SOURCE: Ganz, Margaret. “Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Ilness: Art Proscribed.” In Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, edited by Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen, pp. 37-58. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Ganz focuses on the literary aspects of Schreber's Memoirs.]

“… s'il est assurément écrivain, il n'est pas poète.”

—Jacques Lacan, Les Psychoses

“He pleads for his case, but is fortunately no poet, so that one can follow his thoughts without being seduced by them.”

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Reading Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [1903]) does not constitute a literary experience, even when the text has been illumined by Freud's brilliant exegesis of 1911. But if this work cannot “seduce” us in the imaginative sense of granting “une dimension nouvelle de l'expérience” (Lacan 1955-56, 91) and an aesthetic balancing of contraries, it haunts and perturbs us if our inclinations are literary. Even as Memoirs brings its equivocal news of the realm of madness, so long an artistic preoccupation, it suggests how extensively verbal compulsion informs that sinister mystery. At its most accessible, it also explores, directly and obliquely, the very themes that are the stuff of myth and literature. (Not the least of these is the Promethean striving to defy divine encroachments, here promoting a bizarre pyrrhic victory.) Moreover, like the artist, this author is largely defined by his text, a verbal concatenation in which his delusional self stirs uneasily: “… le ‘Schreber’ si souvent cité n'est pas un patient. … ‘Schreber’ est un livre” (De Oliveira 1979, 15). Above all Memoirs teases us into examining why we miss in a work fictionalized by its hallucinatory nature the aesthetic effect of literary odysseys of mental torment in fiction or autobiography—if that distinction between modes is still viable.

To consider the literary reverberations of Memoirs is hardly eccentric, even if psychoanalysts have understandably focused on its “clinical value, as unquestionable today as it was at the time of [its] appearance” (Niederland 1984, 9-10). Jule Nydes, in a standard psychological analysis, quotes Milton's Paradise Lost to draw an analogy between the states of mind of Schreber and the fallen Satan (Nydes 1963, 208, 211). Franz Baumeyer sees “the artistic grandeur of the delusions” as one of the reasons the text is “a classic” (Baumeyer 1956, 61). Recounting the experiences of seven years in three asylums (1893-1900), after madness had aborted his recent prestigious appointment as Senatspräsident of the Dresden Court of Appeal, Schreber himself compels literary preoccupations as his text approximates literary genres. The autobiographic memoir of personal vicissitudes, the chronicle of remarkable events and opinions (in tune with the meaning of Denkwürdigkeiten [Schreber 1903b, 5]), the epic struggle of hero against destructive forces—all are here. Yet they all bear a special disfiguring mark, as this text best reveals in another of its guises. The prophetic book regarding the nature of the cosmos, the fate of man, and the intentions of God has a peculiar teleological twist: Schreber's future apotheosis as procreative Savior by becoming, as Freud puts it “God's wife” (1911, 32) or, in Lacan's terms, the “correspondant féminin de Dieu” (1955-56, 90).

In the disorienting world that is Schreber's text,¹ we not only cling to his succinct references to literary works (notably Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, Weber's Der Freischütz [55] but are drawn to other literary parallels. We may muse on the connection between “der Teufelsküche”—the name Schreber gives to Pierson's Asylum where he briefly stayed—and the “Hexenküche” in which the fall of Goethe's Faust is brewed, yet analogies proliferate beyond the author's hints in that face of the “variegated symptomatology—often rich in dramatic symbolic expressions” (Carr 1963, 197). The songs and discharge of the “miracled” birds in Schreber's treacherous world evoke the “liquid siftings” that “fall / To stain” the “shroud” of Agamenmon in T. S. Eliot's sinister “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” The “‘little men,’” merely “a few millimetres” in height who control Schreber's eye movements, “pull[ing] the eyelids up or down as they pleased with fine filaments like cobwebs” (137) and the small creatures wrought “‘out of Schreber's spirit’” who create a distant realm, complete with diminutive cattle, of which he is the “‘National Saint’ so to speak” (112), are literary familiars. The psychoanalytic connection of the former with spermatozoa (Freud 1911, 57; Katan 1950, 33) is less immediate to us than their evocation of Swift's Lilliputian universe, with its adulated, misunderstood, and hounded Gulliver, whose later discourse in Book 4 might accommodate the following Schreber comments: “Von W.'s soul … temporarily paid me more respect, as when it noticed that I brought the fork to my mouth with my left hand” (111) and “The picturing of female buttocks on my body—honi soit qui mal y pense—has become such a habit that I do it almost automatically whenever I bend down” (181). More directly, even if the literary source is only implied, the haunting presence of the Commander in Don Juan's vital realm is suggested in a few lines. At another time Schreber will see himself in the Don Juan role—despised by “souls” for his “sensual pleasure” in “eating and drinking,” “the same feeling,” he tells us in a footnote, “which … made the Commendatore in Don Giovanni … refuse the proffered meal. …” (133). Here he sadly identifies with the insubstantiality of this grand revenant: “When I sat on a camp stool in the [asylum] garden in a black coat with a black flap hat I felt like a marble guest who had returned from times long past into a strange world” (96).

Such conjunctions are challenging because of the fundamental disjunctions they point up (as in the identity shift just noted) in Schreber's handling of traditional mythic and literary themes. For if we consider his own literary clues in Goethe, Byron, and Weber's librettist Friedrich Kind, we note the paradox that these texts of transgression—albeit heroic—are called into play in Schreber's chronicle of consistent victimization. What becomes apparent is the extent to which a motif of guilt and its concomitant terror is in Memoirs distanced from comprehension—ours and his—and in a manner antithetical to the processes of art. For in Schreber's censorship by deflection, discourse camouflages, rationalizes, fragments, and curtails instead of illumining, transmuting, synthesizing, and unfolding. Thus Schreber quotes the words of Tannhaüser—the revenant with a difference—to evoke the once despaired of return to the beloved (here Schreber's wife) from the distant realm (here of mental suffering) (143) yet remains silent on the Don Juanesque transgression pronounced accursed by that special Commander—the Pope. The gap between literary utterance and Schreber's involutions can also be measured indirectly by literary approximations of his torment. Niederland's fascinating gloss (1984, 85-91) on Schreber's cryptic reference to a supposed family title of “Margraves of Tuscany and Tasmania” affirms the relevance of Canossa to Schreber's inner drama; recalling Pirandello's paranoid tormentor of self and others, “Henry IV,” one plumbs the distance between Schreber's proliferating complaints and the dramatic character's crafted existential torment.

