DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER VERSUS PSYCHIATRY
In my opinion science would go very wrong to designate as “hallucinations” all such phenomena that lack objective reality, and to throw them into the lumber room of things that do not exist.
—DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER
Daniel Paul Schreber, a newly appointed judge on the Supreme Appeals Court of the Kingdom of Saxony, in Dresden, began to go mad in the summer of 1893. He had experienced difficulties with his mental health once before, nine years earlier, and had been treated successfully at the psychiatric hospital at Leipzig University, run by the famed brain anatomist Paul Flechsig. Now, anxious about the prominent position he would soon take up, he began to have dreams that his illness had returned. They proved to be prophetic. Schreber began his job in the fall, and he worked so hard and with so little rest that he was soon at the point of collapse. He stopped sleeping. He heard strange crackling noises coming from the walls of his bedroom. In six weeks he had grown so desperate and suicidal that he was forced to leave his job and rush back to Leipzig for emergency treatment.
Flechsig had treated Schreber during his first illness with sedatives and bed rest, but nothing he could do now seemed to alleviate Schreber’s insomnia. Sleeping drugs were ineffective, and the asylum offered little solace for an ever-worsening condition. In just a few weeks Schreber grew so depressed that his doctor found himself unable to help. Then, after a winter of more failed treatments, Schreber’s condition took a turn toward the psychotic. He began to have persecutory fantasies and delusions. He believed that he was a “seer of spirits”; that the soul of Flechsig was plotting to commit “soul murder” against him; that he was being transformed into a woman so that his body could be sexually abused; that he was surrounded by ghostly replicas of human beings; that the world would soon end. He also began to hear innumerable voices that tormented him day and night—of Flechsig, of his mother and father, of his wife, of various “departed souls,” of the Pope, of “240 Benedictine Monks,” of the members of the “Students’ Corps Saxonia in Leipzig,” of the sun. By the spring of 1894, Schreber was so far gone that arrangements were made for him to be transferred to Sonnenstein, a state asylum for the severely mentally ill. He would spend the next eight and a half years there. His voices referred to it as the “Devil’s Castle.”
Schreber’s first year at Sonnenstein had both a religious and a torturous flavor. Even before his transfer he had begun to develop his own metaphysics, with peculiar ideas about God and reincarnation. These theories now grew more elaborate. At the same time, his suffering grew to unbearable heights. His voices made his waking life hell. They contradicted his every move; they compelled him to curse himself aloud; they claimed to be recording his life for posterity; they mocked him; they led him to bellow and bang his fists against the wall in a futile attempt to drown them out. Worst of all, they convinced Schreber that he was the last surviving man in the world, so that he was compelled to suffer in silence.
Schreber’s doctors at Sonnenstein did little to help him, but toward the end of 1895, his illness began to manufacture its own solution. Earlier, Schreber had considered himself the victim of a cosmic plot. Now he came to believe that he was the universe’s redeemer. His fate, he declared, was to grow female sexual organs, become impregnated by God, and restore the world to its lost state of bliss by giving birth to a new race of men. The fantasy brought him comfort, and he spent hours in women’s clothing, preening in front of a mirror. He also began to apply what psychiatrists call “reality testing” to his voices’ messages. In 1896, Schreber came to realize that he was not alone on the planet, and with this realization he experienced a renewed interest in life. He started to take copious notes on his illness and to seek a greater say in his future. In late 1894, as the result of a financial dispute with his wife, Schreber had been declared legally incompetent. In 1899, he filed a legal petition with the county court to have this status overturned and to gain the right to go home.
His plea failed. The director of Sonnenstein, the psychiatrist Guido Weber, argued that although Schreber had regained his formidable intellectual skills, his beliefs were still delusional and he was still psychotic. The defeat set off a three-year legal battle between doctor and patient. In 1900, Schreber appealed the court’s ruling, and to win his psychiatrist’s support and better acquaint him with his experiences, he produced a lengthy manuscript that he had stitched together from his notes and that he hoped one day to publish. This gambit failed as well. To Weber, Schreber’s book was further proof that he was irredeemably insane, and the intermediate court upheld the incarceration.
