrate research that shifted the analytic focus from sexual etiologies to other dynamic factors such as rage, frustration, and contemporary conflicts. See Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 341-42.

15. See Gay, Freud, 221-22. Jacques Le Rider turns Adler's phrase into a central organizing metaphor of his recent study of crises of gender, national, and ethnic identity in fin-de-siècle Austrian literature: Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum, 1993). There Le Rider characterizes Schreber's Memoirs as a “disturbing parody of the literary presentations of depersonalization and mystic or narcissistic reconstruction of the deeper self,” which he analyzes in the works of Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Lou Andreas-Salomé (81). Friedrich Kittler reverses this relation of original and parody when he claims, for example, that Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge might be profitably reexamined under the heading Memoirs of My Simulations of Nervous Illness. See Kittler, Discourse Networks. 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 329.

16. The existence of Jungian and Adlerian schools of psychoanalysis testifies to the success of these contestations. That these schools bear the name of their founders suggests the continued efficacy of the founding utterances. The “truth” of the Jungian, Adlerian, or Freudian position continues, in other words, to be at least in part dependent on the force of the master's speech and the pupil's transferential relation to it.

17. What Pierre Bourdieu has argued apropos of the “political capital” of institutions applies, in other words, in an emphatic way to psychoanalysis. It is, he suggests, “a form of symbolic capital, credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or on an object) the very powers that they recognize in him (or it). This is the ambiguity of the fides … : an objective power which can be objectified in things (and in particular in everything that constitutes the symbolic nature of power—thrones, sceptres and crowns), it is the product of subjective acts of recognition and, in so far as it is credit and credibility, exists only in and through representation, in and through trust, belief and obedience. Symbolic power is a power which the person submitting to grants to the person who exercises it, a credit with which he credits him, a fides, and auctoritas, with which he entrusts him by placing his trust in him. It is a power which exists because the person who submits to it believes that it exists. Credo, says Benveniste, ‘is literally “to place one's kred,” that is “magical powers,” in a person from whom one expects protection thanks to “believing” in him.’ The kred, the credit, the charisma, that ‘je ne sais quoi’ with which one keeps hold over those from whom one holds it, is this product of the credo, of belief, of obedience, which seems to produce the credo, the belief, the obedience” (Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991], 192).

18. Regarding the transferential mechanism that supports the symbolic authority of the “classical master,” Žižek writes: “The transubstantiated body of the classical Master is an effect of the performative mechanism already described by la Boétie, Pascal and Marx: we, the subjects, think that we treat the king as a king because he is in himself a king, but in reality a king is a king because we treat him like one. And this fact that the charismatic power of a king is an effect of the symbolic ritual performed by his subjects must remain hidden: as subjects, we are necessarily victims of the illusion that the king is already in himself a king. That is why the classical Master must legitimize his rule with a reference to some non-social, external authority (God, nature, some mythical past event …)—as soon as the performative mechanism which gives him his charismatic authority is demasked, the Master loses his power” (The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 146). Adam Phillips has offered a rather more straightforward account of the problematic—and exemplary—nature of psychoanalytic authority: “Psychoanalysis began … as a kind of virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine; and free association—the heart of psychoanalytic treatment—is itself ritualized improvisation. But Freud was determined to keep psychoanalysis officially in the realm of scientific rigour, partly, I think, because improvisation is difficult to legitimate—and to sell—outside of a cult of genius. With the invention of psychoanalysis … Freud glimpsed a daunting prospect: a profession of improvisers.” But precisely because of this problematic status of psychoanalytic knowledge and authority, Phillips adds that “psychoanalysis can be good at showing the ways in which certain points of view become invested with authority” (On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life [London: Faber and Faber, 1993], xv, xvi).

19. Bourdieu, Language, 109.

20. “An investiture … consists of sanctioning and sanctifying a difference … by making it known and recognized; it consists of making it exist as a social difference, known and recognized as such by the agent invested and everyone else” (Ibid., 119).

