We Have Never Been Schreber: Paranoia, Medieval and Modern

PDFaid.Com #1 Pdf Solutions We Have Never Been Schreber Paranoia, Medieval and Modern erin labbie and michael uebel In place of Lancelot, we have Judge Schreber.—Michel Foucault It is a rhetorical topos to note that Daniel Paul Schreber is the most frequently quoted psychiatric patient in the history of mental health.∞ The remarkable fame of Schreber’s autobiographical book, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903; Memoirs of My Nervous Illness),≤ rests upon its status as an extraordinarily rich narration of the prototypical form of madness, psychosis. From the time of his death in 1911 in a state asylum— Schreber had spent about half of the last twenty-seven years of his life in mental institutions—he became recognized as the iconic madman, with his Memoirs shaping psychoanalytic conceptions, first articulated around deformations of desire in the only case study Freud wrote concerning a psychotic patient, his famous ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’’ of 1911.≥ Elias Canetti’s estimation of the Memoirs as ‘‘the most important document in psychiatric literature,’’ whose author is thus the most influential patient in the history of psychiatry, is perfectly justified, given the enduring iconic status of Schreber’s self-described symptoms in the history of descriptive psychiatry.∂ As a textbook for how to read lapidary psychosis, and, as we will suggest, how to interpret religious, scientific, and poetic relays from the medieval to the modern (and back again and forward to the contemporary), the Memoirs have achieved precisely the status that Schreber believed they would. the legitimacy of schreber One of our principal interests in this essay is to highlight the special and extreme sensitivity of the psychotic to his cultural environment, to history, and to future possibility. The psychotic’s multiple and complex relation to present, past, and future is for us a register of how psychosis rebuilds the world, where the delusional system amounts finally to a quasi-heroic ‘‘reconstruction after the catastrophe.’’∑ In a key passage in Discipline and Punish, Foucault marks the transition from the medieval to the modern disciplinary-scientific society: And if from the early Middle Ages to the present day the ‘‘adventure’’ is an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the internal search for childhood, from combats to phantasies, it is also inscribed in the formation of a disciplinary society. The adventure of our childhood no longer finds expression in ‘‘le bon petit Henri,’’ but in the misfortunes of ‘‘little Hans.’’ The Romance of the Rose is written today by Mary Barnes; in place of Lancelot, we have Judge Schreber.∏ Citing two famous case studies by Freud concerning phobic little Hans and paranoid Schreber, and another text by a schizophrenic artist,π Foucault suggests that the maturation of the disciplinary society is reflected in transitions marked by iconographic heroic and creative ideals. These ideals have altered from a perception offered by medieval treatments of them to their modern diagnosable counterparts. Although, in this passage, Foucault finds the presence of these pasts in the dominant cultural schema of a disciplinary modernity, the pasts are also overtaken by their negative and disenfranchised counterparts as dramatized in the shift, for instance, from Lancelot to Schreber. This shift from the fantasized heroic knight to the paranoiac signals a telling transition in the construction of the past itself. In this scene of cultural history, the mythologies that govern the perception of the medieval past as ideal, by which a certain nostalgia for misperceived simplicity or innocence is derived and performed, are in fact offered and created by the modern moment that distinguishes itself from the past. Thus, given the replacement of medieval heroism by private fantasies generated in the context of new technologies of power and knowledge (e.g., the judicial system and the then new science of psychoanalysis), it is 128 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel not surprising that Schreber, having imagined a world-historical catastrophe, undertook to legitimate his own solitary mission as redeemer of mankind, a kind of crusader fighting on God’s side and ‘‘a champion’’ for the German people.∫ Certain that the world around him had been subject to plagues (‘‘holy diseases’’) and that he was surrounded by only reanimated corpses (‘‘fleeting-improvised-men’’),Ω Schreber inserts himself into a medieval history of ‘‘holy times,’’ refusing to dismiss visionary experiences, such as his own communications with souls and God through ‘‘rays,’’ as fabulous inventions: To avoid going back as far as biblical events, I consider it very likely that in the cases of the Maid of Orleans, of the Crusaders in search of the Holy Lance at Antioch, or of the Emperor Constantine’s well-known vision in hoc signo vinces which was decisive for the victory of Christianity: that in all these cases a transitory communication with rays was established, or there was transitory divine inspiration. The same may also be assumed in some cases of stigmatization of virgins; the legends and poetry of all peoples 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.∞≠ Schreber’s certainty about spirituality’s deep roots in divine communication necessitates a return to the mixture of heroic strength and innocence that Foucault characterizes as departure points for modernity. Judge Schreber, as modern Lancelot, did the precise opposite of what Hans Blumenberg considered characteristic of modern culture, that is, to fill traditional spiritual forms with a modern secular content. He conveyed to the modern Weltanschauung (worldview) a traditional religious content, one remarkably consistent with medieval aesthetic theory and practice as realized, for instance, in the mystical aims of Gothic architecture. The Gothic cathedral, such as that of St.-Denis, embodied a Neoplatonic vision, based upon analogies between Dionysian light-ray metaphysics and Gothic luminosity.∞∞ Within Schreber’s Gothic vision, the rays, or souls, by which he felt himself connected to the divine, were ‘‘proof of God’s miraculous creative power which is directed to earth.’’ His supporting evidence reflects the intimacy common to the mystic: ‘‘the fact that the sun has for years spoken with me in human words and thereby reveals herself as a living being or as the organ of a still higher being behind her.’’∞≤ We Have Never Been Schreber 129 Despite his identification with forms of medieval heroism, Schreber’s will to power, what Freud saw as his megalomania, was never remotely as strong as his will to truth.∞≥ Schreber was more mystic than knight. ‘‘I lived,’’ Schreber writes, ‘‘in the belief—and it is still my conviction that this is the truth—that I had to solve one of the most intricate problems ever set for man and that I had to fight a sacred battle for the greatest good of mankind.’’∞∂ Certain that truth, as communicated to human beings from the divine, was being interrupted and perverted and that his own will was subject to the influence of others (a condition he called ‘‘soul murder’’), Schreber attempted to create his own private world shaped and unshaped by metaphysical truths and supernatural events that he deemed resistant to human language and beyond understanding.∞∑ To preserve the world as sacral became Schreber’s preeminent concern, and his chief obstacles to this were condensed in the figure of his first psychiatrist, the chair of psychiatry at Leipzig University, Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig, in whose Irrenklinik (mental hospital) Schreber voluntarily placed himself on two different occasions following mental breakdowns. Schreber’s new place at the margins of the social order, his ‘‘disappearance’’ from the center where he had held one of the higher positions in the German court system with the title of Senatspräsident, or presiding judge, of the Supreme Court of Appeals, signified for him that he had been replaced: ‘‘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.’’∞∏ In Freud’s reading of Schreber, emphasis was placed on the persecution complex in which Schreber’s physician was understood as God/ Father. Schreber’s paranoid system was naturally assumed to rest on universal, Oedipal tension∞π; yet this interpretation, which takes the religious dimension of his paranoid system as a secondary rather than primary aspect of its construction,∞∫ does not adequately account for belief in a wizard demolishing the foundations of religion and thereby triggering mental disorder and corruption. Seelenmord, the murder of souls, was Schreber’s strongest term for describing the catastrophes affecting him and his world. Schreber did not 130 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel invent the term—he might have picked it up from any number of sources, including the playwrights Henrik Ibsen (John Gabriel Borkman, 1896) and August Strindberg (discussing Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in 1887), Ellen Key’s international best seller The Century of the Child (1900), or another popular book by Anselm von Feuerbach, a well-known German judge, whose volume of 1832 on the Kaspar Hauser case was likely known to Schreber.∞Ω He did, however, introduce the term into the psychiatric literature, defining it as a kind of demonic bond with one person absorbing the life of another, wherein the victim’s identity is forfeited in such a way that he is unable to reason about what has happened. In the most basic sense, soul murder is a crime, a violation of selfhood that may, as in the case of Schreber, cross multiple existential areas, including the sexual (his famous ‘‘unmanning’’), the spiritual and moral, and the political, including the racial.