Undaunted, Schreber appealed a second time, now to the very court that he had briefly served on more than seven years before. Again, Weber challenged, but this time tepidly, and the court ruled in Schreber’s favor. Five months later, in December 1902, Schreber left the asylum. The following year his book was published to acclaim in the medical press. In German, the title was Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken—The Great Thoughts of a Nervous Patient. But it is better known as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.1
The above is a description not of the life of Daniel Paul Schreber but of “The Schreber Case,” which refers to his experiences and behavior from the years 1893 to 1903. The phrase comes from Sigmund Freud, who in 1911 published a celebrated paper on Schreber titled “Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” Freud had not treated Schreber, nor had he met him. His paper is based solely on Schreber’s book. But the acuity of Freud’s interpretation has helped raise Schreber into the ranks of psychiatric celebrity, and his book into the ranks of the classics. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness has been called the most written-about document in psychiatry’s history.
Freud first heard of Schreber from his protégé Carl Jung, whose doctoral dissertation had been published by the same house as the Memoirs and who had written a book in which he had discussed the case. Schreber fascinated the two men. They were amused by the neologisms Schreber’s voices were constantly inventing, such as “fleetingly-improvised men,” and they were staggered by his grasp of complex diagnostic issues. “The wonderful Schreber…ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital,” Freud wrote to Jung in 1910.2 The praise was only slightly in jest. At the time, psychoanalysis was facing dire threats, both from within and without, and Schreber’s conception of the world, with its strange terminology and obsession with unseen processes, was a convenient and comforting metaphor.3 What was more, it provided ballast for Freud’s revolutionary theory of sexuality. As he writes almost gleefully in his paper: “Schreber expresses himself on countless occasions in the manner of a follower of our prejudice. He always speaks of ‘nervosity’ and erotic lapses in the same breath, as if the two were inseparable.”4
The congruence between sex and mental illness is indeed glaring in the Memoirs. In the early phase of Schreber’s illness, while he is anxiously waiting to take up his judgeship, he is struck by the idea that “it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.”5 He pinpoints as the onset of the acute phase a night in Flechsig’s clinic in which he is wracked by half a dozen spontaneous orgasms. During the first half of his time at Flechsig’s, he is tormented by the feeling that his penis has been removed and that he is going to be raped. During the second half, he takes pleasure in sensations of feminine “voluptuousness.” These revelations were all welcome material for Freud, who concluded, not surprisingly, that Schreber had homosexual desires (specifically, that he wanted to be sodomized by Flechsig), which “provoked an intensive resistance on the part of Schreber’s personality, and the defensive struggle, which might perhaps as easily have been pursued in other forms, elected for reasons unknown to us that of a delusion of persecution.”6
Freud’s interpretation of Schreber’s case is outmoded—Schreber expressed not homosexual but transsexual desires—and is not generally well thought of today. The psychiatric critic Thomas Szasz, for example, has criticized Freud for devoting page after page to the erotic tenor of Schreber’s illness but “not a word to the problem posed by his imprisonment or his right to freedom.”7 A host of other writers have shifted the focus from Schreber’s sexuality to his potentially hostile feelings toward his father, a prominent physician. The elder Schreber, Moritz, published some thirty books on child-rearing, espousing a philosophy of total obedience and advocating the use of such posture-improving inventions as the Geradehalter, a system of bars and straps applied to force children into a rigid sitting position.8 Still other writers have traced Schreber’s madness to the social atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Germany. The novelist Elias Canetti even equated Schreber’s paranoia with Hitler’s, using lengthy quotes from the Memoirs to explain the rise of Nazism.9
Still, every interpreter of Schreber who has followed Freud owes a great debt to the innovative fact of his analysis. Before Freud, in the late nineteenth century, hallucinations and delusions were considered static phenomena. They were pathological, nothing more. After Freud, they became analyzable. The psychoanalyst Zvi Lothane, the author of In Defense of Schreber, a monumental and definitive history of the case, has pointed out that Freud did for psychosis what he had earlier done for the dream—by linking it with thought, emotion, and desire, he imbued it with meaning. Freud, Lothane writes, “restored to hallucinations the dignity of a personal redeeming epiphany.”10