Far more impressively still, the shadow of dubiety falls on the most evident literary motif in this text—the mysterious phenomenon of Seelenmord (“soul murder”) apparently committed upon but perhaps by Schreber. He briefly speaks of the familiar theme in “folk-lore and poetry” of “tak[ing] possession of another person's soul … to prolong one's life at another soul's expense, or to secure some other advantages which outlast death” (55), identifying it as the Devil's specialty. Yet, like so many others, this explanation begs the question for himself and his readers, here by the masterful sardonic stroke of noting that it is “difficult to see what the Devil was to do with a soul so caught” barring the “assum[ption] of gratuitous ‘special pleasure’ in ‘torturing a soul.’” Readers of Memoirs are tantalized because elucidation appears buried in the excision of chapter 3 as “unfit for publication.” Yet ambiguity in one of the remaining few sentences, which mentions “some events concerning other members of my family, which may possibly in some ways be related to the presumed soul murder” (61) does not promise firm news. Characteristically in hiding from self and others, uncertain whether he is more sinned against than sinning even if he overtly always proclaims his virtue, Schreber is unlikely to have broken through to a saving illumination of his sense of harm simultaneously endured and allowed in this “presumed” violation.

Baumeyer's postwar researches having been foiled with regard to finding the missing chapter (1956, 61), Seelenmord remains a psychoanalytic challenge and rout even as approximations of the concept proliferate. (Katan repeatedly informs us that soul murder means Schreber's attempt—resisted by him—to masturbate while indulging his homosexual attraction to his physician Flechsig; Schatzman [1973], understandably impelled to see in Schreber père—the fanatic orthopedic specialist and gymnastics expert—the perpetrator of the deed, appropriates the term as his book title.)² But beyond any explanation by Schreber still lurks the mystery of some larger psychic loss, destruction, emptying out of meaning that no specific familial history could validate. Our only Vergil in this perplexing journey through Schreber's torment is, beyond Freud, his truest disciple—Jacques Lacan. Lacan's sweeping imagination knows that no mechanical resolutions are to be found in what Schreber “présente lui-même comme totalement énigmatique” (1955-56, 88). Lacan has more largely intuited what it might mean to be robbed of a relationship to the symbolic, to be doomed instead to subsist in the mirror world of the “imaginaire,” seemingly implicated in everything and yet drained of personal meaning (91).³

But it is Freud who first and foremost teaches us not to underestimate psychological mysteries after he looks in vain for the reference to soul murder that Schreber suggested in Byron's Manfred (the references to Goethe's Faust and the Freischütz libretto are less direct). In text and footnote, Freud affirms the presence of the incest motif in the poem, appositely refers to its even more important presence in the drama of “the primal family” that is Byron's Cain, and proclaims that “our threads break off short” (1911, 45, 44), but not before evoking other complexities. Quoting Manfred's memorable affirmation that he has made “no compact” with a devilish “crew,” Freud proclaims “a direct contradiction of a soul having been bartered,” a “mistake on Schreber's part … probably not without its significance” (45). What that significance might be Freud does not say; he might have agreed, however, that there is no real “contradiction” here, but a different kind of bartering, an internalized struggle in Manfred sealed by that “compact” with another self that is the hallmark of the narcissistic choice, with its incestuous and homosexual reverberations. Byron's elusive reference to a kind of soul murder (“I have shed / Blood, but not hers—and yet her blood was shed—” [ll. 119-20] is after all anticipated by hints of mirror-imaging: “She was like me in lineaments—her eyes, / Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone / Even of her voice …” (ll. 105-7).

Conscious that literary parallels, if they cannot resolve, may illumine the complexities of Schreber's plight, one is drawn to another literary text in which mystery seems indeed the defining element, the sine qua non of an experience of spiritual violation involving mental suffering. Schreber's nightmare journey transcending time and space readily evokes the navigation “Alone on a wide wide sea” of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. But even as the aesthetic resolution the poem allows (in his unconscious “bless[ing]” of the “happy living things” of the sea) demarcates that text from Memoirs in which no saving interaction comes for Schreber, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” confirms the ineffable nature of psychic transgression and its consequences. (In another poem, “The Pains of Sleep,” Coleridge, like Schreber, conveys the fluctuating identity of the transgressor in referring to his actual nightmare of “Deeds to be hid which were not hid, / Which all confused I could not know / Whether I suffered, or I did.”)

The conjunction of the theme and imagery in “The Ancient Mariner” and Memoirs is arresting (the familiarity of both writers with opium may have played its part, Schreber having been given it to assist sleep [Baumeyer 1956, 63]). Schreber's overwhelming sense of the end of the world, the disappearance of mankind, the presence not of human beings but of “flüchtig hingemachte Männer” (10)—“fleeting-improvised-men” (43)—recalls the “Life-in-Death” state of the Ancient Mariner,⁴ becalmed “upon the rotting sea,” the despairing survivor on a deck full of corpses (at Wordsworth's suggestion later “hingemacht” [!] into mariners by benevolent spirits). As for the Mariner's destructive impulse, which has emptied the world with a sinister swiftness, it remains to the last inexplicable. Coleridge's masterly telescoping conveys in the four-line stanza concluding Part 1 what Schreber calls a “Riss” (21)—“rent” (54)—in the “‘Wundervoller Aufbau’” (20)—“‘miraculous structure’” (54)—of the universe. To apply to the Mariner Schreber's reference to “the fact that the crisis that broke upon the realms of God was caused by somebody having committed soul murder” (55) seems especially apt if we recall that when the albatross befriended the drifting mariners, they “hailed” the bird “As if it had been a Christian soul.”

Coleridge's treatment reverberates again where Memoirs is concerned with the equally unanticipated advent of another awesome “signifiant”—to adapt Lacan's term. Freud's insight—“that what was abolished internally returns from without” (1911, 71)—may here be justified by the appearance in Part 3 of “The Night-mare life-in-death” with its threat of invasive feminine corruption (“Her lips were red, her looks were free”) and disease (“Her skin was as white as leprosy”). For as Schreber connects soul murder with “Entmannung” (47)—“unmanning” (78)—for the purpose of the “Preisgabe meines Körpers als Weibliche Dirne” (45)—the “hand[ing] over my body in the manner of a female harlot” (77)—(a plan of which God is “Mitwisser”—the confidant—if not “Anstifter”—the initiator), Schreber's elusive terror of enthrallment to the feminine approximates the Mariner's sense of being a mere pawn in the throw of dice that wins him over to “that Woman.” Schreber's fear that he bears the “signs” of leprosy and plague “on my own body” is by him connected with an envisioned outbreak of “general nervousness and immorality” (97).

The conjunctions between these texts (reinforced by the sense that a kind of soul murder abetted by the victim may well be at the heart of Coleridge's “Christabel”) raise intriguing questions regarding the phenomenon of projection. For both Coleridge and Freud have after all exercised their imagination on the creative and stultifying aspects of this psychological strategy, Freud most impressively in the Schreber case itself, Coleridge in the memorable “Dejection: An Ode.” Coleridge's sad insight in this poem that “we receive but what we give” is in its negative manifestation the kernel of Freud's illuminations here regarding the “return of the repressed” and the conjugations in paranoid inner discourse (e.g., “‘I do not love him—I hate him, because he persecutes me’” [63] that shunt off to the outside world what Freud had already termed in Draft H “an idea that is incompatible with the ego” (1895, 209).