≤≠ Dr. Paul Flechsig, soul murderer, was appointed außerordentlicher Professor (also known as Extraordinarius, or a university professor not holding his own chair) of psychiatry and was promised to be made head of the psychiatric hospital to be opened at Leipzig University. The Irrenklinik was opened in 1882, and it included a brain-anatomical laboratory specially designed by him. In 1884, with the psychiatry chair having been vacant since Johann Christian August Heinroth’s death in 1843, Flechsig was appointed chair, or ordentlicher Professor (also known as Ordinarius). Heinroth, a Psychiker, worked in the tradition of soul psychiatrists, a humanistic tradition dominating the German psychiatric scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Flechsig’s inaugural speech, in clear opposition to his predecessor, was entitled ‘‘On the Physical Basis of Mental Diseases,’’≤∞ establishing his position as Somatiker and supporter of a scientific paradigm given the title Hirnmythologie (‘‘brain mythology’’) by the neuropathologist Franz Nissl (1860–1919).≤≤ Zvi Lothane has emphasized the extent to which brain mythology is an ideology and not a methodology. Anchored in philosophical reductionism, it views the mind as caused by the brain, rather than the mind acting in the brain, at the same time that it ignores the reality of the tertium quid, or the person.≤≥ There is thus a sense in which brain mythology was itself a paranoid system, operating through depersonalization and with a sense of absolute certainty that the realities of the mind are to be replaced with the realities of the physical body. The replacement of Heinroth by Flechsig We Have Never Been Schreber 131 as chair of psychiatry at Leipzig University marked a transition, as Flechsig announced in his inaugural lecture, from the ‘‘mistaken doctrine’’ of mental disorders understood as guilt- and sin-based to an understanding of mental disorders as information- and experiment-based.≤∂ That is, a ‘‘chasm . . . gaped’’ between him and Heinroth, one ‘‘no less deep and wide than the chasm between medieval medicine’’ and modern science.≤∑ Heinroth, the Somatiker claimed, had regressed psychiatry to medieval exorcism rather than advanced it forward into modern science. Flechsig, as a neuroanatomist renowned for his work on the myelination of nerve fibers and the localization of nervous diseases in the brain, ‘‘ushered in a new epoch,’’ claimed Freud.≤∏ ‘‘In one fell swoop,’’ writes Lothane, ‘‘the tradition of the soul ended and the reign of the brain began.’’≤π Medieval psychological understanding had been murdered, only to be psychotically resurrected. Schreber’s concept of ‘‘soul murder’’ should thus be seen as a dialectical comment on Flechsig’s neurobiological paradigm. Schreber’s paranoid alienation was historically inflected—‘‘I felt,’’ he writes, ‘‘like a marble guest who had returned from times long past into a strange world.’’≤∫ This strange world, however, was fast becoming one populated with subjects who, just like Schreber, began to record their mental illnesses for an enthusiastic modernist audience. Walter Benjamin expressed his joy at finding a copy of the Memoirs in a used bookshop in Berne in 1918,≤Ω and his shelf of ‘‘books by the mentally ill,’’ while formerly it might have been ‘‘disconcerting,’’ even ‘‘terrifying,’’ ‘‘nowadays . . . the situation is different. Interest in the manifestations of madness is as universal as ever . . . more fruitful and legitimate.’’≥≠ The publication of texts by mentally ill persons, we suggest, is a marker of modernity. Both professionals and laypersons noted their appearance with greater frequency by the turn of the twentieth century. Examples include the Moscow physician Viktor Kandinsky, who in 1880 described his psychopathological symptoms under the term ‘‘mental automatism’’ (telepathy, reading and broadcasting thoughts, and enforced speaking and motor movements).≥∞ Karl Rychlinski, of the Warsaw psychiatric clinic, presented a case of hallucinatory psychosis.≥≤ One of the most widely read and discussed accounts, in this case of mania, was that of Auguste Forel, a retired professor of psychiatry in Zurich, published in 1901.≥≥ By 1906, such texts were available in popular German literary periodicals.≥∂ 132 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel In the texts of psychotics, then, a modernity was inaugurated in which science, poetics, and religion attempt to legitimize themselves in relation to the Middle Ages in two simultaneous and contradictory ways. On the one hand, modernity contrasts itself to the barbarism (and innocence) and presumed illegitimacy of the Middle Ages. In this case the idealization of science asserts the supremacy of the technological progress of modernity over what is seen to be an archaic premodern scientific culture. On the other hand, modernity is precisely dependent on the citation of the past as a site of authority, therefore marking the Middle Ages as a legitimizing power in which a reliance on the theological foundations provided by scholasticism provides a cultural grounding for potential knowledge. In both of these contradictory approaches to the Middle Ages, the juxtapositions of science and religion are primary fields by which modernity justifies itself in relation to the past, and in both cases a relationship between the present and the past takes the form of paranoia. Thus, we will argue, the case of Judge Schreber is a complex embodiment of the medieval within the modern. scholastic schreber Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, through a focus on language as a primary element dictating the subject’s relationship to reality and to the theological potential to explore the limits of knowledge, illustrates the medieval foundations upholding the modernist crisis in representation, a crisis that informs science, aesthetics, theology, and the field of psychoanalysis. Because paranoia is in part a linguistic disorder, it also calls into question the very possibility of writing history. As Michel de Certeau asserts, the writing of history has much to learn from the writing of the psyche, and both history and psychoanalysis are informed by what is considered to be a premodern sensibility.≥∑ Additionally, our concept of the Middle Ages is dependent upon, and constructed by, a modernist academic agenda.≥∏ The idealization of the past as a source for developing nationalist identities led the modernist medievalists to couch their literary criticism in scientific terms.≥π Schreber’s memoirs, then, perform a complex layering of the modern onto the medieval that illustrates a nonlinear continuity between the Middle Ages and modernity. Indeed, the construction of the Middle Ages is grounded in what we call modernity.≥∫ We Have Never Been Schreber 133 The links between science and legitimacy have been addressed widely in light of the ‘‘two cultures’’ debates and the idealization of a positivism that is promised by scientific discourse. Fredric Jameson, in his foreword to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, succinctly states, ‘‘ ‘Doing science’ involves its own kind of legitimation.’’≥Ω For Lyotard, this indicates a particular legitimacy at stake in the legislature of scientific discourse such that ‘‘the question of the legitimacy of science has been indissociably linked to that of the legitimation of the legislator since the time of Plato.’’∂≠ Science relies on the ‘‘game’’ of language; the narrative structure of science calls for the observer to turn a scrutinizing gaze toward the question of the legitimacy of language as a mediator.∂∞ In his quest for truth and his desire to offer a contribution to scientific discourse, Schreber’s memoirs narrate and document the multifarious dynamics at stake in the experience of psychosis. Offering his autobiography as a contribution to medieval scholastic debates, Schreber participates in the dynamics of dialectical thinking. Paranoia resembles the conventional dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; however, there is no synthesis in the paranoiac field. Presenting as parallel the disciplines of science as an assertion of truth (thesis), poetics as an interrogation or negation of this positivist assertion (antithesis), and religion as a promise for hope and an awareness of the real (synthesis) allows an understanding of paranoia that explains why it is one of the central questions at stake in psychoanalysis as well as in the study of modernity. 1 Science (Thesis) One of Schreber’s purposes in the writing of his Memoirs involves the explicit desire to contribute to the discourse of science. Offering himself as a case study—indeed, as a living corpse for the members of the scientific establishment to examine—Schreber contributes to the formation of a peculiarly legitimate form of knowledge at the limits of knowability.∂≤ Schreber claims that God is capable of relating only to corpses: ‘‘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.’’∂≥ Needing to present himself as al134 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel ready dead, Schreber makes his body into an object of scrutiny. In Schreber’s view, the scientific and theological systems become elided such that Flechsig is another god who can relate to him only through a ‘‘policy of vacillation in which attempts to cure my nervous illness alternated with efforts to annihilate me as a human being who, because of his everincreasing nervousness, had become a danger to God Himself.’’∂∂ As a scribe recording his own ontotheological experiences and hallucinations, Schreber seeks to attain the legitimacy that he associates with scientific discourse and systematicity, and, despite his avowed agnosticism and skepticism, he longs for the legitimacy that he also associates with God, who has the power to recognize Schreber. With Schreber as theoretical touchstone, the analysis of psychosis pervades the work of Jacques Lacan. Even before the completion of his 1932 doctoral thesis on paranoia, Lacan translated Freud’s paper ‘‘On Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’’ and published ‘‘Structure des psychoses paranoïaques’’ (The structure of paranoid psychosis) in 1931.∂∑ Although these early papers seek to distinguish between psychosis and the ‘‘normalcy’’ of neurosis, by the end of his career in 1975 Lacan would conclude that we are all paranoiacs and that personality is premised on paranoia. The very structure of desire, dependent as it is on the desire of the Other (the Che Vuoi?), is paranoid. As an ‘‘expert’’ in paranoia, then, Lacan spends the third seminar (The Psychoses) reading the case of Schreber in order to devise a line between psychosis and neurosis.