But Freud’s elevation of the status of hallucinations and delusions was largely abstract. Even more than sex, the subject of the Memoirs is voice-hearing. Schreber dedicates dozens of pages and several chapters to minute, hairsplitting explications of what he alternately calls “nerve-language,” “inner voices,” and “rays.” His voices, as his constant companions and his abiding torment, naturally become his greatest subject. Yet Freud largely ignored them, consigning them to Schreber’s case history—the descriptive, preliminary chapter of his paper. The omission is both glaring and strange, for Freud himself had experienced voice-hearing. As he wrote in an early book on aphasia:
I remember having twice been in danger of my life, and each time the awareness of the danger occurred to me quite suddenly. On both occasions I felt “this was the end,” and while otherwise my inner language proceeded with only indistinct sound images and slight lip movements, in these situations of danger I heard the words as if somebody was shouting them into my ear, and at the same time I saw them as if they were printed on a piece of paper floating in the air.11
The omission was also influential. Freud’s paper holds canonical status in the literature on Schreber. Like the Bible, it can be disputed or dismissed, but it can never be fully ignored. Indeed, a great deal of the Schreber literature is essentially commentary on Freud, as if it were adorning and interpreting a theological text. Whatever the merits of this endeavor, it has led some authors to adopt Freud’s analytical framework uncritically. Interpreters of Schreber following Freud have treated the subject of voice-hearing not as an experience and mystery in its own right, but as the mere vehicle for a man’s traumas, anxieties, and passions. Its meaning is thought to lie in what may be extracted from it, such as the lasting trauma of being the subject of an authoritarian father’s experiments.
There is unquestionable value in this stance. Immanuel Kant, of whom Schreber was a dedicated follower, famously commented, “The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state.” Few people look to the act of dreaming for meaning. They look to the action that takes place within the dream and to the reality to which that action might refer. With Schreber, however, we can’t accept this valuation lightly, for it is not our dream that we are examining. It is Schreber’s—and the lead we must follow is his.
Schreber’s book is, on first and even second reading, extremely difficult to follow. In theory, the Memoirs has a structure. It begins with an overview of Schreber’s religious views, proceeds to a narrative of his experiences as an asylum inmate, and concludes with discussions of sundry topics of personal and metaphysical interest to Schreber— “the soul’s state of Blessedness,” “cries of help,” “soul-language.” In practice, however, the book is discursive and muddled. Locked in an institution with few salutary distractions, Schreber follows his mind where it leads him, and it often leads him astray. The result is a sort of second-rate modernist literary experiment.
Nevertheless, a chronological line of facts regarding Schreber’s voices can be traced through the rubble. For example, we learn that the event that marked the beginning of Schreber’s illness—the crackling noises that he heard coming from the walls of his bedroom and that, he writes, he thought at first were mice—grew into speech four months later, after the disturbingly orgasmic night in Flechsig’s asylum. We also learn that the voices took a parabolic course through Schreber’s illness. They began with Flechsig’s voice, proliferated until they became “nonsensical twaddle” in his head, and ultimately quieted down. By the time Schreber had actively begun to fight for his release from Sonnenstein, six years into his incarceration, his voices had come to sound like “sand trickling from an hour glass.”
Yet the linear narrative of Schreber’s voices tells us very little about what they meant to him and what they felt like, and nothing at all about how he lived with them on a day-to-day basis. To understand these things we have to look at Schreber’s voices not chronologically but descriptively. What nouns does he use to explain them? What verbs? What adjectives? Unfortunately, these questions have complex answers. Freud has observed of Schreber’s theology that it is “so peculiar, so full of contradictory determinants, that it is only with a dose of good faith that we can hold on to the expectation of finding ‘method’ in this ‘madness.’”12 The statement applies to Schreber’s phenomenology as well. Besieged by twaddle, his descriptions grow confused.