Still in relation to the Coleridge material, not only the motif of soul murder but that of “the Wandering Jew” (the figure so often connected with that of the Mariner, who is doomed to “pass, like night, from land to land” to tell his story) seems suggestive where Schreberian deflections are concerned. With the arbitrariness that marks Memoirs throughout, the connections of Schreber's own term, the “ewige Jude” (41) with the legendary motif are sounded, obscured, and ultimately subverted as we are told that, in case of universal cataclysm, “in order to maintain the species, one single human being was spared—perhaps the relatively most moral—called by the voices that talk to me the ‘Eternal Jew’” (73). This appellation, Schreber hastens to add in a striking understatement, “has therefore a somewhat different sense from that underlying the legend of the same name of the Jew Ahasver.” Another deflection ensures: “one is however automatically reminded of the legends of Noah, Deucalion and Pyrrha, etc.” By some Schreberian legerdemain the Cain-like figure of the Wandering Jew and that of Noah—of the arch sinner who has rejected Christ and of the only moral man worthy to be saved by God (or Jupiter for that matter in reference to Deucalion)—have become fused, and the connection drawn with Schreber himself as the intended propagator of a nearly doomed race. Yet we soon reach the most essential affirmation of the connection that transforms the dreaded feminization we alluded to earlier into a moral imperative: “The Eternal Jew … had to be unmanned (transformed into a woman) to be able to bear children.”

Such qualifications and assimilations to his own need of mythic, legendary, or literary motifs bear the distinctive marks of Schreber's equivocal struggles in which self-loathing vies with megalomania, and the fragmenting of identities (in himself and his alleged tormentors) obtains. Freud's early suggestion to Fliess in Draft H that paranoia “dissolves the ego itself into extraneous figures” (280) is here borne out by a Don Juan figure who can identify with the Commander and a reputed “‘Prince of Hell’” (140) who can claim a “so-called ‘crown of rays’” that was “incomparably richer and brighter” than the depicted “halo of Christ” (88). Not surprisingly we view Schreber's hints about Goethe's Faust or Byron's Manfred with scepticism after assessing his talent for metamorphosis not only in the matter of identity, but where interpretation is concerned. In tune with the handling of “the Wandering Jew” he maneuvers the truth of Hamlet to affirm his own epochal struggles with the divine: “… even now I still receive impressions daily and hourly which make it perfectly clear to me 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” (164).

Such cavalier handling of literary motifs and texts is closely related to Schreber's delusional self-vindication in personal relationships. Honed in the judicial courts, his argumentative powers might have refuted the accusation of a tendentious reading of Hamlet as ingeniously as they ward off suggestions that he is hallucinating about his arch enemy, Dr. Flechsig, the Leipzig neurologist who for the second time was treating him for psychosis. Thus Schreber authenticates his intimations through “Nervenanhang” (60)—“nerve contact”—(the main mode of communication in his scheme of things) of Flechsig's madly arrogant behavior and his earlier “Traumbild”—“dream vision”—of Flechsig's suicide and funeral cortege by telling us that “it is permissible to interpret them as revelations of divine opinion on what ought to have happened to Professor Flechsig” (91). (Viewers struck by the vainglorious pose of Dr. Flechsig in a Memoirs photograph—Lacan, like Niederland, has gotten the message—are likely to sympathize with this argument, fortified by the information that Flechsig practiced castration on women patients to allay insanity [Niederland 1984, 104-5]).

Given Schreber's propensities to recast reality, the literary connections that seem in one sense inescapable are in another quite tangential to his preoccupations. Surely anyone who can quell the repetitious drone of harrassing voices by reciting snatches of those two compendia of familial sadism—Struwelpeter and Max und Moritz (176)—is likely to subserve fable to special compulsions. The initially quoted verdicts of Lacan and Canetti on the absence of poetic power in this text (even if Canetti's concern is with Schreber's proto-fascism [1984, 444-48]) are convincing—Schreber being the first to agree, we will see later. Acknowledging the vexed problem of the extent to which an autobiographical work is fictional and vice versa, here compounded by the special artifice of a delusional text, one confronts a striking poverty of aesthetic effect. It is challenging because it is pervasive, not limited to the earlier sections in which Schreber's deep regression denudes the world. Indeed, as our previous discussion suggests, the intermittent dramatic power and symbolic resonances of Memoirs seem more the result of the reader's investment than the writer's intention. We miss the poignancy in the attempts by Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Mill to convey their own mental crises, respectively in The Prelude (bk. 12), Sartor Resartus (chap. 7), and Autobiography (chap. 5). Their accounts are hardly without ambiguity (Mill's may be the most obvious case in point), but consciousness of reality harnesses imagination and intellect sufficiently to guarantee an authentic experience, even if much in it remains unconscious.

Where conjunctions with fictional characters seem pertinent, our empathy is predictably also in abeyance. Surely Schreber's impotent rage is as ubiquitous as that of King Lear and his sense of manipulation as pervasive as that of Marlowe's Faustus, and yet the spectacle of his protracted struggle forbids the characteristic sorrow and awe at so woeful a fall. At times indeed Memoirs, in its drab repetitiveness, compulsive marshalling of dubious arguments, distance from human intercourse, and emotional indigence appears to be a mere figment of a text—if not “flüchtig” still “hingemacht”—a botched creative act. It then seems destined to find its ideal reader in Schreber's God, whose knowledge, he tells us, does not extend to “the living human being,” being limited exclusively to corpses (75).

Still our interest in this strange document of suffering (like the attention exercised on it by Freud and Jung in their correspondence) is deeply engaged. One knows that one is being granted remarkable glimpses of a mental cataclysm even if Schreber's claustrophobic self-concern discourages compassion, and his defensive ruminations and arrogant pronouncements on the nature of man, sun, planets, cosmos, God, reality itself mute his plight in a ruined world. While interpreting his “sacred battle for the greatest good of mankind” differently, one accepts his contention that he is wrestling with “one of the most intricate problems ever set for man” (130). If more than one engagement is being fought in Memoirs, the conflicts are nevertheless related to each other and to the absence of aesthetic affect. In a recent study Chabot (1982) makes a detailed and in some ways convincing case for “lodg[ing] the issue of self-determination or autonomy in its many permutations at the thematic center of Memoirs …” (133). But such a striving for integrity is hardly a monolithic impulse and is only the particular manifestation of a wider relationship to psychic wholeness that is essentially ambivalent. If one is mindful of Freud's suggestive “emphasis on ambivalence” (1923, 87) in “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” (an essay that also refers to Schreber) and not so convinced as Chabot about “the radical cohesion of the individual life” (4), one cannot even speak of Schreber's seeking “autonomy” without affirming that behind this need lurks the desire for subjection, if not annihilation.