∂∏ Such a line is never in fact drawn, but in his effort to determine the fragile and elusive difference between the two, Lacan diagnostically marks the speech of the psychotic by way of its detachment from signification. Despite his alienation from the external world, the urges to participate in a social order and to be recognized by God lead Schreber to assert his voice in the form of idealized scientific discourse. The fantasmatic desire to be recognized compensates for the impossibility that the solipsistic paranoid will ever be able to participate in a social community. Scientific discourse, then, accommodates, while it symptomatically displays, Schreber’s desire for legitimation. Yet, in Lacan’s terms, science is itself akin to psychosis; science exceeds the lines of the discursive structures at stake in ideological systems. In a discussion of these fragile boundaries in Television, Lacan suggests that the discourse of science is akin to that of the hysteric.∂π The discourse of the We Have Never Been Schreber 135 hysteric, like that articulated by Schreber, replaces the empty subject with the illusion of mastery and believes that jouissance is the truth of the product of knowledge. The discourse of science appeals to the hyperbolic vigilance that seeks to record its own desire.∂∫ Schreber’s appeal to the fetishized discourse of science foregrounds the very status of psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. Based, as it is, on linguistic narrative, the ‘‘talking cure’’ becomes the discursive product that, by calling into question the ability to narrate perceptual reality, enables an articulation of the subject in the field of history. Schreber’s recognition of the imbrication of science and what will be called juridical discourse is tied to his professional status. A powerful figure in the Senatspräsident of the Supreme Court, yet the youngest to take this position among other ‘‘legitimate’’ patriarchs, his precarious relationship to the law in fact appears to catalyze his second psychotic break.∂Ω Discussing the legitimacy of Schreber and his exclusion from the law, Janet Lucas speculates that ‘‘there is no legitimate place for him in the Law.’’∑≠ This exclusion is, according to Lucas, due to the split between the Name-of-theFather and Schreber’s system of knowledge. Schreber does not have access to the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father because his psychic system of replacement has created wholeness where there is lack. Schreber therefore imagines that he is in a constant state of illegitimacy (and that this is true despite his juridical success). Concluding that this illegitimacy is the ‘‘trigger’’ to his psychosis, Lucas then agrees with many scholars who perceive the oppression of ideology at play in Schreber’s participation in the disciplinary structure of the hegemonic system that, prior to his incarceration, he helped to organize and lead.∑∞ As a means of addressing and approaching a form of truth, Schreber’s desire to participate in scientific discourse (itself a form of replacement for a lack in language) reflects the illegitimacy of the law itself by way of the foreclosure of the Father. Since there is a protective barrier against the concept and the signifier of the Father, there is no access to the Law of the Father in its proper form; the Name and the Law of the Father are absent from the first then, and this is reflected by Lacan’s ‘‘absent’’ seminar on the Name-of-the-Father.∑≤ In the analytic scene, however, joining science is structurally prohibited. In Serge Leclaire’s view of psychoanalysis as a discipline that is utterly dependent on the letter, the signifier is materialized in its very abstraction. 136 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel This paradoxical view of language is most evident in the linguistic field of the paranoid schizophrenic: ‘‘The materiality of the letter manipulated by the schizophrenic seems to be in fact doubly abstracted from any corporeal reference, so that it is nothing more, finally, than the shadow of a letter, that is, a materiality that refers to nothing other than the materiality of any and all letters.’’∑≥ The fantasy of a pure scientific discourse becomes impossible for the paranoiac to achieve because scientific narrative is bound to the poetic qualities of language. Before allowing the shadowy signifier to take us into a discussion of poetics, we will address the element of the visual as a scene of pseudoscientific proof. In the performance of his subjectivity and the desire to seduce God (as well as his other Father figures including but not limited to Flechsig and Guido Weber∑∂), and in his concomitant desire to ward off the voices that barrage him with persecutory messages, Schreber engages in what he calls picturing. Seeking a means of maintaining a self-presentation that confirms his imago, Schreber relies on picturing as a visual contribution to the scientific discourse he attempts to achieve with his text. Picturing is crucial in Schreber’s production of the proof of his experience. Through it, he presents himself as evidence offered up as a sacrifice for the examination of the scrutinizing eyes of God, Flechsig, the rays, and the multiple father figures that persecute him. Imagining, or believing, that he is being constantly watched, Schreber performs for the gaze of the Other. He dresses up as a woman in order to make himself available to God’s advances, and in his transvestism he makes his external appearance conform to his internal image of himself. Picturing constitutes one of the chief strategies that Schreber devises in order to ward off the constant influx of voices and rays. In his own words, ‘‘ ‘Picturing’ in this sense may therefore be called a reversed miracle. In the same way as rays throw on to my nerves pictures they would like to see especially in dreams, I in turn produce pictures for the rays which I want them to see.’’∑∑ Despite his awareness of its illusory nature, Schreber relies on picturing as a defense mechanism by which he tests his reality.∑∏ The endurance of Schreber’s picturing is a testimony to its efficacy as well. At the end of treatment, his picturing remains a stable defense mechanism that allows him to negotiate the social order of the world. The externalized or projected visibility of Schreber’s internal psyche calls attention to the public character of paranoia. In addition to its We Have Never Been Schreber 137 obvious connections to the rise in technological advancements that accompany modernity, the function of picturing participates in the scopic drive toward knowledge and truth that was dominant during the Enlightenment.∑π Picturing also places Schreber within the present moment. Considering the location of knowledge within a historical moment, JeanClaude Milner understands Alexandre Koyré’s thesis regarding the intersection of modernity and mysticism to indicate that ‘‘science means only modern science.’’∑∫ If this is the case, then by considering his own discourse to be scientific, Schreber marks his experience as immanent presence and as an expansion of the horizon of the present. Schreber’s concern with the self as a subject who exists in history is evident in his drive to record his experiences. Working toward an understanding of the centrality of the trace as a means of understanding the subject, the historian comes to resemble the psychoanalyst. Indeed, the very process of narrating history is at the core of the discourse of psychoanalysis, and the process of interpretation leads the subject to imagine the Other as an inquisitive audience. Narration, like desire, is then caught within the discourse of the desire of the Other, and the process of constructing the self as present is fraught with the fantasy of the Other’s desire. The precise narration of history, then, as a drive toward the construction of a properly scientific record of experience, is also paranoid. In Bruno Latour’s characterization of history we are able to perceive the function of this discursive paranoia as it translates to personal and political matters: Historians reconstitute the past, detail by detail, all the more carefully inasmuch as it has been swallowed up for ever. But are we as far removed from our past as we want to think we are? No, because modern temporality does not have much effect on the passage of time. The past remains, therefore, and even returns. Now this resurgence is incomprehensible to the moderns. Thus they treat it as the return of the repressed. They view it as an archaism. ‘‘If we aren’t careful,’’ they think, ‘‘we’re going to return to the past; we’re going to fall back into the Dark Ages.’’ Historical reconstitution and archaism are two symptoms of the moderns’ incapacity to eliminate what they nevertheless have to eliminate in order to retain the impression that time passes.∑Ω The repetition and return of the image of the Middle Ages as a promise or a threat further reinforces the power dynamic at the heart of the narrative 138 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel process as it relates to the desire of the Other. The very treatment of the past as the eruption of the repressed intensifies the desire to further repress, revealing, symptomatically, the desire to perceive time as a force of progression. The paranoid tendency to construct walls between the present and the past is manifested, in part, through the desire for science and reason in the form of historical documentation. As a model of this form of the historical play between modernity and the Middle Ages, Schreber’s self-documentation appeals to history as a rational expression that will save him from a lapse into the unreason associated with the Middle Ages. Attempting to repress that which does not fit into a logical system or order, Schreber asserts a hyperrationality that is affiliated with modernity and relies on the logic of scholasticism. Rationality must be conceived of in a historicized context;∏≠ notably, this is not the same as saying that rationality must be contextualized historically. Latour and Schreber both demonstrate the impossibility of epochal distinctions as temporality shifts, eliding that which is called medieval and that which is called modernity. In accord with a sympathetic reading of the paranoiac, many critics have suggested that Schreber’s deity is the Judeo-Christian God. As such He is also the contingent God of modernity and classical antiquity that Niklas Luhmann describes in his analysis of Aristotelian observation. This God induces and produces paranoia. Everyone who believes in God, Luhmann writes, ‘‘knows that he is being observed, not only in violation of his private space, that is, with data security, but also in everything that surrounds and motivates him. God knows now, even before now, when we are in error—and leave it be! Therefore, He also knows the ‘futura contingentia.’ ’’∏∞ Thomas Aquinas’s concept of contingency (which is central to Luhmann’s argument regarding observation) signifies the precise manner in which the paranoid subject relates to and conjures the Other. Scholasticism is thus historically bound to a concept of paranoia. Schreber’s paranoid relationship with God is indeed secured by technological Otherness to the extent that ‘‘private space’’ is not at all private. In the cosmology of the paranoiac, there is no such thing as private space.∏≤ Similarly, we are introduced to a perspective of ourselves as the Other when we locate our own position as observer in the scene of Schreber’s self-display. As his readers, we stand in for the gods for whom he dresses his language; we are the Others he is seducing—Schrebers are We Have Never Been Schreber 139 we. Since God is purely reasonable, He is in control of His passions.∏≥ Therefore, the question of rationality in regard to the perception of the impossible knowledge of God shifts to one of our potential to observe God. Luhmann characterizes this dynamic by recalling the very problem at stake in both premodern and postmodern understandings of the unknown: ‘‘In engaging in the same task of observing the observation of God, theologians come dangerously close to the devil and must therefore maintain their distance. This occurs within the values of the nobility by distinguishing between agitation and humility; through a sense of social standing, or in folk variants through a demonization of the devil—in short, through an observation of the observer of the observation of God.’’∏∂ The meta-level upon which the subject is observed situates the paranoid subject as one who logically and rationally offers himself to the view of the Other. In this manner, the subject who is paranoid is in fact ahead of the game. He is not within the scene of social order, yet he leads the drive of the social sphere to form a community. As the legal norms of the Enlightenment privileged the spoken over the written, the testimony of the illiterate was equated with that of the literate, thus placing the element of picturing within the statist view of legal testimony.∏∑ Schreber’s picturing, however, evinces a complex scientific gaze that accounts for both visually ‘‘proven’’ empiricism and linguistically driven narrative. In his reading of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson (1630), Francis Barker demonstrates that the lines of the gaze are focused on the text, not on the body at stake in the image. The scientific gaze is blind to what becomes the invisible body, and it aims its trajectory instead at the textualization of evidence: ‘‘thus reduced, the body has ceased to mean in any but residual ways, sinking away from vision into the past.’’∏∏ The scientific gaze that becomes the textualized gaze is situated on a threshold of visibility and a horizon of perception. It refers back to the practice of scholastic medieval anatomy and simultaneously ‘‘points forward to the modern aversionary textualization of the flesh.’’∏π In this manner, the scientific gaze gives way to the textual gaze of poetics. As Friedrich Kittler states, ‘‘Only when sciences localize madness in ‘language itself ’ does its literary simulation become possible and important.’’∏∫ Or, in Lacan’s view, ‘‘science is a collusion with hyperreality’’ and as such is overtaken by poetics.∏Ω 140 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel 2 Poetics (Antithesis) According to Lacan, Schreber has no claim to being a poet.π≠ Yet, like Lacan’s own expression of neologism, euphemism, and metaphor, and like Freud’s literary case studies, Schreber’s Memoirs consistently expresses a drive toward poetics and a recourse to metaphor and metonymy. From the outset of his autobiography, Schreber confesses that his discursive register is a poetic one: To make myself at least somewhat comprehensible I shall have to speak much in images and similes, which may at times perhaps be only approximately correct; for the only way a human being can make supernatural matters, which in their essence must always remain incomprehensible, understandable to a certain degree is by comparing them with known faces of human experience. Where intellectual understanding ends, the domain of belief begins; man must reconcile himself to the fact that things exist which are true although he cannot understand them.π∞ The limits of knowledge find their expression in the poetic register. Gesturing toward the shift from proof to belief, poetics are asserted as a counter to scientific discourse. For Julia Kristeva, this poetic dilemma is linked precisely to the nominalist function in which language constructs reality: ‘‘the subject of poetic language continually but never definitively assumes the thetic function of naming, establishing meaning and signification, which the paternal function represents within reproductive relation. Son permanently at war with father, not in order to take his place, nor even to endure it, erased from reality, as a symbolic, divine menace and salvation in the manner of Senatspräsident Schreber.’’π≤ The generational conflict at stake in the historical recording of the poetic experience links Schreber’s internal tragedy to a transcendent reality. Through poetics, he is able to produce that which he cannot physically produce in life. And, though, like the demonically possessed early modern painter Christof Haizmann, Schreber risks losing his soul, he maintains it through the poetic register which conquers discourse itself.π≥ As Kittler neatly summarizes it, ‘‘All of Freud’s case histories demonstrate that the romanticism of the soul has yielded to a materialism of written signs.’’π∂ Poetics remain central to the move toward the necessary technological inquiry of the influencing machines that domWe Have Never Been Schreber 141 inate the embodiment of schizophrenia. Avital Ronell identifies Lyotard’s recourse to poetics: ‘‘The electric flow installs the paradigm for a language opposed to a signifier that strangles and overcodes the flows and in which no flow is privileged, ‘which remains indifferent to its substance or support, inasmuch as the latter is an amorphous continuum.’ The electric flow serves to illustrate ‘the realization of such a flow that is indeterminate as such.’ In this regard, consider also Lyotard’s generalized critique of the signifier in which the signifier’s coded gaps are short-circuited by the ‘figural.’ ’’π∑ The poetic determination of language as an organizing force within the psyche then also determines the somatic display. The letter indeed becomes materialized. Even Schreber’s grammatical structure is poetic, depending on emotion to inflect and direct his logic. As Freud defines paranoia in his case study of Schreber, the paranoid turns the statement ‘‘I love him’’ into ‘‘He hates me.’’ By way of transition and projection, the paranoiac defies his own desire to claim, ‘‘I do not love him—I hate him, because he persecutes me.’’π∏ Freud thus institutes a grammatical structure of emotion that is supported by a concern regarding poetics. Paralleling this connection between language and feeling is the grammatical structure of melancholy. According to Kristeva, the malady is emphasized linguistically by way of introjection: ‘‘ ‘I love that object,’ is what that person seems to say about the lost object, ‘but even more so I hate it; because I love it, and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am nonexistent, I shall kill myself.’ ’’ππ Kristeva’s explication of melancholy precisely describes Schreber’s relationship to God and to the poetic expression of the self. As a scholarly malady, poetics is precisely linked to melancholy.π∫ On the one hand, Schreber wants to be able to claim that God persecutes him, and, on the other hand, he wants to take control of this persecution so that he punishes himself for his ill will toward his oppressor. Ultimately, we find ourselves in a scene of cynicism. This dynamic also characterizes and is characterized by modernity’s relationship to the Middle Ages. We view the past only with the eyes of a paranoiac. We cannot find a way out of the paranoid system, because language itself is founded on the structure of lack and alienation. François Roustang calls attention to this primacy of paranoia within language when he declares, ‘‘Language is at the center because it must confront that which is its 142 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel enemy, that which threatens to dissolve it, and because it owes its salvation solely to the fact that it becomes the servant of what is foreign to it.’’πΩ Psychosis is entrenched within language and the gaps in signification that are rendered when the subject speaks. The fantasmatic structure of language as a mediator renders it a replacement or supplement for the ideal form.∫≠ In Friedrich Nietzsche’s terms, this means that we exist in a world of illusion. Further, we must give ourselves over to the illusion in order to pretend as though reality is sedimented through perception. In this way, we delude ourselves, and we doubly delude ourselves when we necessarily forget that we have in fact deluded ourselves. Nietzsche articulates this process in ‘‘Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,’’ where we find that language is always already metaphorical and metonymical.