21. That Lacan was, in the end, more aware than Freud of these parallels between Schreber's psychosis and problems internal to the rites of institution of psychoanalysis itself is indicated by a persistent emphasis in his work on the problem of investiture. In his seminar on the psychoses, noting the importance of Schreber's nomination/election as Senatspräsident, he writes: “But where the psychoses are concerned, things are different. It's not a question of the subject's relation to a link signified within existing signifying structures, but of his encounter under elective conditions with the signifier as such, which marks the onset of psychosis” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: Norton, 1993], 320). We might compare this remark with a much later pronouncement of Lacan's apropos of the “magical” procedure instituted by the Lacanian School—la passe—marking the symbolic election of the analyst: “Now that I think about it, psychoanalysis is untransmittable. What a nuisance that each analyst is forced … to reinvent psychoanalysis. … I must say that in the ‘pass’ nothing attests to the subject's [that is, the candidate-analyst's] knowing how to cure a neurosis. I am still waiting for someone to enlighten me on this. I would really love to know, from someone who would testify in the ‘pass,’ that a subject … is capable of doing more than what I would call plain old chattering. … How does it happen that, through the workings of the signifier, there are people who can cure? Despite everything I may have said on the topic, I know nothing about it. It's a question of trickery [truquage]” (cited in Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991], 158).

22. These reports were submitted as documents to the courts adjudicating the question of Schreber's guardianship and confinement. Schreber included them as appendixes to his memoirs, adding the following note: “The comparison with the corresponding accounts in the Memoirs and in my grounds for appeal will show immediately that the reports contain some factual mistakes, inexactitudes and misconceptions. But I have no doubt that the reason lies to some extent in unreliable reports furnished by third persons (attendants, etc.)” (267).

23. In the German, the temporal structure of reinterpretation described by Freud takes on an added dimension. In the penultimate sentence of the quoted passage where we read “later on,” we find, in the original, the word “nachträglich,” which carries with it the association not only of “Nachtrag,” meaning addendum, addition, or supplementary revision, but also of the verb “nachtragen,” which means to bear a grudge against someone for a past injury.

24. This aspect of Freud's reading has, as might be expected, come under attack from a number of different quarters. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Freud's claims thus far is his equation of feminization with emasculation, i.e., castration, an equation that forces Freud to marginalize those aspects of Schreber's feminine identification which do not accord with the sense of radical loss and mutilation one associates with castration. See, for example, Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter's analysis of the case in the appendix to their translation of Schreber's Memoirs and, more recently, Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, as well as Jay Geller, “Freud v. Freud: Freud's Reading of Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken,” in Reading Freud's Reading, ed. Sander Gilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller, and Valerie Greenberg (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 180-210.

25. For Schreber as for Otto Weininger, who was developing his notorious theories of sexuality, gender, and race more or less contemporaneously with Schreber, sexual pleasure that escapes genital localization is by definition feminine. Schreber notes his willingness to offer his body to medical examination “for ascertaining whether my assertion is correct, that my whole body is filled with nerves of voluptuousness from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, such as is the case only in the adult female body, whereas in the case of a man, as far as I know, nerves of voluptuousness are only found in and immediately around the sexual organs” (204). See also Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1980).

26. “It is my duty to provide Him with it [enjoyment] in the form of highly developed soul-voluptuousness, as far as this is possible in the circumstances contrary to the Order of the World. If I can get a little sensuous pleasure in the process, I feel I am entitled to it as a small compensation for the excess of suffering and privation that has been mine for many years past” (209). The original German endows this surplus enjoyment with the status of refuse or waste product: “soweit dabei für mich etwas von sinnlichem Genusse abfällt …” (Denkwürdigkeiten, 194).