That fundamental conflicts and oppositions are finding their champion in the embattled Schreber is what his text tells us in many ways, not least through a pervasive effect of incongruity that may account for the comic turns noted by Freud and Katan, among others. (It must be remembered that laughing loudly was one of Schreber's symptoms and that in his last illness he frequently uttered an apparently inexplicable, pained “Ha-ha” [Baumeyer 1956, 66-67]). The abnormal tension between form and content, which arises as a pedantic style tries to encompass delusional experiences, is the telltale sign of a struggle both wide-ranging and intense, as Macalpine and Hunter appropriately stress in their Introduction: “The more psychotic the material, the more the former Judge attempts to reason his way out and the more legalistic his mode of expression” (26). But such stylistic symptomatology as marks Schreber's attempt to legitimize his hallucinations and delusions in a kind of legal brief is but one instance of the pull of opposites on which psychoanalytic examination of Memoirs has expended its acumen since Freud.

This probing may have aligned the antinomies in Schreber's battle as ego and external world, ego and superego, eros and death instinct, homo- and heterosexuality, or identified his urge as the oral greed White (1961) emphasizes rather than the terror of castration charted by Freud. But beyond such distinctions the most significant phenomenon remains the reality of wrenching conflict that Memoirs conveys. For the battlefield is not only Schreber's mind—prodded, examined, noted down, monitored, harangued, and taunted (“‘Why do you not say it [aloud]?’”)—but also his body—impregnated, twisted and mutilated, poisoned, infected, asphyxiated, emptied of or filled with fluids, invaded by “souls” innumerable, hooked into by countless divine “rays.” If, also aware of the siege in Schreber's style, one seeks literary approximations of his plight, the adversaries obliquely adduced in the initial complaint of Goethe's Faust and hauntingly dramatized in Keats's “Lamia” appear most suggestive: imagination and reason. It is significant that Schreber is writing in the post-Romantic era, in the wake of Goethe and his English contemporaries Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, and simultaneously with the young William Butler Yeats, in whom the pull of “Faeryland” (not to speak of the later occult systematizing) at times suggests a destabilizing consciousness.

The conflict just posited and its relation to the aesthetic limitations of Memoirs is illumined by Freud's verdict regarding Schreber's illness: the withdrawal of libido in paranoia and the regression to an earlier narcissistic state (a verdict upheld in later writings [1914, 74-75 and 249; 1917, 424]). (Freud's emphasis on the defense against homosexuality inherent in such a withdrawal has survived its challenges, as comments by Niederland [1984, 111] and Carr [1963, 195-96] make clear, and Lacan has brilliantly assessed and interpreted his insights.) Where Schreber is concerned, the impaired capacity for emotional interaction with others seems to have been hard on imagination and reason alike, even if stultification predictably assumes in each a different aspect. And because the attempt to rebuild a ruined world takes, as Freud so impressively realized, the form of a “delusional restitution of meaning, a process of reconstruction” that is imperfectly “successful” (1911, 71), imagination is, one senses, denied its true “shaping spirit” (Coleridge's term in “Dejection: An Ode”) and reason its analytic edge and capacity for discrimination.

Yet such even-handed enfeebling does not preclude an initially unequal conflict. Schreber's terror of losing his reason is the ironic leitmotif of this irrational text. Whether he has lasped into “Blödsinn”—imbecility—by failing to think is what God constantly spies out; the conspiracy “contrary to the Order of the World” (“Weltordnungswidrig” is the ubiquitous term) is after all to destroy his mind (significantly identified with “unmanning” him) and to abandon him, to “liegen lassen” him. But this terror is unevenly balanced by the desire to be free of those very mental demands to which he owes his professional stature—delusionally transformed here into the enforced “Denkzwang” (38)—“compulsive thinking” (70). That desire is admittedly conveyed in different forms, in the unappeased longing for the state of “Nichtsdenken” (“not-thinking-of-any-thing”), in the ambiguously erotic aim of cultivating “Seelenwollust” (“soul voluptuousness”). It has also been identified as an “intense primitive longing … to return to a magical, blissful, restorative reunion with the idealized mother” (White 1961, 70). But we can surely, in our terms, read here an impulse to yield to the life of the imagination—to linger in that special kind of Venusberg—as an inescapable counterpart of Schreber's struggle for intellectual sanity. When Schreber states that his “individual gift” has been “much more in the direction of cool intellectual criticism than in the creative activity of an unbounded imagination” (80), he may be spelling out a problem rather than offering appropriate credentials for rational discourse.

This Schreberian longing as he has conveyed it and we have framed it has familiar Romantic reverberations; its narcissistic aspects are evoked in Schreber's brief allusion to Goethe's “The Fisherman,” for if White reads in the poem Schreber's “own primitive wishes to merge with a mother” (1961, 69), one is tempted to stress the lines White presents but does not address: “Does not your own face lure you / Into the eternal dew?” Yet that recognizable longing is qualified by its sinister familial context. The investigations by Baumeyer (1956), Niederland (1984), and Schatzman (1973) of Schreber's tyrannical, physically abusive, and erotically seductive paternal training has dramatized the kind of restraint Schreber must have learned to exercise alike on mind, imagination, and phallus—masturbation being the arch enemy. (His problem takes a lurid turn if we realize that orthopedic contraptions, applied by Schreber père testing out his inventions, are likely to have restrained his limbs, compressed his chest, and immobilized his head [Niederland 1984, 65 and 72]). The later psychoanalytic studies of this paranoid patient suggest in Schreber's abdication through illness of his judicial appointment a complicated kind of nay-saying to his professional success in the reasoning world—not so different perhaps from a rejection of parental demands to which we have already indirectly alluded. The psychic refusal by John Stuart Mill—mentally abused by his father in being prematurely forced—to rejoice in the achievement of Utilitarian goals (“an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’”) was the prelude to a nervous breakdown that reading poetry helped to cure.

That Schreber's flight into illness was intended to punish his exacting doctor father, to refuse to rival him, to punish himself, or to escape from the professional constraints of judicial tenure—all such suggestions in psychoanalytic studies of the case seems apposite and reconcilable in the light of overdetermination. At any rate, the unsettling “Vorstellung” (“Idea”) that marks the onset of Schreber's major illness and perhaps mapped its course (Lacan 1955-56, 74)—“dass es doch eigentlich recht schön sein müsse, ein Weib zu sein, das dem Beischlafe unterliege” (30) (“that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse” [63])—can be read in psychoanalytic terms as acceding to feminine libido but in literary ones as assuming the Muse, particularly if with Lacan we give “schön” its aesthetic stress (“ce serait une belle chose” [74] or “il serait beau” [75]. Rejecting the life of reason and—Faustian attribute—musty knowledge for the cultivation of feeling and, not least, imagination is the decision to which we might justifiably apply Schreber's ultimate defense: “Ich möchte auch denjenigen Mann sehen, der vor die Wah gestellt, entweder ein blödsinniger Mensch mit männlichem Habitus oder ein geistreiches Weib zu werden, nicht des Letztere vorziehen wurde” (124) (“I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter” [149]).

