My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity (review)

In 1911, Sigmund Freud published an essay entitled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” This was not a case report but a sustained analysis of the memoirs of the jurist Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), which had been published in 1903 by a press specializing in theosophical and occult works. Schreber’s autobiography, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, was a complex, richly detailed account of how its author suffered from a succession of bizarre psychotic breakdowns induced by various persecutors, ranging from his psychiatrist to God himself; although a fascinating work, it would probably have remained an obscure fin-de-siècle curiosity had it not been immortalized by Freud as a source of insights on paranoid thought processes.

Schreber’s delusions were many and diverse. Perhaps the most intriguing was his conviction that he was being physically feminized to serve as God’s private concubine. God was being assisted by various more or less malevolent people, among whom was Schreber’s personal psychiatrist, Paul Emil Flechsig. Such feelings of feminization were neatly translated by Freud into straightforward homosexuality and used to explain the psychodynamic basis of paranoia.

Freud did not explore Schreber’s life and cared little about using his memoirs to understand the psychic and cultural tensions of the epoch. For the last two decades, historians and critics have been addressing these issues in many different ways, and the number of publications on the Schreber case has risen steadily. The volume under review is a new, ambitious analysis of the case, claiming that Schreber’s madness was a consequence of problems inherent in modernity itself, particularly in the processes whereby symbolic authority is conferred and assimilated. Schreber, argues Santner, “discovered that his own symbolic power and authority as judge—and as German man—was . . . sustained by an imperative to produce a regulated series of repeat performances. It was this idiotic repetition compulsion at the heart of his symbolic function that Schreber experienced as profoundly sexualizing” (p. 124). As Santner shows, and as has long been known to readers of Otto Weininger and Franz Kafka, sexual pleasure was seen by Schreber and his contemporaries as feminine and Jewish. Santner’s argument is conceptually complex, and his command over the secondary and critical literature is impressive. (At times, however, this command is too impressive. To take only one example, long quotes from Zvi Lothane’s well-known work In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry [1992] fill footnote after interminable footnote. This would be excessive even in a dissertation!)

Particularly noteworthy is Santner’s attempt to relate Schreber’s anxieties concerning masculinity and “Jewishness” to those expressed in the works of Kafka, Weininger, Oskar Panizza, and Richard Wagner. These sections, which are of great historical (as opposed to exclusively psychoanalytic) import, are unfortunately rather brief and insufficiently contextualized. Take Otto Weininger, for example, whose personal demons (according to Santner) related to Jewishness, masculinity, and modernity. True enough. Weininger’s crisis, however, was induced and modulated by a specific aspect of modernity: turn-of-the-century feminist activism. Weininger acknowledges this repeatedly in Geschlecht und Charakter—but such macrohistorical phenomena are ignored in Santner’s analysis. That there were intrapsychic components to the fin-de-siècle crisis of masculinity is not in doubt, but broader cultural and political issues were often of direct relevance. To invoke, as Santner does, the traumatic effects of “modernity” without bothering to explore such issues may well be good psychoanalysis, but it is hardly adequate as history.