27. Schreber gives a brief list of examples of the birds' susceptibility to homophony: “It has already been said that the sounds need not be completely identical; a similarity suffices, as in any case the birds do not understand the sense of the words; therefore it matters little to them—in order to give some examples—whether one speaks of

    ‘Santiago’ or ‘Cathargo’
    ‘Chinesentum’ or ‘Jesum Christum’
    ‘Abendroth’ or ‘Athemnoth’
    ‘Ariman’ or ‘Ackermann’
    ‘Briefbeschwerer’ or ‘Herr Prüfer schwört’”

    (168-69).

28. He notes, for example, that “in a carping mood people often compare them [young girls] to geese, ungallantly accuse them of having ‘the brains of a bird’ and declare that they can say nothing but phrases learnt by rote and they betray their lack of education by confusing foreign words that sound alike” (36).

29. Schreber writes that “To a large number of the other bird-souls I jokingly gave girls' names in order to distinguish them, because all of them can best be compared to little girls in their curiosity, their inclination to voluptuousness, etc. These girls' names were then taken up by God's rays and used for the respective bird-souls concerned” (171; cf. SE 12:36).

30. One will recall that in a later metapsychological study, Freud posits moral masochism, the analysis of which follows an account of feminine masochism, as one of the typical products of the drive-decomposition that normally accompanies the introduction into the ego of foreign matter, i.e., the symbolic and ethical mandates of parents and other social authorities (see “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” SE 19:159-70). It is not out of the question that Schreber's experience of the talking birds was suggested to him by his knowledge, attested to at several points in the Memoirs, of Wagnerian opera. One will recall that in the third opera of the Ring, Siegfried, upon slaying Fafner, is able to understand the language of birds. We recall that after attaining his release from the Sonnenstein asylum, Schreber had the Siegfried-motif inscribed above the entrance to his new home in Dresden. A more noxious Wagnerian association, one to which we will return later, is the one the composer made in his essay on “Judaism in Music” between the meaningless repetitions of parrots and Jewish discourse.

31. Based on interviews with a descendant of the Jung family into which Schreber's sister Anna had married, Lothane reports that it might have been Carl Jung, Anna's husband, who was responsible for the deletion of the third chapter from the Memoirs and for the efforts to buy up and destroy the printed copies of the text. See Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 26.

32. Lothane writes that Flechsig turned his discovery of myelination, made in 1872 while dissecting the brain of a five-week old boy named Martin Luther, “into the foundation of his research methodology and his entire neuroanatomical as well as psychiatric system. Flechsig was able to demonstrate that myelination of nerve fibers was a lawful and sequential process in the development of the nervous system of man, reflecting the maturation of various neural systems” (In Defense of Schreber, 203). Freud's neurological writings contain numerous references to Flechsig's work and in a letter to his bride, Martha, he even refers to Flechsig as his “competitor” (cf. ibid., 241).

33. Freud seems to want to turn this self-imposed methodological asceticism into a boast about his hermeneutic prowess when he brags that apart from some biographical information about Schreber passed on to him by the Dresden psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Georg Stegmann, “I have made use of no material in this paper that is not derived from the actual text of the Denkwürdigkeiten” (SE 12:46). Included in the material that Stegmann passed along was the October 1908 issue of Der Freund der Schrebervereine (Friend of the Schreber Associations), the official organ of the Schreber Associations, which, as we shall see, Freud uses to piece together an ultimately positive appraisal of the role of Schreber's father in the life of his psychotic son.

34. In a certain sense, Freud begins his own case study with a kind of confession that is the mirror image of Schreber's accusation against Flechsig. Freud begins his opening remarks by noting that because he is not attached to a public institution and because paranoia rarely offers the prospect of therapeutic success, it is, Freud admits, “only in exceptional circumstances … that I succeed in getting more than a superficial view of the structure of paranoia—when, for instance, the diagnosis … is uncertain enough to justify an attempt at influencing the patient, or when, in spite of an assured diagnosis, I yield to the entreaties of the patient's relatives and undertake to treat him for a time” (SE 12:9). It is, of course, uncertain whether this sort of “transgression” of the purely therapeutic mandate would count for Schreber as an instance of malpractice.