∫∞ In the expression of his desire to contribute to the scholastic debates known as the quarrel of the universals, Schreber articulates the wish to be a poet. Self-conscious of his own play with language and his discursive construction of his reality, he idealizes the role of the poet as one who is able to convey significance by way of metaphor and metonymy, even while offering a unique fusion of expression and meaning. The automatic elimination of nonsense rendering signification everywhere and nowhere, evident in Schreber’s statement that ‘‘all nonsense cancels itself out,’’ calls into question the potential for meaning in the perceptual reality of the paranoiac. Schreber’s search for a Grundsprache, a basic language or a root language, is manifested in a focus on the sounds and voices of the ‘‘miraculously created birds’’ he imagines. Organic in nature, Schreber does not know the ‘‘mechanical’’ language of the birds, but he nonetheless understands their utterances despite their emptiness. Knowing their significance by rote or parroting, Schreber is able to communicate with them. Indeed, he claims that the birds themselves do not know the sense of their song. Rather, they have a ‘‘natural sensitivity for the similarity of sounds.’’∫≤ Schreber records: 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 We Have Never Been Schreber 143 ‘‘Santiago’’ or ‘‘Cathargo’’ ‘‘Chinesentum’’ or ‘‘Jesum Christum’’ ‘‘Abendroth’’ or ‘‘Athemnoth’’ ‘‘Ariman’’ or ‘‘Ackermann’’ ‘‘Briefbeschwerer’’ or ‘‘Herr prufer schwört,’’ etc., etc.∫≥ Taking the birds as a challenge to create unity of sound, Schreber seeks to fulfill the order toward homogeneity that he imagines to derive from God. The precise significance of the sounds is unimportant given the extreme auditory identification that enables Schreber and the birds to understand each other. Neither his language nor theirs requires translation. Instead, the full significance of the utterances rests in the lack of a need for translation. In fact, this communication with the birds then represents a scene in which transference has the potential to succeed in a case of psychosis. By displacing his own sense of the difference between words that sound the same but have different meaning, Schreber unites language, making it a system based on sameness and identification rather than on difference. He becomes one with all he hears. This unity, however, is achieved only by dispossessing himself of his own knowledge and awareness that the words that sound similar and therefore seem to have similar signification, such as ‘‘Santiago’’ and ‘‘Cathargo,’’ nonetheless remain separate and different. In a desperate attempt to preserve and prove his rationality, Schreber must sacrifice his sense of linguistic logic in order to identify with God and achieve mystical unity. At the limits of understanding, Schreber offers a mystical unity that promises a union between belief and proof. His concept of eternity as that which cannot be precisely proven but which must be taken on faith is a primary example of that which must be believed yet not understood. In his mystical experience of these transrational moments, Schreber seeks to articulate that which exceeds the capacity of language and human understanding. If understanding is perfectly bound to language, then we are stuck in the realm of paranoia by way of nominalism. Language determines the way in which we know the world, and so we enter a constructionist mentality. Schreber’s desire to articulate the inarticulable is in fact an indication of his poetic drives, even as he seeks to systematize his experience. In the course of his discursive strategy to seduce God and to defend 144 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel himself against the multitude of persecutory voices he hears, Schreber also claims a particularly complex relationship with language. He relies heavily on metaphor and metonymy in his quest to communicate his personal Weltanschauung as he determines the Order of the World. Poetics take over the role of epistemological activity in this scenario. Schreber’s desire to understand the order of the world and the unknowable elements of the cosmos find limits similar to those located within the poetic. When he says that ‘‘an intimate relation exists between God and the starry sky,’’ he notes that ‘‘such things are also known to our poets ‘Far above the starry sky, surely dwells a kindly father,’ etc.’’∫∂ Schreber’s frequent citations of poets, including this passage by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other references to Tannhäuser and Richard Wagner, situate his poetic knowledge as a discursive register of authority that is akin to, and the inverse of, the scientific register he emulates. Unlike science, which cannot prove the existence of eternity, poetry has the potential to assert the immanence of being and the presence of souls across time.∫∑ 3 Religion (Synthesis) As he states in his open letter to Professor Flechsig of March 1903, Schreber’s explicit goal in the writing of his autobiography is ‘‘solely to further knowledge of truth in a vital field, that of religion.’’∫∏ Scholasticism contributed to philosophical theology what Louis Dupré characterizes as ‘‘a science of God based exclusively on rational arguments.’’∫π Seeking the proof of God’s existence and his availability to human interaction, Schreber hopes to posit a scholastic theory. He claims that his examples of God’s knowledge ‘‘illustrate exactly the way in which for centuries scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages treated predestination and related questions.’’∫∫ Speculating about God’s potential to know the future and to ‘‘determine the number which is to win in the lottery,’’∫Ω Schreber imagines that God in fact is the tuché, the encounter with the real. However, by way of his certainty and his omniscience, God precisely takes chance out of the tuché and inserts a constant state of the fantasy that marks the real.Ω≠ The very impossibility of properly knowing God insures that this fantasy is in fact a brush with the real. Schreber articulates God’s knowledge in light of scholastic concerns. Moving from a concern with human life to flies in the spider’s web to the numbers in the lottery to a political assertion of global conflict, the particularities and the generalities of God’s omniscience renWe Have Never Been Schreber 145 der moot any concern with causality, as God dominates cause itself. Causality is premised on fragmentation and schizophrenia. As Étienne Gilson explains, ‘‘That we may have causality in the strict sense of the term means that we must have two beings and that something of the being of the cause passes into the being of that which undergoes the effect;’’ thus ‘‘being is the ultimate root of causality.’’Ω∞ Not content with a split between the soul and the body, and resisting the alliances with Cartesian vigilance and the state of constant thinking that barrages his mind, Schreber imagines that his union with God will occur by way of copulation. The proof of God’s existence, then, will be materialized in the form of the maternal Schreber’s children. In this way, Schreber inverts not only the trajectory of desire (shifting an expression of love into a threat of persecution), but also the dynamic by which we have come to know the power of the phallic mother. His picturing is precisely linked to his need to become the mother of the new world order and, as such, binds him to representation. Lacan reflects on this connection when he wonders, ‘‘Could we not say that desire itself is an effect of representation, of the bringing-to-presence, and that insofar as desire is always desire for something (something that would be God or a representation thereof ), it is bound up with the teleological thought of meaning?’’Ω≤ The neurotic block preventing representation becomes the psychotic flow in which representation abounds by way of Schreber’s desire to disseminate his experience through the Memoirs. This scene of representation calls attention to the relationship between belief and proof. As David Tracy points out, ‘‘God, religiously construed, is not primarily the problem of consciousness but the question of the unconscious. Mystics (and Jacques Lacan) know this.’’Ω≥ It is precisely the gap between the signifier and the signified that establishes the foundation on which the paranoiac builds his airy castle. This is one of the paradoxical elements of paranoia: heterogeneity fails the subject by reminding him of the difference between the signifier and the signified; yet homogeneity fails the subject by eliding difference and denying crucial subjective distinctions among words, things, objects, and beings. If both realism and nominalism are paranoid—if, in fact, the quarrel of the universals is paranoid—how do we know God?Ω∂ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari perceive an aporetic structure of schizophrenia such that the assertion and its simultaneous negation, ‘‘I am God I am not God, I am God I am Man,’’ do 146 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel not synthesize but remain parallel, ambivalent statements and beliefs. For them, this failure to synthesize is the reason that ‘‘the schizophrenic God has so little to do with the God of religion.’’Ω∑ Alon Kantor reframes this question when, in ‘‘Ethics and Simulacrum,’’ he asks, ‘‘Can God be ‘known’ otherwise than in Schreber’s way?’’Ω∏ Schreber synthesizes poetics and science to imitate Meister Eckhart’s paradoxical prayer, ‘‘I pray to God to save me from God.’’Ωπ Schreber achieves his goal of contributing to the fields of scholasticism, religious knowledge, and scientific knowledge by illustrating that in the field of psychosis the distinctions between realism and nominalism collapse. The articulation of the fantasized relationship between the word and the thing itself, in which the solipsistic reality of the speaking subject perceives a unity of internal thought and external reality, suggests a dialectical synthesis of the nominalist and the realist epistemic systems. In this manner, Schreber’s cosmology gestures toward a fantasmatic state of omniscience akin to that epistemic system projected onto, or imagined in, God. As such, his mystical approach to knowledge and language fuses belief and proof, religion and science, and realism and nominalism in a manner that indeed contributes a unique theological imaginary to the scholastic debates and to psychiatry—the so-called science of the soul.Ω∫ we (synthesis ii) We are all budding paranoids.—François Roustang With schizoids anything is possible.—Peter Sloterdijk The psychotic appears as the antithesis—or is it antidote?—to the Enlightenment. ‘‘Enlightenment,’’ writes Sloterdijk, ‘‘means to affirm all antischizophrenic movements.’’