Schreber

Daniel Paul Schreber · German judge, writer, and notable patient of Freud (1842–1911) · 1842–1911

Appears in 7 videos · 8 passages, 6 of them in depth.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani discusses Schreber on the basis of the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and the analysis Freud drew from them. He points out that it is Freud's only analysis based on a written text rather than on a patient1. He first recalls the delusion of this presiding judge of the Saxon court of appeal: God had chosen him to save the world, on condition that he be changed into a woman2. He also keeps a detail that he cites several times, the birds that mock him and that he identifies with young girls3 4. From 2023 onward, he places this case within a reflection on contradictory identity. In his view, Schreber cannot recognise this desire as his own and attributes it to the universal order, that is, to God. He sees this alienation as a way of preserving his narcissism5. The delusion then becomes the example of a subject who refuses to know that what determines him comes from within himself6.

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Who is this?

Daniel Paul Schreber (German:; 25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who was famous for his personal account of his own experience with schizophrenia. Schreber experienced three distinct periods of acute mental illness. The first of these, in 1884 to 1885, was what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox (later known as paranoid schizophrenia or schizophrenia, paranoid type). He described his second mental illness, from 1893 to 1902, making also a brief reference to the first disorder from 1884 to 1885, in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (German: Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). […]

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Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0, excerpt · Portrait: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain

Season 12 · 12 Dec 2023"I is another", or contradictory identity

1:33:48Memoirs of My Nervous IllnessPresident of the Court of Appeal of Saxony, he is deluded that God chose him to save the world after having changed him into a woman.
1:44:06He cannot recognize this desire as his own and attributes it to the universal order: an alienation that preserves his narcissism.