35. Žižek has described this correlation in terms of a Lacanian understanding of the superego: “It is this very exteriority which, according to Lacan, defines the status of the superego: the superego is a Law in so far as it is not integrated into the subject's symbolic universe, in so far as it functions as an incomprehensible, nonsensical, traumatic injunction … bearing witness to a kind of ‘malevolent neutrality’ directed towards the subject, indifferent to his empathies and fears. At this precise point, as the subject confronts the ‘agency of the letter’ in its original and radical exteriority, the signifier's nonsense at its purest, he encounters the superego command ‘Enjoy!’ which addresses the most intimate kernel of his being” (The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality [London: Verso, 1994], 20).

36. Freud's equation of the delusion of being transformed into a woman with male homosexuality is, of course, problematic and has been challenged by critical readers, most notably by the English translators of Schreber's Memoirs. See Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, “Translators' Analysis of the Case,” in Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs, 369-411.

37. Freud uses the word “Geschwisterinzest” which could also signify an instance of homosexual incest.

38. In one sense, Freud is teasing out an ambiguity in Schreber's own language. Schreber's phrase for “communication with supernatural forces” (Memoirs, 68) is “Verkehr mit übersinnlichen Kräften.” “Verkehr” could be translated as “commerce,” “traffic,” or “intercourse,” and, given a certain literalizing tendency typical of psychotic disorders, “übersinnlich” might suggest not so much the dimension of the supersensible as an excess or surplus of the “sinnlich,” of the sensuous and sensual. These ambiguities are familiar to anyone who has struggled with the translation and interpretation of the final lines of Kafka's short prose text, “The Judgment,” in which a similarly overdetermined “Verkehr” figures in a crucial way.

39. Dr. Weber's report of December 9, 1899, cited by Freud, recalls Schreber's main symptoms during his stay in Flechsig's asylum. Weber notes that among the central delusions, Schreber “thought he was dead and rotten, suffering from the plague” (appendix to Memoirs, 267). One also recalls in this context Schreber's own characterization of the conspiracy against him: “in this way a plot was laid against me (perhaps March or April 1894), the purpose of which was to hand me over to another human being after my nervous illness had been recognized as, or assumed to be, incurable, in such a way that my soul was handed to him, but my body—transformed into a female body … was then left to that human being for sexual misuse and simply ‘forsaken,’ in other words left to rot” (Memoirs, 75).

40. One really begins to appreciate Freud's confusion upon reading his quite unexpected appeal to a biological contingency—the possibility that Schreber was experiencing the effects of male menopause—to explain the timing of the outburst of homosexual libido (cf. SE 12:46).

41. Bourdieu, Language, 105-6; my emphasis.

42. Apropos of this epiphany, Lacan notes that “Insults are very frequent in the divine partner's relations with Schreber, as in an erotic relationship that one initially refuses to take part in and resists. This is the other face, the counterpart, of the imaginary world. The annihilating insult is a culminating point, it is one of the peaks of the speech act. … Around this peak all the mountain chains of the verbal field are laid out … in a masterly perspective by Schreber. Everything that a linguist could imagine as decompositions of the function of language is encountered in what Schreber experiences, which he differentiates with a lightness of touch, in nuances that leave nothing to be desired as to their information” (Seminar. Book III, 100). Taking Lacan's reading as his point of departure, Philippe Despoix has noted not only the importance of insults in the Israelite God's relation to the prophets—as in, for example, Hos. 1:8-but also the fact that it was Max Weber who, in his Sociology of Religion, written in the years of great productivity following his own psychotic breakdown and recovery, underlined this feature of Old Testament rhetoric. See Despoix, “Buch und Wahn: Die sprachliche Struktur im ‘Psychotischen’ Diskurs—Schreber mit Lacan,” in Die Spur des Unbewußten in der Psychiatrie, ed. Stefan Priebe, Martin Heinze, and Gerhard Danzer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 45-69.

