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The Psychotic Dr. Schreber
Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) came to prominence as one of history’s most famous madmen in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” Published in 1911, Freud’s case study psychoanalyzes Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a detailed account of the German Judge’s psychotic breakdowns in which he battled against numerous antagonists, including everything from God and the Devil to his own body and lexicon. Since then, Schreber’s remarkable, uniquely lucid account has leaked from the psychiatric world into literary and popular culture. Postmodern theorists, for instance, have used him as a means to critique consumer-capitalism, explore the dynamics of modernity, and foretell the Nazi ascension, whereas filmmakers such as Alex Proyas have science fictionalized Schreber’s experience, representing him as a product of technologized subjectivity and desire.
Schreberfiktion, an evolved SF—this is the subject of D. Harlan Wilson’s case study, which is at once about, around and beyond Memoirs as well as the many secondary texts it has engendered. As the formerly make-believe aspects of the science fiction genre continue to materialize in the real world, Schreber’s pathology becomes more and more relevant; his imagination and intellect, his anxiety and dread, his solipsism and megalomania point to the pathological unconscious that animates contemporary technological society. Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real. Science fiction explored the effects of the New in the Next, the Near and, in some cases, the Now. Galvanized by Schreber, this book maps the next stage: the New in the Never.
Schreberfiktion, an evolved SF—this is the subject of D. Harlan Wilson’s case study, which is at once about, around and beyond Memoirs as well as the many secondary texts it has engendered. As the formerly make-believe aspects of the science fiction genre continue to materialize in the real world, Schreber’s pathology becomes more and more relevant; his imagination and intellect, his anxiety and dread, his solipsism and megalomania point to the pathological unconscious that animates contemporary technological society. Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real. Science fiction explored the effects of the New in the Next, the Near and, in some cases, the Now. Galvanized by Schreber, this book maps the next stage: the New in the Never.
- GenresFiction
164 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2019
About the author
D. Harlan Wilson
65 books330 followersD. Harlan Wilson is an American novelist, critic, editor, playwright, and college professor. His body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary and film theory with various genres of speculative fiction. Recent books include
Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion
(2022),
Minority Report
(2022),
Jackanape and the Fingermen
(2021),
Outré
(2020),
The Psychotic Dr. Schreber
(2019),
Natural Complexions
(2018), and
J.G. Ballard
(2017).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 20, 2019
TL;DR This is a gateway drug to postmodernist literary critique, history of art, and of course - psychoanalysis of 20th century.
Review (originally for Three Crows):
Near the end of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, he has an epiphany: “…everything that happens is in reference to me.” (233) Since the publication of his Memoirs Schreber has been at the center of psychoanalytical and literary debate for a hundred years; he’s been called everything – from a psychotic homosexual to a pioneer of language. This is hardly surprising – the language and the images that he documented during his illness have so far infected the language of both psychoanalysis and science fiction, and the ripples from the stone he threw into our consciousness are seen to this day.
It might seem to be an insurmountable task to critique, or even just write, about anything that has to do with Schreber without making the book all about him and his illness. Freud, Lacan, Deleuze analyzed him, in absentia that is, Proyas critiqued Memoirs in his Dark City, Lynch directly visualized him. Yet none of them attempted to address the phenomena of the Psychotic Daniel Paul Schreber as D. Harlan Wilson did. In the fluid, unstructured manner, taking bits and pieces from everyone (even himself) and creating a literary Frankenstein – the only thing that could do justice and provide a surprisingly comprehensive introduction to Schreber in pop culture, science fiction, and our consciousness. More so, Wilson tries to experiment with the mythology of the paranoid-noir-detective nature of the Schreber’s narrative by inventing a fictionalized version of the man (or maybe us in the world crafted by Schreber?) based on the same assumption Alex Proyas made in Dark City – what if everything in the Memoirs is true and he could shape the world on a whim? What if everything is indeed in reference to Schreber?
Memoirs
Before delving into the analysis, I’d like to put the nature of Memoirs into a more contemporary, counter-point context. Dr. Schreber, a highly intelligent judge and politician, put his training in argumentation and negotiation to good use when he wrote the Memoirs – he methodically crafted a “jail free” card for himself, carefully explaining that he the illness no longer ails him and he is no threat to himself or the people around him. Considering that soon he returned back to the mental institution with an even more severe form of depression, it was definitely a trick of a high-functioning psychopath. The same trick that fifty years later Edmund Kemper, the Co-ed Killer performed as a teenager to lie his way out of a mental institution, persuading the doctors, the judge, and the police that he was no longer a threat.
There’s little to no justification for comparison of circumstances of their, Schreber’s and Kemper’s, upbringing, social, economic, or political conditions, and yet the methods, goals, and the cunning they used to trick the institutions, that and power structures the society has trusted in keeping and away and (not)caring for people like Schreber to get out of control is uncanny.
One has to be careful when dealing with Memoirs, one wrong step and you’re in Schreber’s playing field.
Dark City
The Kemper comparison fits perfectly with the grand narrative of Schreber’s influence on pop culture that D. Harlan Wilson researched in Psychotic Dr. Schreber. D. Harlan Wilson established the scientific basis for the book in his academic essay in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts The Pathological Machine: "Dark City's" Translation of Schreber's "Memoirs" where he laid the groundwork for this book through the overview of Alex Proyas’s critique of Schreber’s memoir and reimagining it as a visionary sci-fi film.
In the article, Wilson stresses the role of Schreber as a world-builder, developer of exquisite mythology. Proyas has converted Schreber’s Memoirs into a story. In this story, the fantastical facts are turned into fictional facts. (Wilson 154) And Schreber’s schizophrenia-fueled cosmological fantasies work perfectly for a sci-fi noir detective – Roger Ebert said that “it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination.” (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/da...). Though he was maybe the most respected film critic in his time, Ebert never delved into what informed the direction and design of the movie.
Wilson has successfully experimented with the same technique of extrapolating fiction from Schreber’s mythology in his “Room 00X” parts of the book. A fluid and everchanging narrative of a man locked in a room and surrounded by the myriad of Freudian and Lacanian nightmares of whores and pimps, who turn out to be literary agents and publishers, crocodiles on hind legs, and other nameless miseries of the numberless mortals.
Wilson’s protagonist, if this term even applies here, goes through all those challenges, the urges and the confusions that Schreber described and felt. It is a confusing, claustrophobic experience, like getting locked out inside someone else’s head in a spectator role. You don’t know how you got there and there is no way out.
Lynch
I opened the book having next to none knowledge of Schreber and Dark City and all this business, but ten pages in I knew that David Lynch is ought to pop up in here somewhere. The moment I read the quote from Memoirs about a man melting in an armchair, his head turning into a puff of smoke, and leaving only his clothes in the armchair, I knew I saw it somewhere. Episode three of Twin Peaks: The Return.
In that episode, Dougie Jones - a tulpa – a reduced, caricature clone of the beloved Agent Dale Cooper is sent back to the waiting room of the evil spirits – the Red Room to be told that he was manufactured, for a purpose, and that his purpose has been fulfilled. He is then melted in the chair that he is sitting, reduced into a ball of golden light, and his head turns into black smoke (reminiscent of Lynch’s own head falling-off-scene in Eraserhead). After he disappears, only his ridiculously colorful clothes are left there. Sounds familiar?
The parallels between the man who put the schizophrenia into the language of the fantastic and the most psychoanalytical American director of our times are addressed in Psychotic Dr. Schreber multiple times, reiterating and expanding on the points made by Slavoj Zizek back in the 90s in his The Ridiculous Sublime. While Zizek interpreted this “Lynchian” feeling – a combination of fear, uncanny, Americana, and noir as the Lacanian symbolic real touching with Real real, D. Harlan Wilson offers a more nuanced approach. He proposes to look at creators seeing Lynch, Proyas, and everyone else as using Schreber’s invention - nerve-language, the never-language, to tap into the now in the never.
Does any of it make sense for the general public? Hardly. Should it? Definitely no, since the general public wouldn’t be interested in Schreber, Lynch, D. Harlan Wilson and etc, in the first place. That’s a good thing, since they have been and are changing literature, fiction, and the storytelling from the underground, while the rest are looking at Marvel films.
The Psychotic Dr. Schreber
Is this a postmodernist book? A poststructuralist one? I’m not entirely sure if there is definition for this kind of book already and if it needs one. That’s up to the literary critics (fuck, that’s probably me). Maybe post-formalism? It doesn’t have a ring to it, I think. Everything about this book is complicated. It took me weeks to read and months to process and made me return to Lacan, Deleuze, and Wilson himself, digging deeper and wider, researching this grand narrative of Daniel Paul Schreber in the art history of the twentieth century. In this regard, Psychotic Dr. Schreber perfectly fulfills the goal of any book – like an experienced pusher it hooks you on the subject matter and invites to learn more. It challenges you, naturally - just look at the reviews. But as rightly stressed by the author, this is not a book about Schreber, it’s a book around Schreber, for he has sent his god rays through the western pop culture, especially SF genres, and we can trace it, find it, and make our meager attempts to interpret it. D. Harlan Wilson has made the best attempt at doing it and produced one of the most important books in speculative fiction and literary critique in years. And it is worth every minute you spend with it. Funnily enough, we all might have proven Schreber right in that now everything that happens is, indeed, in reference to him.
P.S. Quote of the Year: "At some point all messiahs must confront the issue of their genitals."
Works Cited
Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York Review, 2001.
Wilson, D. Harlan. The Psychotic Dr. Schreber. Stalking Horse Press, 2019.
Wilson, David H. “The Pathological Machine: ‘Dark City's’ Translation of Schreber's ‘Memoirs.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 15, no. 2 (58), 2005, pp. 153–164. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43308738.
Review (originally for Three Crows):
Near the end of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, he has an epiphany: “…everything that happens is in reference to me.” (233) Since the publication of his Memoirs Schreber has been at the center of psychoanalytical and literary debate for a hundred years; he’s been called everything – from a psychotic homosexual to a pioneer of language. This is hardly surprising – the language and the images that he documented during his illness have so far infected the language of both psychoanalysis and science fiction, and the ripples from the stone he threw into our consciousness are seen to this day.
It might seem to be an insurmountable task to critique, or even just write, about anything that has to do with Schreber without making the book all about him and his illness. Freud, Lacan, Deleuze analyzed him, in absentia that is, Proyas critiqued Memoirs in his Dark City, Lynch directly visualized him. Yet none of them attempted to address the phenomena of the Psychotic Daniel Paul Schreber as D. Harlan Wilson did. In the fluid, unstructured manner, taking bits and pieces from everyone (even himself) and creating a literary Frankenstein – the only thing that could do justice and provide a surprisingly comprehensive introduction to Schreber in pop culture, science fiction, and our consciousness. More so, Wilson tries to experiment with the mythology of the paranoid-noir-detective nature of the Schreber’s narrative by inventing a fictionalized version of the man (or maybe us in the world crafted by Schreber?) based on the same assumption Alex Proyas made in Dark City – what if everything in the Memoirs is true and he could shape the world on a whim? What if everything is indeed in reference to Schreber?
Memoirs
Before delving into the analysis, I’d like to put the nature of Memoirs into a more contemporary, counter-point context. Dr. Schreber, a highly intelligent judge and politician, put his training in argumentation and negotiation to good use when he wrote the Memoirs – he methodically crafted a “jail free” card for himself, carefully explaining that he the illness no longer ails him and he is no threat to himself or the people around him. Considering that soon he returned back to the mental institution with an even more severe form of depression, it was definitely a trick of a high-functioning psychopath. The same trick that fifty years later Edmund Kemper, the Co-ed Killer performed as a teenager to lie his way out of a mental institution, persuading the doctors, the judge, and the police that he was no longer a threat.
There’s little to no justification for comparison of circumstances of their, Schreber’s and Kemper’s, upbringing, social, economic, or political conditions, and yet the methods, goals, and the cunning they used to trick the institutions, that and power structures the society has trusted in keeping and away and (not)caring for people like Schreber to get out of control is uncanny.
One has to be careful when dealing with Memoirs, one wrong step and you’re in Schreber’s playing field.
Dark City
The Kemper comparison fits perfectly with the grand narrative of Schreber’s influence on pop culture that D. Harlan Wilson researched in Psychotic Dr. Schreber. D. Harlan Wilson established the scientific basis for the book in his academic essay in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts The Pathological Machine: "Dark City's" Translation of Schreber's "Memoirs" where he laid the groundwork for this book through the overview of Alex Proyas’s critique of Schreber’s memoir and reimagining it as a visionary sci-fi film.
In the article, Wilson stresses the role of Schreber as a world-builder, developer of exquisite mythology. Proyas has converted Schreber’s Memoirs into a story. In this story, the fantastical facts are turned into fictional facts. (Wilson 154) And Schreber’s schizophrenia-fueled cosmological fantasies work perfectly for a sci-fi noir detective – Roger Ebert said that “it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination.” (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/da...). Though he was maybe the most respected film critic in his time, Ebert never delved into what informed the direction and design of the movie.
Wilson has successfully experimented with the same technique of extrapolating fiction from Schreber’s mythology in his “Room 00X” parts of the book. A fluid and everchanging narrative of a man locked in a room and surrounded by the myriad of Freudian and Lacanian nightmares of whores and pimps, who turn out to be literary agents and publishers, crocodiles on hind legs, and other nameless miseries of the numberless mortals.