The problem doesn’t at first appear to be great. Like Jesus Christ, to whom he compares himself, Schreber states explicitly that he does not intend his words to be taken literally: “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…understandable to a certain degree is by comparing them with known facts of human experience.”13 Throughout the Memoirs, Schreber appears to treat voice-hearing as one of these “supernatural matters” and the physical sense of hearing as a “known fact of human experience” by reference to which voice-hearing can be understood. He makes this point quite clearly in the book’s fifth chapter, in which he seeks to strip common physical sound from his experiences:
In my opinion [voice-hearing] is best understood when one thinks of the processes by which a person tries to imprint certain words in his memory in a definite order, as for instance a child learning a poem by heart which he is going to recite at school, or a priest a sermon he is going to deliver in Church. The words are repeated silently (as in a silent prayer to which the congregation is called from the pulpit), that is to say a human being causes his nerves to vibrate in the way which corresponds to the use of the words concerned, but the real organs of speech (lips, tongue, teeth, etc.) are either not set in motion at all or only coincidentally.14
The passage is a model of mystical description. As Teresa of Ávila described her divine “locutions” more than three hundred years before, they were like speech without sound: “The words are perfectly formed, but are not heard with the physical ear.” And yet, Schreber’s description also contains a word that sets him apart from the body-averse mystics. That word is nerves, and it is the dominant concept in the Memoirs. To Schreber, everything unseen is conceived of in terms of nerves. The soul is contained within the nerves of the body. Each “nerve of intellect” contains within it the total “mental individuality” of a human being. God is made of nerves in infinite supply. God communicates with man by way of “nerve-contact.” Voice-hearing is consistently described with the term nerve-language.
Schreber’s adoption of the language of neurology makes obvious sense. In their groping after clarity, describers of the ineffable always latch on to the vocabulary of the times, and late-nineteenth-century Germany was the heyday of neurology—the time and place in which the idea that the mind was based in the brain found its most convincing proponents. As an intellectual and a patient, Schreber was well attuned to this atmosphere: He had read the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin’s textbooks, on which the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is based, and his first doctor, Flechsig, was an internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist. But Schreber used the language of these men in a way and to an extent that has come to seem like parody, and that was certainly, if unintentionally, subversive. By marshaling medical terminology for a metaphysical purpose, Schreber issued a gentle reprimand, a reminder that although the concepts might change, the truth does not.
Schreber’s neuro-mystical rhetoric also provided him with a perfect match for the feel of his voice-hearing, which was both forceful and insubstantial. For regular people, Schreber writes, the mind is set in motion by one’s own will. But for him it is set into motion by the will of others or by the will of God. Schreber describes invisible rays like cosmic telephone wires entering his head and producing speech. This compulsive, verbal thinking is the harrowing essence of his experience:
We are used to thinking all impressions we receive from the outer world are mediated through the five senses…. However, in the case of a human being who like myself has entered into contact with rays and whose head is in consequence so to speak illuminated by rays, this is not at all [true]. I receive light and sound sensations which are projected direct on to my inner nervous system by the rays; for their reception the external organs of seeing and hearing are not necessary. I see such events even with eyes closed and where sound is concerned would hear them as in the case of the “voices,” even if it were possible to seal my ears hermetically against all other sounds.15
Again, Schreber, who is diligent throughout the Memoirs about putting the word voices in quotation marks, echoes Teresa: “For when, in ordinary life, we do not wish to hear, we can close our ears or attend to something else; and in that way although we may hear we do not understand. But when God speaks to the soul like this, there is no alternative; I have to listen whether I like it or not, and to devote my whole attention to understanding what God wishes me to understand.”16 What has been lost, dramatically lost, is the sweetness of the experience, the dulcedo Dei of religious rapture.
