Memoirs of a Nervous Illness

Memoirs of a Nervous Illness
Author: Daniel Paul Schreber
Publisher: Lebooks Editora
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2024-05-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 6558942542

Daniel Paul Schreber (July 25, 1842, Leipzig, Germany - April 14, 1911) was a German jurist and writer who became known for describing his own psychotic delusions. In the first known work of its kind, Schreber, upon being committed, decided to write: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. With his work, Schreber became one of the most complex figures in the history of psychoanalysis. His case became famous after it was analyzed by Freud in his work: The Schreber Case.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Author: Daniel Paul Schreber
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2000-01-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780940322202

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."

My Own Private Germany

My Own Private Germany
Author: Eric L. Santner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 1997-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400821894

In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

The Paradoxes of Delusion

The Paradoxes of Delusion
Author: Louis A. Sass
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1501732560

Insanity—in clinical practice as in the popular imagination—is seen as a state of believing things that are not true and perceiving things that do not exist. Most schizophrenics, however, do not act as if they mistake their delusions for reality. In a work of uncommon insight and empathy, Louis A. Sass shatters conventional thinking about insanity by juxtaposing the narratives of delusional schizophrenics with the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Laws of Transgression

Laws of Transgression
Author: Peter Goodrich
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-03-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1487539827

Laws of Transgression offers multiple perspectives on the story of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a chamber president of the German Supreme Court who was institutionalized after claiming God had communicated with him, desiring to make him into a woman. Schreber was not only a successful judge, but was also to become the author of one of the most commented upon texts in psychiatric literature, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Published in 1903, this remarkable work documented Schreber’s visions, desires, jurisprudence, and theology. Far from ending the judge’s legal investments, it manifested an intensification of engagement with the law in the attempt to prove that becoming a woman did not deprive the judge of legal competence. Schreber’s experience of bodily change and his account of interior life has been the subject of more than a century of psychoanalytic and medical scrutiny. With the contemporary trans turn, interest in the judge’s desire to become a woman has intensified. In Laws of Transgression, Peter Goodrich, Katrin Trüstedt, and contributing authors set out to unfold Schreber’s complex relation to the law. The collection revisits and rediscovers the Memoirs, not only in its juridical and political implications, but as a transgressional text that has challenged law and heteronormativity.

The Psychotic Dr. Schreber

The Psychotic Dr. Schreber
Author: D Wilson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2019-09-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9780999115251

Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real.

Fragile Connections

Fragile Connections
Author: Donald Capps
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014-02-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725233770

"One of the greatest contributions of Capps's book is the way in which he weaves together a vast range of theories, interpretations, and explanations of psychopathology, without ever losing sight of the humanity of the person living with mental illness. Far too many books seek to find one, single explanation of the baffling and complex phenomenon of mental illness. Fragile Connections will expand our understanding and empower pastors and others concerned about mental illness with an eloquent exploration of one of the greatest mysteries of the human predicament." --Lewis Rambo, San Francisco Theological Union and Graduate Theological Union "Donald Capps skillfully guides his readers into the strange world of severe mental illness, a neighborhood disturbingly close to home. He first offers the lay of the land by scrutinizing particular psychiatric classifications. He then carefully treks through gripping narrative accounts of those battling schizophrenia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer's disease. Finally, with interpretive precision honed through a lifetime of attending to persons in pain, Capps risks his own stunning insights into the anguish and mystery of these lives. An exquisite and sobering journey." --Robert C. Dykstra, Princeton Theological Seminary "Fragile Connections is a most welcome resource for those of us involved in theological education. Capps's creative use of five memoirs allows persons who suffer from various mental illnesses and the family members who care for them to speak in their own voices about living with these afflictions." --Carol J. Cook, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary "Doing good with stealth as usual Donald Capps has designed this biblically, historically grounded book for seminary students and ministers, who will find no other like it. The book holds out the key to understanding the experiences of those who are mentally ill and those who love them. Capps argues that the study of individuals' personal memoirs--rather than medically modeled case studies--reveals the deep and profoundly personal nature of each person's unique experience of mental illness. What is more, written as it is in Capps's inimitable style, this book fills a void in seminary curricula as it addresses a problem in methodology." --Antoinette Goodwin, pastoral psychotherapist, Princeton, New Jersey

A First-Rate Madness

A First-Rate Madness
Author: Nassir Ghaemi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0143121332

The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative, fascinating.” —Salon.com Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lackluster leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.