ΩΩ The same can be said for modernity and its inveterate practice of marking off the lines between self and not-self, sane and insane, treatable and untreatable. Schreber was a kind of lightning rod for the modern psychiatric power of defining madness as something containable within categories of affect, behavior, and thought, which are taken to symbolize pathological difference. Schreber both saw himself in terms of that psychiatric discourse, consulting, for example, the sixth edition of Emil Kraepelin’s Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie in order to compare his halluciWe Have Never Been Schreber 147 nations with those described in the textbook, and saw himself as an exception to such a ‘‘rationalistic and purely materialistic’’ way of describing what for him were certainly ‘‘supernatural’’ phenomena.∞≠≠ Indeed, it was precisely by sifting through a psychiatric textbook, determining what ‘‘fit’’ and what did not, that Schreber unsettled the older metaphysical dualism of sanity and insanity through the new empiricism. He experiments with the possibility of a supernatural subjectivity, offering his readers a sense of how it would be to live simultaneously at the very heights of connectedness to the divine and at the very depths of social isolation and psychic pain brought by malevolent others. In this sense, Schreber truly is our modern Lancelot, split between radically different worlds that are only superficially so. The ‘‘legitimation crisis’’ that, according to Jürgen Habermas, represents political modernity and, according to Eric Santner, calls upon Schreber to negotiate a world that is worthy both of paranoia and more so of trust and solidarity, radically alters the conditions in which something like enlightenment may have any meaning at all.∞≠∞ The stage has been set for a kind of schizoid ‘‘free-for-all’’ wherein strategies such as cynicism and paranoia become appropriate for functioning in a morally ambiguous world. Sloterdijk’s cynic behaves like Freud’s paranoiac: By day, colonizer, at night, colonized; by occupation, valorizer and administered; officially a cynical functionary, privately a sensitive soul; at the office a giver of orders, ideologically a discussant; outwardly a follower of the reality principle, inwardly a subject oriented toward pleasure; functionally an agent of capital, intentionally a democrat; with respect to the system a functionary of reification, with respect to the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), someone who achieves self-realization; objectively a strategist of destruction, subjectively a pacifist; basically someone who triggers catastrophes, in one’s own view, innocence personified.∞≠≤ A delusional system supports this ethical concoction; knowledge is fragmented, and the paranoiac, like the cynic, uses disavowal strategically, carving out a quasi-utopian space, even if it never objectively seems to be one. Despite its sociocultural pervasiveness, a schizoid position is hard to maintain for the simple reason that it ultimately issues in the violence of depersonalization, self-destructing in the process, only to begin another cycle.∞≠≥ R. D. Laing once observed that, phenomenologically speaking, nothing separates the scientist or physician, who turns persons into objects of 148 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel study, from the psychotic patient, since both engage in acts of intentional depersonalization.∞≠∂ Laing was a powerful advocate for psychotic subjectivity, carefully placing it in the context of how, given untenable circumstances, a ‘‘rational’’ person might act. ‘‘Without exception,’’ Laing notes, ‘‘the experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.’’∞≠∑ Citing Schreber’s preoccupation with soul murder as an example of strategic self-murder in order to survive, Laing notes that all types of psychosis share a formal feature, namely, ‘‘the denial of being, as a means of preserving being.’’∞≠∏ The strategy is essentially masochistic, though Laing does not use that term, and is consistent with everyday neurotic and perverse formations of subjectivity that convert passivity into activity in order to achieve what the master theorist of masochism, Theodor Reik, neatly summarized as ‘‘victory through defeat.’’∞≠π This masochism has the power to temper somewhat the violence of depersonalization. For the most part, Schreber’s violence is linguistic, consisting in specific speech acts such as bellowing, hearing voices denouncing him as ‘‘Luder!’’ (filthy whore), or experiencing himself ‘‘represented’’ as a soul murderer just like Flechsig. Indeed, acts of being represented are most acutely felt by Schreber as attacks against his innermost self; in short, his identity is up for grabs.∞≠∫ In an important footnote elaborating upon the notion of representing, defined as ‘‘giving to a thing or a person a semblance different from its real nature,’’ Schreber emphasizes that the familiarity of souls and God with human beings is based only upon the singularity of a momentary impression through nerve contact.∞≠Ω This fleeting contact, owing to the interference of Flechsig’s ‘‘tested soul,’’ prevents an understanding of ‘‘living man as an organism.’’ Schreber then reasons that even though one may be acted upon according to impressions, or represented, such treatment ultimately amounts to a ‘‘self-deception quite useless in practice’’ since ‘‘a human being naturally has in his actual behavior, and particularly in the (human) language, the means of establishing his true nature against intended ‘representing.’ ’’∞∞≠ Schreber’s paranoia finds its own antidote in the symbolic realm where the rift between signifier and signified can be healed. The trace of the rift must, however, remain within the paranoid system; to close it forever would be to take up the position of the neuroanatomist Flechsig, for whom no gap can be admitted since the physiology of the brain or body is the preWe Have Never Been Schreber 149 eminent site where signifier and signified become indistinguishable. Schreber’s catalog of ‘‘miracles,’’ including the excruciating ‘‘chest-compression miracle’’ and the miracle of the little men, or ‘‘little devils,’’ who assemble on his head and pull his eyelids up and down, is to be understood then as that which ‘‘represents’’ him as psychotic. Yet precisely because they represent him, the miracles in effect protect him by demonstrating that there is a gap between how he is made to appear and what he is.∞∞∞ To dismiss the whole system of knowledge at work here as delusional would be to miss the central, indeed the only, issue for the paranoiac, namely, as Lacan has identified it, knowing in relation to certainty, not in relation to reality.∞∞≤ Put simply, what marks Schreber as different from putatively sane persons is not a failure to distinguish reality from unreality—that the judge can do—but his radical certainty. ‘‘The very nature of what he is certain of,’’ argues Lacan, ‘‘can quite easily remain completely ambiguous, covering the entire range from malevolence to benevolence. But it means something unshakable for him.’’∞∞≥ If the litmus test for madness is, therefore, not whether one can distinguish reality from unreality, but instead where—the inner world or the outer world—and the intensity with which one directs certainty, then clinical descriptions of paranoia, including those by Freud, can easily be confused with ‘‘the most wonderful descriptions of the behavior of everyone.’’∞∞∂ The nonpsychotic relates to the world with a firm sense of reality precisely because he or she lacks absolute certainty. The inverse relation between reality-sense and certainty may at first be counterintuitive until it is recognized as underpinning the aims of analysis and, we suggest, as grounding contemporary subjectivity. ‘‘What guarantees,’’ Mikkel BorchJacobsen asks, echoing Lacan, ‘‘that the so-called normal personality is not fundamentally paranoid?’’∞∞∑ The answer, as far as Lacan is concerned, is little. Indeed, a form of paranoia marks the emergence of human subjectivity and constitutes the aim of analysis.∞∞∏ Apropos forms of ‘‘paranoiac knowledge,’’ Lacan suggests in ‘‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’’ that the ‘‘highly systematized, in some sense filtered, and properly checked’’ mechanism of analysis aims at ‘‘inducing in the subject a guided paranoia.’’∞∞π But outside the analytic setting, persons routinely reject certainty in order, it seems, to cope with the possibility that reality is worse than it appears. Lacan’s illuminating summary of ordinary avoidances of seriousness returns us to the problem of cynicism: 150 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel What characterizes a normal subject is precisely that he never takes seriously certain realities that he recognizes exist. You are surrounded by all sorts of realities about which you are in doubt, some of which are particularly threatening, but you don’t take them fully seriously, for you think . . . that the worst is not always certain, and maintain yourselves in an average, basic—in the sense of relating to the base—state of blissful uncertainty, which makes possible for you a sufficiently relaxed existence. Surely, certainty is the rarest of things for the normal subject.∞∞∫ The ethical and political consequences of ‘‘blissful uncertainty’’ should be clear, even certain. In the name of existential calm we avoid conclusive relations to the threatening realities everywhere around us. Likewise, in the name of consumption, we surrender to the seductions of the capitalist sensurround without the paranoia often required to resist, and ultimately replace, our reality. One of Jean Baudrillard’s keenest insights is that seduction is stronger than production; that is, if capitalism worked by direct force rather than by techniques of pampering, stupefaction, and the debasement of minds, it would not be nearly as effective as it is.∞∞Ω Realities of force typically engender reactions associated with trauma-related psychic sequelae, including a spectrum of increasingly prevalent mental defense conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), depression, substance abuse, somatic disorders, dissociation, and anxiety.