43. Lacan introduced the notion of the master signifier as point de capiton or “quilting point” in his seminar on the psychoses. There, perhaps playing on the crucial role in Schreber's Memoirs of the signifiers Fürchtegott and gottesfürchtig, Lacan writes apropos of Jehoiada's pronouncement, in Racine's Athalie, that the fear of God is his only fear: “The fear of God isn't a signifier that is found everywhere. Someone had to invent it and propose it to men, as the remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors, that they fear a being who is, after all, only able to exercise his cruelty through the evils that are there, multifariously present in human life. To have replaced these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other means of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable fears, is quite an accomplishment. … To invent a thing like this you have to be a poet or a prophet, and it's precisely insofar as this Jehoiada is one to some extent … that he can use as he does this major and primordial signifier. … This famous fear of God completes the sleight of hand that transforms, from one minute to the next, all fears into perfect courage. All fears … are exchanged for what is called the fear of God, which, however constraining it may be, is the opposite of fear. … The power of the signifier, the effectiveness of this word fear, has been to transform the zeal at the beginning … into the faithfulness of the end. The transmutation is of the order of the signifier as such. No accumulation, no superimposition, no summation of meanings, is sufficient to justify it. … The quilting point is the word fear. … Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It's the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively” (Seminar. Book III, 266-68). See also Lacan's more condensed essay on Schreber, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Lacan's Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 179-225.

44. Michel de Certeau, “The Institution of Rot,” in Psychosis and Sexual Identity: Toward a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case, ed. David Allison, Prado de Oliveira, Mark Roberts, and Allen Weiss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 91-92.

45. Ibid., 92.

46. Ibid. As we have already noted, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose own breakdown occurred almost simultaneously with Schreber's, dedicated much of his life to the philosophical elaboration of precisely this insulting secret.

47. As Certeau puts it, the “goal of torture, in effect, is to produce acceptance of a State discourse, through the confession of putrescence. What the torturer in the end wants to extort from the victim he tortures is to reduce him to being no more than that [ça], rottenness, which is what the torturer himself is and knows that he is, but without avowing it. The victim must be the voice of the filth, everywhere denied, that everywhere supports the representation of the regime's ‘omnipotence,’ in other words, the ‘glorious image’ of themselves the regime provides for its adherents through its recognition of them. The victim must therefore assume the position of the subject upon whom the theater of identifying power is performed” (Ibid., 93). In this context, see once more Elaine Scarry's lucid reflections on torture and symbolic power in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The ethical and political dimension of Scarry's project lies in her efforts to demonstrate “that it is part of the original and ongoing project of civilization to diminish the reliance on (and to find substitutes for) this process of substantiation, and that this project comes in the west to be associated with an increased pressure toward material culture, or material self-expression” (14).

48. One might note a further cluster of meanings evoked by the divine nomination Luder. Schreber may well have known that Martin Luther's family name had been “Luder” before he himself changed it to “Luther” in 1517, the year of his famous ninety-five theses. Before settling on “Luther,” he also used a Hellenized form, “Eleutherius,” meaning “one who is free.” While early enemies of the Reformation made use, in their polemics, of the connotations of putrescence in the name Luder, Luther's supporters produced etymologies according to which his name signified “Herr” of the “Leute” (“the people's master”) or was derived from the adjective lauter, meaning pure, undefiled, genuine. (For a comprehensive discussion of Luther's names, see Bernd Moeller and Karl Stackmann, “Luder—Luther—Eleutherius. Erwägungen zu Luthers Namen,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. Philologisch-Historische Klasse 11 [1981]: 171-203; I am grateful to Peter Schöttler for this reference and to Werner Hamacher for alerting me to the possible significance of Luther's names in the first place.) An unconscious identification with the great theological reformer, whose own change of name dotted the “i,” so to speak, on his radical reshaping of the Christian subject's relation to religious and secular authority, might thus have been operative in Schreber's own experience of spiritual chosenness. In this context one will also recall the bizarre coincidence that the patient on whom Flechsig made some of his first neuroanatomical discoveries was a baby named Martin Luther, thereby offering another layer to the overdeterminations of Schreber's “wretched” nomination; to identify with Luther/Luder in this sense would mean to be the “privileged” object of Flechsig's direct and intrusive powers.