The mystical connection fails to apply in another way—or, rather, it doesn’t always apply. There are moments in the Memoirs in which the quotation marks dissolve and Schreber’s voices emerge as literal fact. This is suggested obliquely at times by reference to space and volume. Schreber hears Ariman, one half of his idea of God, resound “in a mighty bass as if directly in front of my bedroom windows.”17 He hears the sun talking in a “low whisper.” At other times the physicality of Schreber’s voices is explicit. “In contra-distinction to…inner voices,” he writes, “I hear outer voices particularly spoken by birds, which come to me from outside, from the birds’ throats.”18 To further complicate matters, Schreber also has experiences halfway between sense and thought. The sound of bees buzzing and trains rattling mix with the voices in his head and “seem” to speak aloud.
What are we to make of this mess? It is a stew in which language, thought, and perception are hopelessly mixed—which, no doubt, is why so many writers have focused on the cause of the disorder. To attend to the disorder itself could make one as mad as Schreber. Better to dig down to the solid bottom of the pot. The problem with this approach is that it avoids the difficult work of understanding the reality of Schreber’s daily life. Schreber’s madness may well say something about the rise of German totalitarianism, but the primary subject of the Memoirs is the unseen assault on a man’s consciousness. Day to day, Schreber lived in the middle of a complex flux of experiences the only common feature of which was that they nullified his will. Any interpretation that does not attend to the sensation of this nullification does not attend to Schreber’s actual experiences.
A second problem with interpretations of Schreber that attempt to get at the root of his madness is that they inevitably treat his experiences as what Schreber dismissively calls “the morbid offspring of my fantasy.” Since Freud, they consider his voices to be laden with meaning, but they posit that meaning as having risen from the subconscious depths of his mind, without his awareness. This may indeed be true so far as metaphors for madness go, but for Schreber it could not be further from the truth. For the better part of a decade, he waged strenuous battle against his voices. They were the bane of his waking life. At the end of that time, however, the battle Schreber chose to wage was for the right to consider his voices as having extrinsic value, as the carriers of an insight regarding the true nature of God. His survival, he felt, depended on that right. “I have never had a single moment in which I did not hear voices,” Schreber wrote.19 They had taken everything from him: his career, his home life, his freedom, his dignity. But somehow he had learned to convert them into his own brand of sanity. He would not be robbed of that hard victory.
In 1994, in the New York Review of Books, the author Rosemary Dinnage wrote, “If Freud had not been intrigued by the Memoirs, Schreber’s story might have been forgotten as others were, no doubt, from the madhouses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”20 This is the conventional, well-founded wisdom about Schreber: A madman wrote a book, and a genius rescued it from obscurity. Dinnage concluded by saying, however, that the reason people after Freud went on reading and writing about the Memoirs, and will go on doing so, is not the rather disappointing psychoanalytic theory that launched Schreber’s fame but the remarkable, almost impossible dichotomy of the author’s mind. Schreber’s allure lies in his uncanny ability to juxtapose statements of florid insanity with statements of crystalline logic. Schizophrenia, the diagnosis that clinicians typically apply to Schreber, is a misnomer: Splitting is not a feature of the schizophrenic mind. But there do appear to be two men living side by side in Schreber—a credulous madman (“Therefore ‘scorpions’ were repeatedly put into my head, tiny crab-or spider-like structures which were to carry out some work of destruction in my head”21), and a scrupulous attorney (“If one compares the conclusions reached above with the regulations of the Directive of 1893, one must not expect to find in the various regulations an express confirmation of these conclusions which have been drawn from general principles”22).
Toward the end of his stay at Sonnenstein, Schreber was able to draw more and more on the second of these characters. His ability to reason returned to him, and he reawakened to some of the intellectual pursuits that had occupied him prior to his hospitalization. From the years 1894 to late 1896, his hospital chart reveals a man in almost constant torment: “Does not do a thing, does not read a thing.” “Claims his body is completely changed, the lung has all but disappeared, everything he sees around [him] is only a semblance.” “From time to time stands totally still in one spot and stares at the sun and grimaces in the most bizarre way.” “Thunders on the piano and bellows…at times really obscene words.” Then, gradually, life returns: “More talkative and approachable, reads more.” “Reads a lot, plays a great deal and well both piano and chess.” “Amiable upon approach, even though quite reserved and aloof, well oriented about current events, reads a lot and discusses legal issues.”23
Schreber’s interest in reading was both therapeutic and practical. Reading, especially poetry, helped distract him from his voices. But it also armed him for the fight for freedom he was gearing up for and in which he must have sensed he was the underdog. He had had ample time to assess his own mind and values. He wanted now to know the mind and values of his adversary. Toward that end, Schreber obtained and read two editions of Emil Kraepelin’s landmark textbook on psychiatry, published in 1896 and 1899.
He could not have chosen a more authoritative source. More than anyone else, Kraepelin can lay claim to the title Father of Modern Psychiatry, and his textbook to the status of founding document. Released in nine successive editions from 1883 to 1926, the textbook was Kraepelin’s vehicle for a series of ideas that revolutionized psychiatry. His most remarkable idea—that the identification and prognosis of mental illness can be based on a patient’s symptoms—is now the basis of clinical practice and so no longer seems quite so fresh. But in the 1890s it held the psychiatric world rapt, and Kraepelin was hailed as a prophet for the profession.24
Schreber turned to Kraepelin with a specific question: How did psychiatry define voice-hearing? The answer he got, of course, was that it defined voice-hearing as a hallucination—the perception of an external event that does not in reality exist. Schreber vehemently opposed this position. He did not deny that voices might require a “morbidly excited nervous system” to form or that many of the patients whom he read about in Kraepelin had mistakenly ascribed reality to the products of their imagination. But he rejected the generalized application of psychiatric terminology, which, he observed, would negate all claims of supernatural influence. Schreber, labeled as a religious paranoiac, issued an urgent plea on behalf of faith. “If psychiatry is not flatly to deny everything supernatural and thus tumble with both feet into the camp of naked materialism,” he wrote, “it will have to recognize the possibility that occasionally the phenomena under discussion may be connected with real happenings, which simply cannot be brushed aside with the catchword ‘hallucinations.’” As evidence, he cited not only himself but the Roman emperor Constantine, whose vision of a cross in the fourth century led to the global spread of Christianity; the Crusaders at the eleventh-century siege of Antioch, who saw visions of Christ; and Joan of Arc.25
Schreber’s rejoinder echoes the logic of other religious-minded dissenters to the rise of medical psychiatry, such as the Catholic physician Brierre de Boismont, who was particularly concerned about the implications of the concept of hallucination for Western faith. Schreber’s arguments even presage those made by his exact contemporary William James. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, a series of lectures he delivered just as Schreber was preparing his appeal to the Dresden supreme court, James sought to shift the basis of interpretation of voices and visions from pathology to personal value. He even argued, along with Schreber, that mental instability might be a necessary precondition for revelation—if it in fact existed. “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm,” James said, “it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.”26
The difference between Schreber and men like Brierre and James is, of course, that Schreber’s protest was delivered not from within the psychiatric profession or academia, but from within a locked psychiatric asylum. And the audience to which it was directed was not an august society of clinicians or a sympathetic crowd of philosophy students, but a handful of legal and medical authorities to whom he had little access but who nevertheless had the ability to keep him locked up until he was dead. It was that dire: Schreber was nearly sixty years old and in poor health. What is worse, he was on the weak side of an intractable conflict. His fate was to be decided by a standoff between two unyielding worldviews—the one rational, the other religious. “The only difference of opinion,” he wrote in his writ of appeal, “is whether the subjective sensation of hearing voices is caused only by pathological functioning of my own nerves, or whether some external cause acts on them, in other words whether the sound of voices is, so to speak, a trick on the part of my own nerves, or whether some being outside my body speaks into me in the form of voices.” He laid out the problem for the judges as starkly as he could: “In essence it is one assertion versus another.”27