∞≤≠ Seduction and, concomitantly, alienation engender psychotic (schizoid and paranoid) defense reactions. The question we would-be Schrebers may ask is: Are we willing to forfeit our reality-sense, such as it is, for the certainties that may alter it forever and perhaps for the better? Or, put another way, will we choose, with Schreber, how we wish to be represented? Paranoia, then, as florid sign of cultural health: Benjamin had already pointed us here in his 1928 reflection on the new ‘‘fruitful . . . legitimate’’ quality of books by the mentally ill.∞≤∞ Reading and, as we have suggested, writing paranoia are important markers of modernity, and living (our) paranoia has emerged as another such indicator, one posing a wide range of sociological questions that transcend individual psychopathology and private morality.∞≤≤ Engaging the meditations on schizo-existence by Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Thomas Szasz, Franco Basaglia, Joseph Gabel, and Deleuze and Guattari, one is led to the conclusion that we are already enjoying our symptoms, perhaps a bit too much in the sense that we have become prisoners of a reality that largely forecloses We Have Never Been Schreber 151 dissociation and, with it, a sense of the possible. Gabel called this existential condition ‘‘morbid authenticity,’’ a state of being in which, we might say, one is not paranoid enough to be able to lie.∞≤≥ Schreber was an astonishing liar who was able to deduce possibilities, of which he was certain, from realities of which he was profoundly uncertain. That he could trade on the Middle Ages in order to produce something new appears to be less than we can hope for and more than we can bear. notes The authors would like to acknowledge the consultations and/or inspirations of the following persons: Andrew Cole, Zvi Lothane, Wolfgang Natter, and Stephen Sonnenberg. 1 For example, the translators Macalpine and Hunter, in the 1988 edition of the Memoirs, note that ‘‘Schreber is now the most frequently quoted patient in psychiatry’’ and that he is mentioned in nearly all textbooks of mental disorders, including the Casebook accompanying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R); see Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1988 edition), 8; 11. 2 Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness; all page references are to the 2000 edition except where noted. Zvi Lothane has suggested that a more accurate translation of the title might be Great Thoughts of a Nervous Patient; see Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 1–2. 3 Freud, ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),’’ in Standard Edition, 12:3–82. 4 Canetti, The Conscience of Words, 25. Important early psychiatric texts using Schreber to illustrate schizophrenia include Bleuler, Dementia Praecox; Jaspers, General Psychopathology; and Jung, Psychology of Dementia Praecox. 5 Freud, ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes,’’ in Standard Edition, 12:71. 6 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 193–94. 7 See Freud, ‘‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’’ (1909), in Standard Edition, 10:5–149; and Barnes, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness. Barnes discovered her artistic talent after psychotherapeutic treatment for schizophrenia with R. D. Laing. 8 See Schreber, Memoirs, 87. Notably, Schreber’s theological vision of history is based on the medieval principle of translatio imperii (transference of empire); see his historical ordering of ‘‘God’s chosen peoples,’’ which moves from East to West, culminating with the Germans (Memoirs, 27). 9 Ibid., 94–95. 10 Ibid., 82. 11 See Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, 91–141. On the influence of Dionysian 152 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 thought on Suger’s aesthetic visions, see Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis. Schreber, Memoirs, 22. See Freud, ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes,’’ in Standard Edition, 12:65; 72. Schreber, Memoirs, 139. See ibid., 16. Ibid., 93. See, for example, Freud, ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes,’’ in Standard Edition, 12:47; 18. In the years since Freud analyzed Schreber’s writing, the religious fantasies of psychotic patients have been discussed in the psychoanalytic literature. See, for example, Fairbairn, ‘‘Notes on the Religious Phantasies of a Female Patient,’’ and Kaufman, ‘‘Religious Delusions in Schizophrenia.’’ See the discussion in Shengold, ‘‘Child Abuse and Deprivation Soul Murder’’ and Soul Murder. For the relevant discussion in Kaspar Hauser Feuerbach, see Anselm von Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser, 55–56. Feuerbach, Lost Prince, is a new translation of the case by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. See Shengold: ‘‘Soul murder has to do with crime: there is an inherent moral protest in the term. Soul murder is a crime characterized by man’s inhumanity to man. One man uses his power over another to crush his individuality, his dignity, his capacity to feel deeply (to feel joy, love, and even hate); and, as implied in von Feuerbach’s description, to stifle the victim’s use of his mind—his capacity to think rationally and to test reality’’ (‘‘Child Abuse and Deprivation Soul Murder,’’ 536). For the linkages of unmanning to soul murder, see Schreber, Memoirs, 67; for morality, see ibid., 66. On the racial meanings of Schreber’s delusional system, see Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 132–68. Flechsig, Die körperlichen Grundlagen der Geistesstörungen. See also his Gehirn und Seele. Karl Jaspers notes that ‘‘even provisional anatomical constructs are preferable to mere psychological investigation. These anatomical constructions, however, became quite fantastic (e.g., Meynert, Wernicke) and have rightly been called ‘Brain Mythologies’ ’’ (General Psychopathology, 1:18). On Franz Nissl as the first to use the expression, see Bumke, ‘‘Fünfzig Jahre Psychiatrie,’’ 1141. See Lothane, In Defense of Schreber. Heinroth’s psychiatric concepts were preeminently guided by Protestant Christian doctrine; according to Heinroth, the etiology of mental disorders (Seelenstörungen, or disorders of the soul, by which he understood only the endogenous disorders) was located in guilt caused by the mentally ill person himself. This guilt was grounded in sin, a turning away from God and the commandments, as exemplified in a life of physical or earthly satisfaction. See Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Störungen. For an excellent discussion of Heinroth’s religious and ethical conceptualization of sin, see Steinberg, ‘‘The Sin in the Aetiological Concept of Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), Part 1’’ and ‘‘The Sin in the Aetiological Concept of Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), Part 2.’’ We Have Never Been Schreber 153 25 Flechsig, Die körperlichen Grundlagen, 3–4. 26 Freud referred, in his 1893 obituary of Jean-Martin Charcot, to Flechsig’s scientific findings as having ‘‘ushered in a new epoch in our knowledge of the ‘localization of nervous diseases’ ’’ (Freud, ‘‘Charcot,’’ in Standard Edition, 3:15). 27 Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, 205; see also Santner, My Own Private Germany, 70. 28 Schreber, Memoirs, 92. 29 Benjamin was well acquainted with Schreber’s case, and kept the judge’s memoirs in his library on a special shelf reserved for works by the mentally ill. See Benjamin, ‘‘Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Collection.’’ See also Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 57; and Benjamin’s letter to Scholem (July 21, 1925), in Benjamin, Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 279. On the ‘‘strange similarity between the feminized posture of the translator (or translation), and Schreber, who attracted Benjamin’s interest,’’ see Clej, ‘‘The Debt of the Translator,’’ 13. 30 Benjamin, ‘‘Books by the Mentally Ill,’’ 130. 31 This syndrome was later called the Kandinsky-Clerambault syndrome. See Kandinsky, ‘‘Zur Lehre von den Hallucinationen.’’ 32 Rychlinski, ‘‘Ein Fall hallucinatorisch-periodischer Psychose.’’ 33 Forel, ‘‘Selbst-Biographie eines Falles von Mania acuta.’’ 34 See, for example, David, ‘‘Halluzinationen.’’ 35 Certeau, The Writing of History. See also Freccero, ‘‘Toward a Psychoanalytics of Historiography.’’ 36 For thoughtful accounts of the various ways that modernity has constructed the Middle Ages, see Bloch and Nichols, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. 37 See Nichols, ‘‘Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,’’ 29. 38 See Leupin, ‘‘What is Modernity?’’ Leupin’s discussion is central to this essay as a means of addressing the secularization thesis at stake in the debate between Blumenberg and Löwith. See Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Löwith, Meaning in History. 39 Fredric Jameson, foreword to Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, viii. See also Leupin, Lacan and the Human Sciences, and Glynos and Stavrakakis, Lacan and Science. Erin Labbie has addressed Lacan’s idealization of the hard sciences and the role of science within psychoanalysis in her Lacan’s Medievalism, 151–81. 40 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 8. 41 Ibid., 24–31. For an analysis of Schreber’s ‘‘language games,’’ see Wiethaus, ‘‘Cherchez la femme.’’ 42 On Schreber as a body of writing, see Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning, 267; Lukacher, ‘‘Schreber’s Juridical Opera’’; and Kittler, Discourse Networks, 194–95. 43 Schreber, Memoirs, 62. 44 Ibid. 45 Lacan, ‘‘Structure des psychoses paranoïaques.’’ 46 Lacan, The Psychoses. 47 Lacan, Television, 19. 154 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel 48 For a clear discussion of the role of discourse in the scene of schizophrenia, see also Copjec, ‘‘The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine.’’ An important avenue of inquiry that we are addressing in our extended work on Schreber is the role of the idealization of science and the techne. As a disorder that is characterized precisely by way of technological defense mechanisms, paranoid schizophrenia is a disease of the subjective refusal to assimilate modernity and the technological ‘‘advances’’ that accompany it. For an argument along these lines, contextualized in early Russian cinema, see Yampolsky, ‘‘Mask Face and Machine Face’’; and, for ones contextualized in terms of cyberculture, see Roberts, ‘‘Wired,’’ and Marsden, ‘‘Cyberpsychosis.’’ 