49. Cf. Žižek's perspicacious remarks on this experience of overproximity in Kafka's work in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 146.

50. I am following here Sedgwick's discussion of homosexual panic in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

51. One might recall, in this context, Freud's remarks on the decomposition of drives that serves to amplify the force of the superego to the level of “moral masochism.” Freud seems to suggest that the interest of Kant's formalist ethics for psychoanalysis is that the categorical imperative, too, offers a glimpse of this drive dimension purified of empirical, ideological contents (“The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in SE 19:167).

52. Schreber's older brother Gustav, whose own story has yet to be told, committed suicide in 1877 shortly after his own appointment as appeals judge of the District Court in Bautzen.

53. On this tendency of paranoia to divide the persecutor into constituent “demons,” see Angus Fletcher's psychoanalytically informed analysis of this tendency in allegorical works of fiction, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964). Fletcher suggests that an “almost analytic purpose, pseudoscientific if not protoscientific, follows from the very idea of daemon itself. Coming from the term that means ‘to divide,’ daemon implies an endless series of divisions of all important aspects of the world into separate elements for study and control. The daemon of a man is his fate, his Moira, his fortune, his lot, whatever is specifically divided up and allotted to him. Through the working of destiny he is narrowed to the function represented by his daemon. It follows that if nature is a composite system all parts and aspects of which are daemonically controlled, and if man acts only within such a system, the allegorical agent—whose paradigm is daemonic man—is always a division of some larger power” (59-60).

54. The English translators of Schreber have retained the grammatical gender of Sonne in the English.

55. To return to the matter of Freud's preoccupation with priority and originality, we might note that in this postscript Freud has entered a domain already staked out by Jung whose own “dazzling” work in the study of the psychoses Freud set out to supersede in his own study of Schreber. Freud both acknowledges and denies Jung's priority in the direction of thought sketched out in the postscript: “This short postscript to my analysis of a paranoid patient may serve to show that Jung had excellent grounds for his assertion that the mythopoeic forces of mankind are not extinct, but that to this very day they give rise in the neuroses to the same psychological products as in the remotest past ages. I should like to take up a suggestion that I myself made some time ago, and add that the same holds good of the forces that construct religions” (SE 12:82; my emphasis). Freud's preoccupation with originality stands here in stark contrast with the theme of these reflections, namely rites of initiatory investiture that by definition devalue originality. In this context, see Jean-Joseph Goux's fine discussion of the problem of initiatory investiture in the discourse of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

56. Many of these motifs are found in the work of another key figure from German cultural history whose struggle for a position of existential and social legitimacy pushed him to the edge of mental breakdown: Friedrich Hölderlin. Indeed, the breakdown is prefigured in the fragmentary poem that most directly and consistently deploys the metaphorics of ordeal discussed by Freud, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” (As on a holiday …). The poem seems to collapse under the weight of uncertainty apropos of the mythic lineage it sets out to celebrate:

    … So once, the poets tell, when she desired to see
    The god in person, visible, did his lightning fall
    On Semele's house, and the divinely struck gave birth to
    The thunderstorm's fruit, to holy Bacchus.

    And hence it is that without danger now
    The sons of Earth drink heavenly fire.
    Yet, fellow poets, us it behoves to stand
    Bare-headed beneath God's thunderstorms,
    To grasp the Father's ray, no less, with our own two hands
    And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift,
    To offer it to the people.
    For if only we are pure in heart,
    Like children, and our hands are guiltless,
    The Father's ray, the pure, will not sear our hearts
    And, deeply convulsed, and sharing his sufferings
    Who is stronger than we are, yet in the far-flung down-rushing
    storms of
    The God, when he draws near, will the heart stand fast.
    But, oh, my shame! when of

    My shame!