But, as the text reveals, the forces of reason arrayed against the impulsive “healthy egoism” (149) of such a laissez aller are formidable. (We are haunted by the knowledge hidden from Freud that what Schreber terms “die Pflege der Weiblichkeit” (124)—“the cultivation of feminity” (149)—rationalized as a sacred duty—will not save: Schreber, released in 1902, relapses in 1907 and dies mad in 1911, the year of Freud's essay.) Those who, previous to reading Memoirs, assumed that the “fine frenzy” in the eye of Shakespeare's poet closely resembles the excitation of madness would have to be sobered by Schreber's authorial aims: “… I believe that expert examination of my body and observation of my personal fate during my lifetime would be of value both for science and the knowledge of religious truths” (31). The same preoccupation lurks in a footnote, as he seems to take pride in the fact that expressions like “‘forecourts of heaven’”—a kind of realm of the blessed—and “‘fleeting-improvised-men,’” which “would never have occurred to me” but have been transmitted, “are in part of a scientific, and particularly medical nature …” (49).

As not only his English translators but other psychoanalytic writers, for example, Carr (1963, 199) wisely note, Schreber, the accomplished judge, whose “intellectual capacity,” according to his third physician Dr. Weber, was “little impaired” (Memoirs 278), is committed to making sense of the nonsense that threatens to overwhelm him, even if reasoning assumes the form of involuted rationalization. (Canetti aptly speaks of the paranoid “mania for finding causal relations, which finally becomes an end in itself” [1984, 452].) The forging of “interpretative delusions” (Freud 1896, 185), carried to its highest intellectual refinements, is Schreber's dismaying forte, as ideas and authors—Darwin, Laplace, Cuvier, Kraepelin himself, whose work the asylum lent him—feed his dubious ratiocination. By his own account, of course, he is not engaged in an artistic enterprise, and his ideal cosmic state—broken in the conflict between himself and God—is not a traditional vision of universal harmony, but the special “lawful relation” of God to his “creation,” which Schreber terms “The Order of the World” (79). When testifying to his previous credentials as “a person of calm nature, without passion, clear thinking and sober,” he modestly affirms his artistic limitations: “I was by no means what we might call a poet, although I have occasionally attempted a few verses on family occasions” (80).

Reacting in a way at once paradoxical and plausible, this non-poet is more terrified by the processes of figuration—the making of metaphors—than by delusional fabrications. Assisted by his legalistic acumen, Schreber champions the visions of paranoiacs over the fantasies of poets. Such a reaction, which jibes with the primitive impulse of regression to an earlier developmental stage, is deeply troubling. There are admittedly glimpses of Schreber's capacity to use figuration and to intuit its role. The man who has spoken of his “bedclothes form[ing] themselves into so-called ‘white bears’” (87), who has “inscribed the cultivation of femininity on [his] banner” (149) has also informed us in his “Open Letter to Professor Flechsig” that the term Seelenmord was perhaps used by the “souls” addressing him “because of their innate tendency to express themselves hyperbolically” (35). Yet the justification of delusional conviction at the expense of imaginative creation (in language that bears the mark of struggle even to the presence of pedantic metaphors) is the characteristic Schreberian strategy:

… the legends and poetry of all people literally swarm with the activities of ghosts, elves, goblins, etc., and it seems to me nonsensical to assume that in all of them one is dealing simply with deliberate inventions of human imagination without any foundation in real fact.

(89, italics added)

It is not the grandeur of art but the prestige of science that he covets for the manifestations he is chronicling:

In my opinion science would go very wrong to designate as “hallucinations” all such phenomena that lack objective reality, and to throw them into the lumber room of things that do not exist. … This is not to deny the simultaneous existence of a morbid state of nervous hyper-excitability, in so far as only the increased power of attraction of nerves caused by it enabled and facilitated communication with supernatural powers … one ought to beware of unscientific generalizations and rash condemnation in such matters. If psychiatry is not flatly to deny everything supernatural, and thus tumble with both feet into the camp of naked materialism, it will have to recognize the possibility that occasionally the phenomena under discussion may be connected with real happenings, which simply cannot be brushed aside with the catchword “hallucinations.”

(90)

An important distinction seems pertinent to Schreber's attempt to legitimize delusion. In the transpositional effects the poetic imagination achieves through rhetorical figures, there is “suspension of disbelief” (as Coleridge's definition of “poetic faith” would have it), but it is a “willing” one, just as the “frenzy” of Shakespeare's poet is “fine.” When reason in the Schreberian mode literalizes fantasy to validate it scientifically, “belief” runs riot. System-making not only replaces the creative synthesis of art, but the systems tend to deliquesce in the absence of rigorous reasoning or the willed inventiveness of art. That is probably why Schreber's initial exposition (45-54) of his religious and cosmological convictions makes for such tedious reading (as indeed do detailed résumés of these principal tenets in the psychcoanalytic literature). Despite its erudite airs, Schreber's solipsistic presentation baffles reason and forbids imagination. At times it appears to be unconsciously subverting the hypotheses of scientists and the questions of philosophers, even as it proscribes the inventions of poets:

My own personal experiences leave me in doubt however whether even the astronomy of today has grasped the whole truth about the light-and-warmth giving power of the stars and particularly of our sun; perhaps one has to consider her directly or indirectly only as that part of God's miraculous creative power which is directed to the earth. As proof of this statement I will at present only mention the fact that the sun has for years spoken with me in human words. … God also regulates the weather as a rule this is done automatically, so to speak … but He can regulate it in certain ways in pursuit of his own purposes.

(46-47, italics added)

The limitations of Schreber's claustrophobic discourse where reality is concerned are perhaps most evident when his imaginings, instead of being taken literally, as he intends, are reinvested with figurative power. As Freud and Jung in the correspondence about Memoirs playfully adapt Schreber's terminology of “fleeting-improvised-men” and “nerve-contact” to their checkered relations with colleagues, they charge these expressions not only with comic power but with a human vitality previously lacking. And when Freud, in his case study, praises Schreber's approximation of the libido theory—his conception of “‘rays of God’” being “a concrete representation and projection outward of libidinal cathexes” (78), it is a figurative transposition on the part of Freud—the great weaver of metaphors—that has allowed him to recognize the analogy.