There was a very specific “another.” In the first year of the new century, as Schreber’s condition improved and he was increasingly able to control his fits, he was permitted to eat his meals at the table of Sonnenstein’s director, Guido Weber. Weber had found Schreber intellectually sharp, “well-behaved and amiable,” and he had observed Schreber’s ability to make short trips into town and to the home of his wife without creating disturbances. But he refused to put any stake in these improvements. Asked to make a recommendation to the court after Schreber’s first attempt at freedom failed, Weber painted a bleak and uncharitable portrait of a patient whose legal wrangling he clearly found enervating. In Weber’s estimation, Schreber was hopeless. After years of stormy hallucinations and delusions, “a sediment” of ideas had become “deposited and fixed” in his mind. This passage out of the acute and into the chronic stage of illness had allowed Schreber to lift himself up to a level at which he could reason and function again. But it had forced him to lift himself onto pathological ground. Schreber, Weber wrote to the court, “did not…realize and recognize the actual products of his altered perceptions and the combinations built up on them as pathological, nor could he rise above the subjectiveness of his views and reach a more objective judgment of events.” It was a paradox. Without sanity in his past, Schreber could not have sanity in his future. Even more perversely, Weber lamented the fact that Schreber was not still in the throes of psychotic torment: “[A]s long as the acute signs of illness lasted one could hope for a favorable outcome of the illness, whereas now when one sees the fixed result of such a process, this hope must be abandoned.”28
Of all the notable facts about Schreber’s case, the most remarkable is that he wasn’t driven to despair by the resistance of his captor. By Schreber’s own admission, at this time he was still too preoccupied with residual voices to be able to sustain intellectual activity for very long. But the long legal document that he delivered to the Dresden court in July 1901 shows signs of neither temper nor strain. It lays out with quiet, patient precision his right, one might say his human right, to sustain, follow, and endorse whatever system of belief he finds fit. Schreber realized quite clearly that his bind was inquisitorial. Like Joan, he was being told that he must deny himself in order to gain redemption. He rejected the validity of these terms. He rejected them legally, of course, with a logic that exhibits his superior training and mind. But he also rejected them morally. He had paid dearly, he told the court, in order to gain “great and unshakable” knowledge of the nature of God and the universe. He had transformed pain into faith. It no longer mattered what substance he had transformed or if traces of it were still apparent in his “pathological shell.” What mattered was his “true spiritual life,” and that he considered it true.
Weber’s response to Schreber’s appeal rehashes many of his old arguments about the pathology of Schreber’s beliefs. But by this time the doctor had grown weary of his thankless task, however much he remained obsessed with the paradox: “However objective the medical expert attempts to be in his statements, he will never be able to make the mentally ill patient share his opinion in the objectivity of [his] findings, unless the patient himself were able to judge his condition correctly, whereby he would in fact show that he was not ill.”29 In any event, Weber’s opinion no longer held much weight. In the panel of judges on the Dresden appeals court, Schreber had found his first and arguably his best readers. Their decision, passed down in July 1902, can be read as much as a confirmation of the rights of saints as a confirmation of Schreber’s right to self-determination:
Dr. Weber stands with his feet firmly planted in rationalism, which denies out of hand the possibility of supernatural happenings…. In opposition to him the plaintiff champions fundamentally the contrary point of view: the certainty of his knowledge of God and the absolute conviction that he is dealing with God and divine miracles tower for him above all human science…. Whatever one may think of his belief in miracles, no one is entitled to see in it a mental defect which makes plaintiff require State care. One does not usually and without further reason declare the adherents of spiritualism mentally ill and put them under a guardian, although their way of looking at things supernaturally is also neither shared nor comprehended by the vast majority of their fellow men.30
The decision can also be read a third way: as a confirmation of the rights of individuals to endure or accept unusual experiences openly without being deemed of lesser quality than those who do not. It can be read as a proclamation against stigma. Regarding Schreber’s Memoirs, the judges were of the firm opinion that it was the “product of a morbid imagination.” Schreber was clearly deranged. But, they concluded, “this could not possibly lower the patient in respect of his fellow men, particularly as no one can miss the seriousness of purpose and striving after truth which fill every chapter.” And so they let him go. “As Dr. Schreber remarks correctly,” they noted, “the worst that could happen to him would be that one consider him mad, and this one does in any case.”31