49 See Lothane, In Defense of Schreber, and Israëls, Schreber: Father and Son. 50 Lucas, ‘‘The Semiotics of Schreber’s Memoirs’’ (emphasis in original). 51 Ibid. See also Santner, My Own Private Germany. 52 Jacques-Alain Miller discusses this lack in ‘‘The Names-of-the-Father.’’ 53 Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 91. 54 Dr. Guido Weber was director of the Sonnenstein Asylum, where Schreber was confined from June 1894 to December 1902. Weber was a forensic expert for the court, and his reports on Schreber were submitted as documents adjudicating the issue of Schreber’s guardianship and confinement. Schreber included these reports as appendices to his own Memoirs, 327–48; 388–404. 55 Schreber, Memoirs, 181. 56 See also Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, 208–15. 57 These advancements include apparatuses such as the camera, which lent new potential for empiricism (as well as fantasy) to culture by way of photography and film. See Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),’’ in Selected Writings, 1935–1938, 101–33. And consider that Frederick Engels mourns the obsession with the copy and the object rather than the original and the signifier in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. 58 Milner, ‘‘Lacan and the Ideal of Science,’’ 29. See also Koyré, Galileo Studies (originally published as Études galiléennes, 1939). 59 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 69. 60 Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, 39. 61 Ibid., 51–52. 62 Schreber’s architectural sketches of his location in the asylum support a perception of his attempts at a social relationship. In sketching his physical position within the asylum, Schreber demonstrates his need to draw the space in which he dwells, providing us with an image of his atomic location within the panoptical view of the institution, of ideology, and of God as the Father and Other. Additionally, Freud’s own account of his apartments mirrors Schreber’s paranoid display. For a smart parallel between Freud and Schreber’s paranoid system, see Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest. 63 Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, 52. We Have Never Been Schreber 155 64 Ibid., 53. See also Certeau, ‘‘The Gaze of Nicholas of Cusa.’’ Schreber’s hallucinations of the devil recall the famous case of Christof Haizmann, as studied by Freud, ‘‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,’’ in Standard Edition, 19:69–105; and Macalpine and Hunter, Schizophrenia 1677. 65 In fact, the spoken testimony of an illiterate witness took precedence over the written testimony of a literate witness, as documented in Barker, Tremulous Private Body. 66 Barker, Tremulous Private Body, 70. 67 Ibid., 73. 68 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 307. 69 Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 178. 70 Lacan, The Psychoses, 78. 71 Schreber, Memoirs, 16. 72 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 138. 73 Freud, ‘‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’’ in Standard Edition, 19:69–105; Macalpine and Hunter, Schizophrenia 1677. 74 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 283. 75 Ronell, The Telephone Book, 454n147; Lyotard quotations from Discours, figure. 76 Freud, ‘‘Psychoanalytic Notes,’’ in Standard Edition, 12:63. 77 Kristeva, Black Sun, 11. 78 See Kittler, ‘‘The Scholar’s Tragedy: Prelude in the Theater,’’ in Discourse Networks, 3–24; Rickels, ‘‘Faust, Freud, and the Missing Entries into War.’’ 79 Roustang, How to Make a Paranoid Laugh, 37. 80 In The Telephone Book, Ronell explains that the ‘‘always already’’ is different from the a priori and that, as a temporal priority, the former refers to an ‘‘anteriority of essence and presence’’ (430n89). This temporality is crucial for an understanding of the play of the medieval and the modern as dislocated concepts that are not bound by time. See Uebel, ‘‘Opening Time.’’ 81 Nietzsche, ‘‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’’ (‘‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn,’’ 1873), in Philosophy and Truth, 79–91. Lacan’s classic treatment of metaphor and metonymy is ‘‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,’’ in Écrits, 412–41. 82 Schreber, Memoirs, 192. 83 Ibid., 192–93. 84 Ibid., 21. 85 The poetics of the soul is in constant conflict with the end of time. Immanence is poetic knowledge: ‘‘The soul of a child . . . might only have preserved it for the same number of years it had lived’’ (ibid., 29). 86 Schreber, Memoirs, 7. 87 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 178. 88 Schreber, Memoirs, 230. 89 Ibid., 231n104. 156 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 See Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Gilson, Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, 86. Lacan, ‘‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar,’’ in Television, 90. Tracy, ‘‘Mystics, Prophets, Rhetorics,’’ 260. See also Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, and Harshorne, Man’s Vision of God. For Burke, human beings learn by learning negatives (‘‘thou shalt not’’); this is important for an understanding of the grammar and consciousness of the paranoiac. The shifting of a positive into a negative functions to sediment a consciousness of God’s language. See Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 77. This volume and its companion, A Thousand Plateaus, argue for the centrality of schizophrenia within culture. See also Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 192–95. Other thinkers positing a deep connection between modernity (or capitalism as modernity) and schizophrenia include R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Joseph Gabel, Franco Basaglia, and Peter Sloterdijk. Kantor, ‘‘Ethics and Simulacrum,’’ 488. Kantor also asserts that Schreber’s God is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition; see ibid., 487–88. Tracy, ‘‘Mystics, Prophets, Rhetorics,’’ 270. For a developed discussion of psychiatry as the science of the soul, as well as the relationship between the soul and the brain, see Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, in Collected Works, 158–78. ‘‘Unfortunately only too often no further knowledge reaches us of the things that are being played out on the dark side of the soul, because all the bridges have broken down which connect that side with this’’ (178). Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 120. Schreber, Memoirs, 269. See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, and Santner, My Own Private Germany, 145. According to Santner, Schreber acts out and works through an ‘‘investiture crisis’’ (xii, 40, 143). Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 113. The characterization of contemporary culture as schizoid is most elegantly articulated by Rollo May; see, for example, his Love and Will. See Laing, Divided Self, 23 Laing, Politics of Experience, 78–79 (emphasis in original). Laing, Divided Self, 161. See Reik, Masochism in Modern Man. See, for example, Schreber, Memoirs, 34; 124–25; 151. Ibid., 124n62. Ibid., 125n62. The question of what the miracles protect Schreber from is a complex one, the full answer to which exceeds the limits of this essay. Schreber had and has a lot to defend himself against—from the cruelties of asylum life to misinterpretations and mishandlings at the hands of psychiatrists and analysts continuing until the We Have Never Been Schreber 157 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 present. For a complete ‘‘defense’’ of Schreber, see Lothane, In Defense of Schreber. A good case for the ways Schreber defends himself against the dehumanizing effects of mechanization can be made; for one such attempt, see Roberts, ‘‘Wired.’’ See Lacan, The Psychoses, 75–79. Ibid., 75. Cf., on this point, Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, who reads Schreber’s ‘‘unshakeable sense of certainty’’ in the context of the loss of the sense of reality (279). ‘‘Absolute certainty without reality’’ is thus a shorthand definition of psychosis (ibid.). Lacan, The Psychoses, 19. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, 32. Lacan sees paranoia as structurally necessary for the emergence of human subjectivity. The subject emerges when, in the mirror stage, the ego is constituted as a specular Other and as an object of paranoid identification. The mimicry of the mirror stage structures the ‘‘specular I,’’ which is turned, with the intrusion of the symbolic, into the ‘‘social I.’’ Entry into the symbolic inevitably entails what Lacan calls the ‘‘paranoiac alienation’’ of the subject (‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in Écrits, 79). As Muller and Richardson comment, ‘‘captivation by the image of the other in transitivism leads to paranoiac identification’’ (Lacan and Language, 40). Lacan, ‘‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,’’ in Écrits, 91; 89. Lacan, The Psychoses, 74. See Baudrillard, Seduction. For a fine study of trauma-related disorders from a mind-body perspective, see Bremner, Does Stress Damage the Brain? For readings of the potentially positive aftereffects of trauma on identity, see Wilson, Posttraumatic Self. Benjamin, ‘‘Books by the Mentally Ill,’’ 130; see also note 29 in this essay. One of the more important studies along these lines is Gabel, False Consciousness. Gabel sees false consciousness as a purer form of schizophrenia than clinically observable schizophrenia, due to false consciousness’s intense powers of reification. However, he is clear about his adherence to a dualist conception of schizophrenia in which paranoia (in contrast to schizophrenic false consciousness) does not de-dialecticize cognition or necessarily defeat praxis (Gabel, False Consciousness, 209). Ibid., 158–59; this is not a moral condition, but a failure to deduce the possible from the actual. See also Cassirer, ‘‘Pathologie de la conscience symbolique.’’ 158 Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel