Daniel Paul Schreber: Egy idegbeteg emlékiratai
On November 26th at 7pm, we will be introducing Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of a Nervous Patient at the Three Ravens.
DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER was born in Leipzig in 1842, the son of a wealthy and socially active upper-middle-class family. He graduated in law in 1863, then entered the judiciary, and at the peak of his rapidly rising career, in 1893 he was appointed president of the Dresden Court of Appeals.
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Just two months after taking office, he suffered a nervous breakdown and moved into the Leipzig University Neurological Clinic, run by Paul Emil Flechsig. His condition continued to deteriorate, he developed obsessions, and eventually began to hallucinate and went into psychosis. After six months of treatment, he was declared incurable. At the request of his wife, he was placed under state guardianship and deprived of his rights. In 1894 he was transferred to the Sonnenstein Sanatorium near Pirna.
Although for a long time he seemed to be a completely hopeless case, his condition began to improve from 1897, and in 1899 he challenged the guardianship decision regarding him through legal means. In 1901, he represented himself before his former workplace, the Dresden Court of Appeal, and won his case, regained his rights, and moved out of Sonnenstein.
In 1903, he published his work Memoirs of a Neurotic Patient in Leipzig, in which, in addition to a detailed discussion of his fate and ideas, he also published official court documents, an open letter to Professor Flechsig, and a legal essay. The book initially reached only a few people and did not have a major impact until Sigmund Freud published a case study of it in 1911, the year of Schreber's death, and thus introduced the Memoirs into the history of Western ideas.
Schreber's work was later studied by many other important thinkers, including Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Kittler and Eric Santner. His case remains the subject of a wide variety of social historical, psychoanalytic, philosophical and legal research to this day.
NEMES Z. MÁRIÓ, poet, critic and aesthete, talks to SOMÁ CSETE, the book's translator.