    That I approached to see the Heavenly,
    And they themselves cast me down, deep down
    Below the living, into the dark cast down
    The false priest that I am, to sing,
    For those who have ears to hear, the warning song.
    There

    In Friedrich Hölderlin: “Hyperion” and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Continuum, 1990), 195-97). Although this poem was written some hundred years before Schreber's Memoirs, a certain “contemporaneity” of Hölderlin and Schreber is suggested, first, by the fact that Schreber dates the beginnings of the disturbance in the Order of the World associated with the phenomenon of “soul murder” in the eighteenth century and, second, by the great renaissance of interest in Hölderlin in the first decades of the twentieth century. It might also be noted that the most fully developed psychoanalytic study of Hölderlin's life and writings, Jean Laplanche's Hölderlin et la question du père (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), is grounded in Jacques Lacan's theoretical reflections apropos of the Schreber case.

57. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 62; my emphasis.

58. The “presence” of Moritz Schreber is indicated not only by the family name whose quasi-autonomous power Schreber emphasizes, but also by the phrase “miraculous structure” which Schreber glosses in a footnote: “Again an expression which I did not invent. I had spoken—in the thought—or nerve-language … of miraculous organization whereupon the expression ‘miraculous structure’ was suggested to me from outside” (54). This phrase—wundervoller Aufbau—is, as William Niederland has pointed out, very likely an allusion to the title of one of Moritz Schreber's books: Anthropos: Der Wunderbau des menschlichen Organismus (see Niederland, The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality [Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1984], 99).

59. Studienausgabe, 7:182.

60. See once more Lacan's introduction of the concept of the master signifier as “quilting point” apropos of the notion of “fear of God” in Racine's Athalie in his Seminar. Book III.

61. In his analysis of symbolic power, Bourdieu provides an interesting example of a crisis of liturgical discourse and authority which suggests how a state of emergency of symbolic power can manifest itself as sexual transgression (his example is interesting in part because of its seeming triviality at a historical moment when news of sexual transgressions on the part of priests has become a staple of the media). “For ritual to function and operate,” Bourdieu argues, “it must first of all present itself and be perceived as legitimate, with stereotyped symbols serving precisely to show that the agent does not act in his own name and on his own authority, but in his capacity as a delegate.” Bourdieu cites an anonymous text attesting to a breach of this law of delegation: “‘Two years ago an old lady who was a neighbor of mine lay dying, and asked me to fetch the priest. He arrived but without being able to give communion, and, after administering the last rites, kissed her. If, in my last moments on earth, I ask for a priest, it isn't so that he can kiss me, but so that he can bring me what I need to make the journey to eternity. That kiss was an act of paternalism and not of the sacred Ministry.’” Bourdieu summarizes the larger implications of such a transgression in terms which resonate strongly with the Schreber material: “The crisis over the liturgy points to the crisis in the priesthood … which itself points to a general crisis of religious belief. It reveals, through a kind of quasi-experimental dismantling, the ‘conditions of felicity’ which allow a set of agents engaged in a rite to accomplish it felicitously; it also shows retrospectively that this objective and subjective felicity is based on a total lack of awareness of these conditions, a lack of awareness which, in so far as it defines the doxic relation to social rituals, constitutes the most indispensable condition for their effective accomplishment. The performative magic of ritual functions fully only as long as the religious official who is responsible for carrying it out in the name of the group acts as a kind of medium between the group and itself: it is the group which, through its intermediary, exercises on itself the magical efficacy contained in the performative utterance” (Language, 115-16).

62. Schreber's paternal great grandfather was named Daniel Gottfried Schreber, and was a jurist and economics professor; his grandfather, a lawyer, was named Johann Gotthilf Daniel Schreber. It was doubtlessly important to Daniel Paul Schreber that he lacked a reference to God in his middle name.