Ultimately to attempt a rational justification of the irrational—to literalize it—is of a piece with abjuring the outward flowing libido. It is to choose the “Life-in-Death” option of narcissistic sufficiency, of capture by figments, pictorial as well as verbal (experiences translated into catchphrases and words serving as objects). Deeply attuned to Freud's sense of the “shadows” world conjured by paranoid strategies (1917, 422), Lacan brings to bear on Schreber's plight his central distinction between the “symbolique” and the “imaginaire,” between the vital contact with the larger “Autre” and the claustrophobic traffic with the “autre” the mirror purveys:

L'Autre étant donc exclu véritablement, ce qui concerne le sujet est dit réellement par le petit autre, par des ombres d'autre, ou comme s'exprimera notre Schreber pour désigner tous les êtres humains qu'il recontre, par des bonshommes foutus, ou bâclés à la six-quatre-deux. Le petit autre présente en effet un caractère irréel, tendant à l'irréel.

(64-65)

The Other being thus truly excluded, what concerns the subject is really said by the small other, by shadows of otherness, or as our Schreber will put it to designate all the human beings he encounters, by figurines fucked up or fleetingly improvised. The small other presents in fact an unreal appearance, tending to unreality.

The reverberations of Lacan's concern with the possible meaning of utterance under special circumstances of exclusion make his wide-ranging Séminaire (1955-56)—the already quoted Les Psychoses—and the later Ecrit (1958) that telescopes his earlier insights inexhaustibly suggestive documents on paranoia. If Lacan's commitment to verbal significance in psychoanalysis is by now a by-word, it is also true that other psychoanalysts examining Schreber's state have not neglected it. They have indeed made much of Schreber's allusions, of his special expressions in God's language—the euphemistic, antithetical, ambiguous “Grundsprache” (“basic language”) that so preoccupies Schreber—and of the range of his verbal hallucinations.⁵ Still Lacan's affirmation of the significance of the “registre de la parole” (1955-56, 46) (the “dimension of utterance”)—particularly in paranoia—derives its special efficacy from his recognition of the ubiquitous presence and power of the symbolic in human experience. In tune with that recognition is his consistent proclamation of the significance of that ultimate Freudian reality—the unconscious. (He speaks suggestively of the “psychotique” as “un martyr de l'inconscient, en donnant au terme de martyr son sens, qui est celui d'être témoin” (149)—“a martyr to the unconscious, giving to the term martyr its [actual] meaning of being a witness.”)

Not surprisingly Lacan finds the central “question” in paranoia to be not what is being said but “Qui parle?” (33)—“who is speaking?”—a question intrinsic to the workings of the unconscious. The following passage in Les Psychoses typifies his challenge in this regard:

Il est classique de dire que dans la psychose, l'inconscient est en surface, est conscient. … Traduisant Freud, nous disons—l'inconscient, c'est un language. Qu'il soit articulé, n'implique pas pour autant qu'il soit reconnu. … Si tant est que quelqu'un puisse parler dans une langue qu'il ignore totalement, nous dirons que le sujet psychotique ignore la langue qu'il parle.

(20, italics added)

It is a classic remark that in psychosis the unconscious is on the surface, is conscious. … Translating Freud, we say of the unconscious that—it is a language. That it is articulated does not for all that imply that it is recognized [acknowledged as such]. If it is possible for someone to speak in a tongue that he is totally ignorant of, we will say that the psychotic subject is ignorant [and unaware] of the tongue he speaks.

(italics added)

From such ignorance, one might say, flows the whole factitiousness of Schreber's intercourse—in the to him literal, to us figurative sense—with the Deity. Much more than other writers on this case, Lacan is aware that what is missing in Schreber's confrontation with God is “la moindre présence, la moindre effusion, la moindre communication réelle, qui pourrait nous donner l'idée qu'il y a vraiment le rapport de deux êtres” (90)—“the least sense of presence, the least effusion, the least real communication which could give us the idea that there is here truly a rapport between two beings.” Lacan's insights, here and above, tempt one to see in Schreber's ultimate self-erotization (his need to gain divine approval by “hav[ing] to imagine myself as man and woman in one person having intercourse with myself” [208] an approximation of a protracted dialogue with his—unrecognized—unconscious, doubling as other self and outer divinity. To the last it is perhaps that unconscious he is striving to placate in satisfying that artificial “partenaire” (“partner”) he attempts to embrace in himself and confront as his God. It is certainly true that, as Lacan puts it, “ce Dieu paraît être … l'ombre de Schreber” (1955-56, 116)—“this God seems to be … the shadow of Schreber”—and is also “frappé d'une espèce de féminisation”—“stricken with a kind of feminization.” It is with so dubious an interlocutor that Schreber has cast his lot in a world emptied of symbolic meaning.

To be mindful of literary concerns is to acknowledge the equal importance in the aesthetic experience of determining “qui parle,” a problem as thorny perhaps in its own way as that presented to and by Schreber. Still there are saving distinctions to be made by recurring once more to the analogy between the traditional conflict of reason and imagination and the ambiguous contest that is Schreber's battle for sanity. The artificiality of such an analogy is mitigated by the frequency with which in literature such a conflict is marked by signs of mental instability. That the imaginative life threatens as well as allures is confirmed by the state of mind of Keats's Knight-at-Arms left desolate in the real world once he has trafficked not only with the sensual but with the imaginative power of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” But the perils of the artist's fantasy life can hardly be equated with those that overwhelm the paranoiac. While the universe to which he who has overindulged in fancy returns is one in which “The sedge has withered from the Lake” and “no birds sing,” that in which Schreber has landed is one in which birdsong has become a sinister index of threats and demands in an elaborate, often disintegrating system of conspiratorial hierarchies, fluctuating conjunctions of rays, and divisions in the sun, the deity, and the heavenly realms themselves.

Entrapped in the world he has made, the paranoiac may ponder its meaning endlessly but cannot break through into another mode of fabrication; he cannot, as was said earlier, fashion as the artist does. (Lacan reminds us that paranoid convictions characteristically flourish in “productions littéraires,” but, he cautions, “littéraires veut dire simplement des feuilles de papier couvertes avec de l'écriture” (“literary simply means sheets of paper covered with writing”).⁶ Symbolizing problems instead of discharging them into the external world, art works like neurosis, which, Freud tells us (in a text pointed up by Lacan [1955-56, 56] tends, “like the play of children,” to invest “a piece of reality” with “symbolic” significance” (19:187). And neurosis, Lacan notes, is “une parole qui s'articule” (94)—“an articulated utterance.” Avoiding that Verwerfung (repudiation) on whose dangers Lacan in the wake of Freud waxes so eloquent in Les Psychoses (1955-56, 21-22, 57-58, 94-95, 100, 171), the artist foils reason and wards off unreason.⁷ By and large he retains the capacity to understand “qui parle” even if his self remains a mysterious entity, given that “mouvance dialectique des actions, des désirs, et des valeurs” (1955-56, 32) Lacan constantly emphasizes.

