Vom Schreien. Ikon und Index in Bachmanns Ein Wildermuth

Schreien passt nicht ins Gericht und eignet sich offenbar insgesamt nicht für eine Kommunikation. Wann und warum also schreit jemand trotzdem? Die Frage hat sich vor Ingeborg Bachmann für den psychiatrisch behandelten Senatspräsidenten Daniel Paul Schreber gestellt, und der Semiotiker Charles Sanders Peirce hat den Index des Rufs vom Ikon des Schreiens unterschieden. Schreien bleibt kommunikativer Erstheit (Firstness) verhaftet, während das Gericht auf Entscheidungen verpflichtet bleibt. Bachmann betont für die Wahrheit beides: das bloße Innewerden der Welt wie daneben die historisch zumutbare Wahrheit.

World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world.

Objet a et manie

Cet article aborde la clinique de la manie en se penchant sur les « Mémoires d’un névropathe » de Daniel Paul Schreber. Lors d’une des phases de sa maladie, celui-ci décrit une phase maniaque où il se voit dans une euphorie légère, un doux sommeil morphinique, qui contraste avec la tonalité mélancolique de son état précédent. Freud évoque le même phénomène du basculement de la mélancolie dans l’état maniaque. Binswanger, de son côté, s’est intéressé à la manie dans une perspective phénoménologique qui inspirera Henri Ey pour sa théorie psychodynamique : la déstructuration du champ de conscience libère des énergies et des pulsions qui sont à l’état normal sous contrôle. Le rapport à l’objet, en tant que petit autre, abordé par Freud à propos du deuil, sera repris par Lacan pour préciser cette libération : dans la manie, le sujet n’est plus « lesté » par l’objet a, conçu comme l’objet-cause du désir. Tout alors devient marqué du sceau de l’Idéal. La libération du désir n’est plus limitée par le signifiant phallique et se voit remplacée par une quête de jouissance infinie. La voracité insatiable du maniaque laisse ainsi entrevoir la figure archaïque de la mère dans sa version de surmoi féminin cruel et tout-puissant.

Don't Wake Daddy: Martin Kippenberger and the Schreber Case

In the later years of his work, Martin Kippenberger made a number of paintings, multiples, and works on paper that referred to both Daniel Paul Schreber—a German judge whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) became a subject of considerable commentary by psychoanalysts and critical theorists throughout the twentieth century—and his father, physician Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber. Nathan Stobaugh offers an analysis of these works from the 1990s and argues that Kippenberger's engagement with this case, when placed in the context of his larger body of work, demonstrates the necessity of scrutinizing the Schreber father and son together. While this scrutiny might cast Kippenberger's observers themselves as paranoiacs, such a position might be necessary to apprehend a cultural predicament in which authoritarian power seems equally likely to congeal in the form of a patriarchal master as it is to spread throughout a world in which children of all ages are forced, through the management of their desire, into particular molds.

Schreber's Law

Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior German Judge at the end of the 19th century, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, wanted to become a woman. Diagnosed by Freud, without ever meeting this patient, as mad, the Judge was simultaneously made world famous and stigmatised as a lunatic. The diagnosis, taken up again by Lacan, excluded the Judge from any non-clinical reading. Schreber’s Law reverses this diagnosis and takes up the case of the Judge in the current climate of trans advocacy to argue that far from being mad, he was driven by transitional desire and his extra-judicial writings, the Memoirs, some poetry, an essay on legal doctrine should be taken seriously as a radical critique of morbus juridicus, the illness of law. The argument is that the Judge fell ill of law. He was sick of the iron cage of German jurisprudence and so broke out and inscribed a biting critique of the automatism of jurists, of the theology of legal positivism, and of affectless reason of law’s putative science.

Changes in body perception caused by mental illness on the basis of Great Thoughts of Nervous Patient by Daniel Paul Schreber

The article presents a study on delusory changes in perceiving one’s own body in a patient with mental illness. The story of Daniel Paul Schreber is an example of strongly experienced delusions, which, in the described form are contemporarily attributed to schizophrenia. This story, coming from over one hundred years ago, is still vivid, and actualizes the image of mental illness and suffering connected with it in the thoughts of the reader. The author presents these characteristics focusing mainly on the symptoms of dysmorphognosia or dysmorphophobia, which became an important element of delusional constructs. He describes the nature of the experienced symptoms in detail, documenting them with extensive quotations from „Diary of a mental patient” written by such patient. The study of mental illness presented in the paper reveals the meanders of distorted psyche and some changes that are happening in it under the influence of delusions. It is a study undertaking the issue of describing and understanding the symptoms of mental disorders.