63. It was, of course, D. W. Winnicott who, with his theory of the intermediate area and transitional objects, did more than any other post-Freudian thinker to articulate the kinds of preparations and psychic labors a child must accomplish in order to “posit” the world, and the ways in which the responses of the child's immediate environment to these labors affect the ultimate success or failure of this process by which the child discovers/makes the world. See especially Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971).

64. Freud summarizes his transformational grammar of paranoia as follows: “Delusions of jealousy contradict the subject, delusions of persecution contradict the verb, and erotomania contradicts the object.” A fourth possibility, that of contradicting the entire proposition, generates megalomania, the “psychological equivalent of the proposition: ‘I love only myself’” (SE 12:64-65).

65. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 187.

66. Ibid., 186.

67. See, for example, Schreber, Memoirs, 49, 71, 85, 92. I will address these matters, especially Schreber's delusions concerning Catholics and Jews, in Chapter 3.

68. Recalling that Schreber had already alluded to the Wagnerian motif of a Götterdämmerung to characterize the end of the world, it is interesting to note that Freud reads Schreber's inner catastrophe as a variation of another Wagnerian scene of destruction and demise: “An ‘end of the world’ based upon other motives is to be found at the climax of the ecstasy of love (cf. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde); in this case it is not the ego but the single love-object which absorbs all the cathexes directed upon the external world” (SE 12:69).

69. Compare Freud's formulation concerning the regression characteristic of melancholia: “Melancholia … borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism” (SE 14:250).

70. Robert Jay Lifton, “The Image of the ‘End of the World’: A Psychohistorical View,” in Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?, ed. Saul Friedländer, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx, and Eugene Skolnikoff (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 157.

71. As Lothane puts it, “it is on the very pages of the Schreber case, as already noted by Strachey, that a major theoretical revision is taking shape: the revolution called ego psychology is blowing in the wind. It was Freud himself who showed the first cracks in the edifice of the libido theory.” And regarding the crucial role played by pressures exerted by Jung in this revolution, Lothane notes that in Jung's 1913 monograph, The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Jung continued the “challenge to Freud's libido theory and his formulations of Schreber. In the second section of his 1912 work [“Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido”], Jung had quoted an entire passage from the section ‘The Mechanism of Paranoia’ in Freud's essay on Schreber, to argue that Freud had himself broadened the concept of libido to mean interest in general … a harbinger of ego psychology” (In Defense of Schreber, 339, 346).

72. Lifton, “The Image of ‘The End of the World,’” 163.

73. Žižek has compared Schreber's theology with that of Alfred Hitchcock. Apropos of the use of a “God's-view” perspective in Psycho, Žižek writes that “Hitchcock's explanation according to which the function of ‘God's view’ was to keep us, viewers, in ignorance … without arousing suspicion that the director is trying to hide something from us … imposes an unexpected yet unavoidable conclusion: if we are kept in ignorance by assuming God's view, then a certain radical ignorance must pertain to the status of God Himself, who clearly comes to epitomize a blind run of the symbolic machine. Hitchcock's God goes His own way, indifferent to our petty human affairs—more precisely, He is totally unable to understand us, living humans, since His realm is that of the dead (i.e., since symbol is the murder of thing). On that account, he is like God from the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber.” Žižek goes on to define Schreber's Order of the World as “the symbolic order which mortifies the living body and evacuates from it the substance of Enjoyment. That is to say, God as Name-of-the-Father, reduced to a figure of symbolic authority, is ‘dead’ (also) in the sense that He does not know anything about enjoyment, about life-substance: the symbolic order (the big Other) and enjoyment are radically incompatible” (“‘In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,’” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek, [London: Verso, 1992], 250).

74. Melanie Klein's remarks on the Schreber case also focus on the role of splitting in the Memoirs. See the appendix to “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986), 198-200. In contrast to Klein, I am suggesting that it is the father figure that splits.