In some of its most striking manifestations (e.g., the voices' incessant murmurings), Schreber's struggle does seem, as we have suggested, to engage a speaking unconscious whose identity is unknown and whose intentions are as ambiguous to him as those of his conscious self. The desire to give that unconscious status and habitation may in a delusional form mark the impulse to yield to the entreaties of an aroused, in his former life quiescent, inner local divinity. Yet, as long as the way to saving symbolization is barred, the psychological confrontation remains as meretricious as the erotic and the spiritual one. The reconstruction of the world is delusional and its vitality synthetic (one recalls Freud's moving suggestion that hallucination endows past memories with an approximation of the life denied to them by the withdrawal of libido [1924, 185-86]). Far from being meaningless, the universe means inordinately; everything is invested with meaning but, in our common parlance, we might say Schreber is out of it:

Chez un sujet comme Schreber, les choses vont si loin que le monde entier est pris dans ce délire de signification, de telle sorte qu'on peut dire que, loin qu'il soit seul, il n'est à peu près rien de tout ce qui l'entoure que d'une certaine façon, il ne soit.

Par contre, tout ce qu'il fait être dans ces significations, est en quelque sort vide de lui-même.

(1955-56, 91)

With a subject like Schreber things have come to such a pass that the entire world is caught up in this delirium of significance, so that one can say that, far from being alone, there is nearly nothing of all that surrounds him that he is not.

On the other hand, everything he endows with being in these significations is in a sense empty of himself.

Guided by other psychoanalytic insights regarding Schreber's mental catastrophe but particularly by Lacan, we can relate his dispossession in the world to a very special impairment of the belief in reality. For analysts writing on Schreber remind us of the negative power of a central experience of mistrust in the familial setting, some perceived discrepancy between claims and performance, some injunctions to children not adhered to by parents, or, as Carr puts it, some “experience of having others deny the validity of a perception experienced by the patient to be real and true,” a “denial” that “frequently constitutes a hoax or deception maintained by the family, sometimes centring around the major issues of living …” (1963, 197-98). Not only the characteristic suspiciousness of the paranoid state but the tentativeness of paranoid discourse, so evident in Schreber, would be the symptomatic reaction to the absence of integrity in those who for the child are the guarantors of the real. (It is not difficult of course to move from doubting the parents to doubting the world, from—in the French double sense—ignoring the speaker to ignoring who is speaking.) Here again Lacan's conception of the symbolic Other as guarantor of the reality of the universe and the integrity of the concept of Law dramatizes Schreber's bankrupt relationship to a bankrupt authority (reflected in his ambivalent emotions toward Flechsig, Von W., the sun, God—those surrogates of the now absent father).

An awareness of the practices and not least (thanks to the abundant quotations provided by Niederland and Schatzman) of the duplicitous mode of utterance of the Bad Doctor makes it plausible that constant intercourse with the tyrannical and seductive figure of a father lodged Schreber's delusional problem in discourse. An inspired Freud shows us Schreber retorting in kind (a special version of “tu quoque”) to paternal authority and, as “in dreams,” employing “absurdity” to meet its claims with “ridicule and derision” (1911, 52); Katan suggests convincingly that the “euphemisms” in Schreber's “basic language” derive from “the disparity between his father's words and his father's actions” (1959, 338). Lacan, plumbing in Les Psychoses the whole problem of truth and hence trust in discourse, draws a subtle connection between what the transcendent Other might mean as “quelque chose qui est absolument non trompeur” (1955-56, 77) (“something which is absolutely not deceiving”) and Schreber's incapacity to tune in to that larger symbolic entity. Again he evokes the Other for us, here in terms which, however familiarized by their presence in many of his works, retain that quality of the ineffable so characteristic of the human apprehension of a transcendent reality:

Dans la vraie parole, l'Autre, c'est ce devant quoi vous vous faites reconnaître. Mais vous ne pouvez vous en faire reconnaître que parce qu'il est d'abord reconnu. … C'est dans la reconnaissance que vous l'instituez, et non pas comme un élément pur et simple de la réalité, un pion, une marionette, mais un absolu irréductible, de l'existence duquel comme sujet dépend la valeur même de la parole dans laquelle vous vous faites reconnaître. Il y a là quelque chose qui naît.

(1955-56, 62-63)

In the true utterance, the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you cannot gain recognition from it unless it is itself first recognized. … It is in recognition that you institute it and not as an element of reality pure and simple, a pawn, a marionette, but an irreducible absolute, on whose existence as a subject depends the very value of the utterance in which you make yourself be recognized. Something there is being born.

The subtle link that Lacan establishes between Schreber's inability to interact with that Other, “l'Autre des astres, ou si vous voulez le système stable du monde, de l'objet, et entre les deux, de la parole” (86) (“the Other of the stars, or if you will of the stable system of the world, of the object, and between the two, of utterance”) and the bankruptcy of the parent figure reaffirms the Freudian connection between paternal and transcendent authority. In Les Psychoses Lacan goes on to connect Schreber's failure to possess the essential signifier of “être père”—“being a father”—in its procreative sense (1955-56, 329-30) with his mental disaster when called upon to perform a professional approximation of that role; yet the sinister figure of Schreber père is only indirectly evoked. It is in the later essay, “D'une question préliminaire a tout traitement possible de la psychose” (“On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis”) that Lacan will more directly evoke Dr. Schreber's role, and do so with the Swiftian energy his contentious, punning style can command:

Plus loin encore la relation du père a cette loi doit-elle être considérée en elle-même, car on y trouvera la raison de ce paradoxe, par quoi les effets ravageants de la figure paternelle s'observent avec une particulière fréquence dans les cas où le père a réellement la fonction de législateur ou s'en prévaut, qu'il soit en fait de ceux qui font les lois ou qu'il se pose en pilier de la foi, en parangon de l'intégrité ou de la dévotion, en vertueux ou en virtuose, en servant d'une oeuvre de salut, de quelque objet, ou manque d'objet qu'il y aille, de nation ou de natalité, de sauvegarde ou de salubrité, de legs ou de legalité, du pur, du pire ou de l'empire, tous idéaux qui ne lui offrent que trop d'occasions dêtre en posture de démérite, d'insuffisance, voir de fraude, et pour tout dire d'exclure le Nom-du-Père de sa position dans le signifiant.

(1958, 579)

Further still the relation of the father to this law must be considered in itself, for it is there that will be found the reason for that paradox, by which the ravaging effects of the paternal figure are observable with a particular frequency in cases where the father really has the function of legislator or assumes it, whether in fact he is one of those who makes the laws or poses as a pillar of faith, a paragon of integrity or devotion, a man of virtue or of virtuosity, a servitor of a work of salvation, whatever objective or lack thereof obtains—of nation[alism] or natality, of safeguarding or salubrity, of legacy or legality, of pure, impure [a substitution for “worse”] or empire [a pun on “worsening” in the original], all ideals which offer him only too many occasions to be in a posture of defectiveness, insufficiency, even fraud and in fine to exclude the Name-of-the Father from its position in the signifier.

Having thus settled the hash of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (to whom he gives the verbal coup de grace in a later paragraph), Lacan affirms that while no one analyzing children “ne niera que le mensonge de la conduite ne soit par eux perçu jusqu'au ravage” (1958, 579)—“will deny that mendacity in conduct is not by them perceived to a ravaging extent”—a further deduction has been neglected: “Mais qui articule que le mensonge ainsi perçu implique la référence à la fonction constituante de la parole?”—“But who makes the point that the mendacity thus perceived implies a reference to the constitutive function of language?”

To relate the capacity for sane utterance to a larger validation of the integrity of the word is to measure the distinction between Schreber's discourse and artistic expression. But it is also to see aesthetic expression as increasingly threatened by a declining faith in the absolute integrity of meaning and hence being. Confronting an ever-continuous deliquescence of ontological certainties, the artist may well be inclined to go Ophelia's prognosis one better by asserting that we not only “know not what we may be,” but also do not “know what we are.” But he may also cultivate the Freudian insight, so subtly adapted and enlarged by Lacan, on the dangers of a Verwerfung that, in shunting off dismaying realities, reaps the whirlwind of paranoid reentry. Schreber's tale teaches us that when delusions invest the world with artificial vitality, they proscribe the vision of “happy living things” projected by art.

Notes

1. The reference here is to the English translation by Macalpine and Hunter, which is the text cited throughout (except of course for references to the original). So as not to complicate matters I have, whenever quoting the German text, also provided the translators' version in quotation marks—placed within parentheses or dashes—despite the fact that I have reservations about some of their choices. Although for obvious reasons I could not use it, I have found the French translation far more accurate. (The English translators sometimes condense material; I have never found the French ones to do so.) In rare instances, where there were many cognates, translations seemed superfluous. Since there is to my knowledge no translation of Les Psychoses, I have provided the English versions. Although there is a translation available for the 1958 Ecrit I discuss, I have taken the liberty of providing my own translation of a tricky passage.

2. There are two basic versions of Katan's contention, one in the 1949 “Schreber's Delusion of the End of the World,” the other in the 1959 “Schreber's Hereafter: Its Building-Up (Aufbau) and Its Downfall.” In the latter work, with characteristic ingeniousness and self-assurance where documentation is absent, Katan goes on to develop an elaborate scenario of incestuous “soul-murder”: a kind of seduction of Schreber as a child by his older brother involving “acts of a homosexual masturbatory nature” (365). The victimization would include hiding the brother's misbehavior from the father with the connivance of Schreber's mother and one sister (see pp. 365-83). (The difficulties in such speculation are perhaps best illustrated by the following sentence: “Presumably his brother tried to masturbate him, but we do not know how far this act went” (373); we do not of course know anything.) Schatzman, bringing to bear on the subject of soul murder his sense of the complex control exercised by Dr. Schreber, sees enforced secrecy as central to the crime: “In searching for the murderer of his soul, Schreber came to see that behind the figure of Flechsig stood God. Could he have unpeeled another veil, he would have seen his father, I think, as the prime ‘instigator.’ … But his father, I believe, had made himself his ‘master’ ‘forever’ and would never have allowed such an ‘impure’ thought. A feature of ‘soul murder,’ it seems, was forbidding the victim to identify his murderer correctly” (38).

3. The power of Lacan's insights on Schreber needs acknowledgement in future work on the subject, especially since his concern with psychosis is of such long standing—his fascinating study of the paranoid patient “Aimée” being the centerpiece of his wide-ranging medical thesis of 1932: De la psychose paranoîaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité. That even Lacan's name should remain unspoken in the 1984 edition of Niderland's work is very disappointing, as is the unkind nod in his direction in Chabot's Introduction to his recent book (1982); Schatzman's references (mostly epigraphs) are cryptic indeed.

4. It is interesting to see R. D. Laing, who has so richly evoked the inner ruin of the schizophrenic's world in The Divided Self, refer to “the inner self,” “no longer able to sustain what precarious sense of its own identity it started with,” possibly opting for “the deliberate cultivation of a state of death-in-life as a defence against the pains of life” (italics added). That human relationships and human suffering remain essentially mysterious phenomena is arrestingly conveyed in the case histories of families of schizophrenics in Sanity, Madness and the Family (Laing and Esterson).

5. Indeed Niederland (1984) emphasizes the process of “regaining the lost object via word representations” (91) and notes Schreber's capacity to encapsulate in “the concretized language of the schizophrenic” (77) what are “distorted memories of realistic experiences in his early life” (27). In chapter 7, “The Language of the Body”, Schatzman (1973) draws a direct correlation between the father's words and the son's delusions, suggesting that “some of Schreber's odd experiences can be seen as transforms of speech patterns of his father.” (92).

6. Interestingly enough, this statement is not really applicable to the creative writings of Lacan's patient “Aimée,” which reveal some literary ability; in fact Lacan stresses the absence in her work of certain standard attributes of paranoid writing, such as “parenthèses,” “subordinations intriquées,” and “reprises” (179). Though the pithy contentiousness of “Aimée” 's language of “délire” differs from the sedateness of Schreber's tone, the characteristics Lacan adduces here in his diagnosis of paranoid psychosis are very pertinent to Schreber's case: “systématisation,” “égocentrisme,” “développement logique sur des prémisses fausses,” “mise en oeuvre tardive des moyens de defense” “belated putting to work of means of defense” (1932, 200). See 181-99 for “Aimée”'s writings.

7. If the artist's enterprise is also a narcissistic one, as André Green aptly notes in his suggestion that the artwork “vise a s'offrir comme une construction dont l'effet doit être de constituer un double narcissique du créateur”—“aims to offer itself as a construction whose effect must be to constitute a narcissistic double of the creator”—that work, however, he goes on to say, is “un objet transnarcissique,” since its “réussite” [success] will depend on effecting “la même impression chez le consommateur de l'oeuvre”—“the same impression in the consumer of the work” (1965, 32).

References

Baumeyer, Franz. 1956. “The Schreber Case.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 37: 61-74.

Canetti, Elias. 1984. Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Carr, Arthur C. 1963. “Observations on Paranoia and Their Relationship to the Schreber Case.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 44: 195-200.

Chabot, C. Barry. 1982. Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

De Oliveira, Eduardo Prado. 1979. “Introduction: L'invention de Schreber.” Le cas Schreber. 15-43. Translated and edited by De Oliveira. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Freud, Sigmund. 1886-99. “Extracts from the Fliess Papers.” In vol. 1 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961.

———. 1983-99. “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defense.” In vol. 3 of The Standard Edition.

———. 1911-13. “The Case of Schreber.” In vol. 12 of The Standard Edition.

———. 1914-16a. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In vol. 14 of The Standard Edition.

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