Spring 1998
Volume 24, Number 3

With the publication in 1903 of his Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkraken, later translated as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the Dresden Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, the son of the famed educator, social reformer, and physical education enthusiast, Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schrener, was to become the most cited patient in the hsitory of psychiatry.1 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness2 caused a sensation that challenged psychiatry's scienific sobriety. In an April 1910 letter to Jung, Freud referred to "the wonderful Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital, . . ." Jung referred to Schreber in his work on schizophrenia, and Freud developed his theory of paranoia from Schreber's writings. Freud's Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), a study based, so its author claimed, only on Schreber's text, was published eight years after Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and ranks with cases of Dora, the Wolf Man, and the Rat Man as an exemplary psychoanalytic case history. 4 Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia is certainly Freud's most extended reading of a "literary" text. Although Freud urged his readers to read Memoirs of My Nervous Illness at least once before reading his own study (see PN, p. 11), Schreber's text seems to have been little read after the publcication of Freud's case study. It was not translated into English until 1955 and was soon out of print.

Whatever psychological significance Memoirs of My Nervous Illness may have, from a literary-discursive point of view it is one of the most challenging texts of the century. Read as such, and in terms of its incongruence with our usual psychological assumptions, it reveals the way in which various discursive strategies facilitate psychological description and interpretation. I am suggesting that that which we declare to be "psychological" is in fact a historically contingent "placement" of discursive strategies that are at other times and in other cultures "located" in other realms--the demonic, for instance--which may be coordinate with other social arrangements. 5 Psychodynamic processes postulated by psychoanalysis such as condensation, displacement, transference, and the mechanisms of defense, can be understood as metadiscurisve figures for discursive strategies that are expressed metaphorically in psychological terms. Schreber's failure to find an "appropriate" location for these strategies underscores their discursive nature and the contingency of their metadiscursive representation--a contingency that is lost to those who insist upon reducing them to the psychological.6

1. See Ida MacAlpine and Richard A. Hunter, translators' introduction to Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. MacAlpine and Hunter (1955; Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p.8; hereafter abbreviated M. See also Zvi Lothane, In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry , by Lothane, New York Review of Books, 3 Mar. 1994, pp.17-19. Lothane provides the most extended bibliography on Schreber to date. His comments on studies by Lacan and other French psychoanalysts are perfunctory.

2. I have adopted the following conventions to distinguish different elements of Schreber's work: I refer to Schreber's complete book, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, ed. Samuel M. Weber (1903; Frankfort am Main, 1973), hereafter abbreviated D, by its English title, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. "Memoirs" refers just to Schreber's account of his asylum experiences and does not include the postscripts included in the complete book.

4. Freud admits to having been in correspondance with one of Schreber's relatives, who provided him with "some information" about Schreber (Freud, Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 12:46n; hereafter abbraviated PN.) In an unpublished letter to Sándor Ferenczi, Freud wrote that he had asked Arnold Georg Stegmann "to find out all kinds of details about Schreber senior" and adds that it will depend upon Stegmann's reports "as to how much I will say about it publically" (quoted in Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, p.106). (Stegmann, a psychiatrist from Dresden and an early follower of Freud, had known all three of Schreber's psychiatrists.) It is not known how much information Stegmann provided. Freud claims that apart from Schreber's age at the time of his second illness--Schreber was fifty-one--he "made use of no material in his paper that was not in the Denkwürdigkeiten" (PN, p. 46 n. 1). Freud's refusal to acknowledge the possible influence of the information, whatever it may have been, which Stegmann and Screber's relative provided him, is disgenuous--and suggestive of the peculiar reaction he had to Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Freud spuriously justifies the fact that his study is not based on direct clinical experience: "since paranoics cannot be compelled to overcome their internal resistances, and since in any case they only say what they choose to say, it follows that this is precisely a disorder which a written report or a printed case history can take the place of a personal acquaintance with the patient" (PN, p.9). See also Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, Calif., 1990).

5. See Vincent Crapanzano, Herme's Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistomology of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), especially the introduction and chaps. 4 and 5.

6. I acknowledge the determinancy of my own stress on the discursive.

Vincent Crapanzano teaches anthropology and comparative literature at the Graduate Center at the City Univesity of New York. His latest book is Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistomology of Interpretation (1992).