Memoirs of My Nervous Illness Book

It was alas not by way of Freud that I first came across the legendary Judge Schreber, perhaps history's most analyzed psychotic, but rather, being the dissolute young connoisseur of radical theoretical guerilla action that I once was, through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ANTI-OEDIPUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA. Judge Schreber appears in ANTI-OEDIPUS as a meritorious early example of the (post)modern schizo. Deleuze and Guattari advocate for the schizo (which is never the same thing exactly as extolling the virtue of your everyday clinical schizophrenic). They celebrate modes of experience which explode the binary apparatus, pursue startling lines of flight, precipitate nomadic cartographies, and manifestly disrupt conventions inherent to social assemblages. In his work with and without Guattari, Deleuze frequently extolled the value of creativity and creation. The schizo creates a world and with a world, always against the grain of the dominant rational (social) order. If ANTI-OEDIPUS is distinguished by its unstinting assault on Freud's persistence in territorializing the delusional psyche around a regimented system of entrenched clinicized mythology (especially the daddy-mommy-me assemblage at the heart of the Oedipus complex), some of us who have read the CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA books will be reminded by Rosemary Dinnage, in her introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Schreber's MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS, that Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless continue to operate in debt to Freud: it was the father of psychoanalysis who first introduced the idea of "Wahnbildungsarbeit," which essentially imparts the principle of an active process at the heart of the "work of delusion-formation" allowing the psychotic person to integrate delusion into an overarching picture of the world. This is a concept that Dinnage avers would have been completely alien to the medical professionals, some very schooled indeed, who oversaw Schreber's care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I recall Deleuze and Guattari writing rapturously about Schreber's "solar anus," insisting that this hallucinated holy orifice is just as much of reality as is anything else. Imagine my surprise now at having finally gotten around to MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS and discovering that among the prodigious inventory of marvels on display nary a single instance of rays emerging from the judge's posterior is to be accounted for, though the poor man is indeed endlessly assailed by said rays. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari got the memoirs mixed up with Georges Bataille, who did indeed write a marvelous essay entitled "The Solar Anus." It seems to me to bear noting, probably because I very recently read it, that MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS also has some points of curious intersection with Bataille's essay "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh." Van Gogh also spent time in Asylums, occasionally extremely far gone, and suffered a tormented, obsessive relationship with the sun. When I read the CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA books as a young man I had no firsthand experience of psychosis. That was to change. You see, I suffer from bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I experienced periodic psychosis in my twenties and two prolonged full-fledged psychotic episodes (resulting in hospitalization) more harrowing I am certain than anybody who has never experienced such things can possibly imagine. I, of course, having plenty of reason to be grateful that, unlike in the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, no psychotic episode I experienced became broadly progressive, going on for years and years, almost entirely determining the character of my life. I do, however, know what it is like to hear voices and completely believe in their realness. Schreber heard many voices. Many, many voices. The voices in large part provided for him a rich lexicon to accompany the overwhelming nervous phenomena from which he could not extricate himself. Here is a list of terms the voices habitually utilized: The Order of the World, nerve-contact, nerve-language, soul-language, soul murder, soul-voluptuousness, the Eternal Jew, unmanning, rays, "forecourts of heaven," fleeting-improvised-men, "little men" ("hundreds if not thousands" of "little men" a few millimetres in height living briefly on Schreber's head and later in his body), the seer of spirits, Prince of Hell, Divine Judgment, "the cursed play-with-human-beings," "new human beings out of Schreber's spirit," tying-to-celestial-bodies, writing-down-system, listening-in-thought, "the cursed creation-of-a-false-feeling," the head-compressing-machine miracle, the so-what-party, the bellowing-miracle, the cries of help, birds created by miracle, "the capacity to answer at first sight," spontaneous generation, frightening miracle, automatic-remembering-thought. This is simply a compressed list of some of the building blocks with which the ill Schreber rebuilt his world. I especially relate to the fleeting-improvised-men. I associate with the onset of psychosis people who are there and then just suddenly magically not. At his most unwell Schreber believed that The Order of the World was so utterly in a state of abject strife that no living humans currently occupied it save himself, and that all people with whom he communicated were fleeting-improvised. Schreber believed himself in contact with God. At all times. But God, you see, was two. Upper God (Ariman) and Lower God (Ormuzd). He believed himself immortal, by virtue of the attraction he exerted on God, souls, and rays, but also subject to endless miracles of infirmity. At times he believed himself to have both Leprosy and the bubonic plague. Because of his hyper-attraction to souls, "scorpions" were put in his head: "tiny crab- or spider-like structures which were to carry out some work of destruction in my head." They were divided into Aryan and Catholic scorpions. Schreber believes the "holiness" of his "purpose" saved him from serious compromise as regards the scorpions (and all other physical adversities). Central to Schreber's delusion-formation was the belief that he was (unmanning) being turned into a woman so he could be impregnated in order to repopulate the world and restore the beyond to a condition of blessedness. Souls won't leave Schreber alone. Especially, it would seem, the soul of Flechsig, the man who happened to oversee the first of the Asylums where Schreber found himself constrained, and who could mess with the judge without necessarily having to be in the same room. Two Asylums and many years later: Flechsig continues to pester. Daniel Paul Schreber was a man of culture and considerable learning. Many of his faculties had returned commandingly to him by the time he penned his memoirs (in his third Asylum). He was the son of a kind of proto-Nazi Doctor Spock, a man who wrote child-rearing books focused on the importance of extremely regimented discipline. (His other brother committed suicide). A man of great discipline and never especially religious, Schreber's delusional conception of himself as the centre of cosmic (and explicitly divine) miracles can only appear fascinating and novel in the extreme, especially as it engenders the staunchest form of faith and something like an intricate theology. He writes almost soberly and with complete clarity about his experiences. He believed himself to be the most important person in the history of mankind from both a religious and scientific standpoint. This, he explains, is why he endeavoured to produce the memoirs (not without some reluctance): "it need hardly be said," he states early on, "what incalculable gain it would be for mankind if, through my personal fate, particularly as it will be shaped in the future, the foundation of mere materialism and of hazy pantheism would once and for all be demolished." Nobody has known God like he has know God. One cannot be miserly with such foundational knowledge. MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS does not consist of the memoirs alone (nor is the extra material confined to a number Postscripts he wrote prior to its original publication). In the back end of the present volume things get truly fascinating, almost shockingly so. You see, we are also treated to legal documents germane to Schreber's efforts to free himself from tutelage in order to be granted control of his own affairs (and to possibly be released from the Asylum). All of a sudden, in the five addenda with which it terminates, the book treats us to a captivating courtroom drama. Schreber himself deploying absolutely unimpeachable legalistic rhetoric whilst at the same time remaining steadfast in his convictions regarding the legitimacy of his spiritual insights is some of the most amazing shit I have ever read. And, my God, friend: the court's immaculately considered final decision on the case brings the fucking house down. This house at any rate. So, uh, what else to say? Extremely strongly recommended.