Wilson’s protagonist, if this term even applies here, goes through all those challenges, the urges and the confusions that Schreber described and felt. It is a confusing, claustrophobic experience, like getting locked out inside someone else’s head in a spectator role. You don’t know how you got there and there is no way out.
Lynch
I opened the book having next to none knowledge of Schreber and Dark City and all this business, but ten pages in I knew that David Lynch is ought to pop up in here somewhere. The moment I read the quote from Memoirs about a man melting in an armchair, his head turning into a puff of smoke, and leaving only his clothes in the armchair, I knew I saw it somewhere. Episode three of Twin Peaks: The Return.
In that episode, Dougie Jones - a tulpa – a reduced, caricature clone of the beloved Agent Dale Cooper is sent back to the waiting room of the evil spirits – the Red Room to be told that he was manufactured, for a purpose, and that his purpose has been fulfilled. He is then melted in the chair that he is sitting, reduced into a ball of golden light, and his head turns into black smoke (reminiscent of Lynch’s own head falling-off-scene in Eraserhead). After he disappears, only his ridiculously colorful clothes are left there. Sounds familiar?
The parallels between the man who put the schizophrenia into the language of the fantastic and the most psychoanalytical American director of our times are addressed in Psychotic Dr. Schreber multiple times, reiterating and expanding on the points made by Slavoj Zizek back in the 90s in his The Ridiculous Sublime. While Zizek interpreted this “Lynchian” feeling – a combination of fear, uncanny, Americana, and noir as the Lacanian symbolic real touching with Real real, D. Harlan Wilson offers a more nuanced approach. He proposes to look at creators seeing Lynch, Proyas, and everyone else as using Schreber’s invention - nerve-language, the never-language, to tap into the now in the never.
Does any of it make sense for the general public? Hardly. Should it? Definitely no, since the general public wouldn’t be interested in Schreber, Lynch, D. Harlan Wilson and etc, in the first place. That’s a good thing, since they have been and are changing literature, fiction, and the storytelling from the underground, while the rest are looking at Marvel films.
The Psychotic Dr. Schreber
Is this a postmodernist book? A poststructuralist one? I’m not entirely sure if there is definition for this kind of book already and if it needs one. That’s up to the literary critics (fuck, that’s probably me). Maybe post-formalism? It doesn’t have a ring to it, I think. Everything about this book is complicated. It took me weeks to read and months to process and made me return to Lacan, Deleuze, and Wilson himself, digging deeper and wider, researching this grand narrative of Daniel Paul Schreber in the art history of the twentieth century. In this regard, Psychotic Dr. Schreber perfectly fulfills the goal of any book – like an experienced pusher it hooks you on the subject matter and invites to learn more. It challenges you, naturally - just look at the reviews. But as rightly stressed by the author, this is not a book about Schreber, it’s a book around Schreber, for he has sent his god rays through the western pop culture, especially SF genres, and we can trace it, find it, and make our meager attempts to interpret it. D. Harlan Wilson has made the best attempt at doing it and produced one of the most important books in speculative fiction and literary critique in years. And it is worth every minute you spend with it. Funnily enough, we all might have proven Schreber right in that now everything that happens is, indeed, in reference to him.
P.S. Quote of the Year: "At some point all messiahs must confront the issue of their genitals."
Works Cited
Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York Review, 2001.
Wilson, D. Harlan. The Psychotic Dr. Schreber. Stalking Horse Press, 2019.
Wilson, David H. “The Pathological Machine: ‘Dark City's’ Translation of Schreber's ‘Memoirs.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 15, no. 2 (58), 2005, pp. 153–164. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43308738.
July 19, 2019
In 2007 I was living in Port Angeles Washington. I was super excited to see The new Darren Aronofsky movie at the time called The Fountain. The nearest theater it was playing at was in Victoria B.C. It is the only time I went to another country just to see a movie. When the movie ended I felt a stunned silence fall over the theater. The guy behind me said, "I have no idea what I just saw but I like it."
I have read Wilson before, in 2007 I reviewed his Science Fiction send-up Dr. Identity and said "The level of creativity and invention that appears on every single page is what makes Dr. Identity a must-read. D. Harlan Wilson is a real talent that has me imaging Phillip K Dick writing for the Monty Python." Then I reviewed His next novel in 2008 Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria. I said at the time "Blankety Blank is not exactly horror it is a darker take on Wilson’s absurdist style that is every bit as zany...Wilson also detours into hilarious mini-chapters on the subject ranging from the film careers of Patrick Swayze to the history of Ferris wheels. "
I don't know how ten years passed since I read Wilson it was not intentional. but I thank James Reich over at Stalking Horse for sending me an advanced copy of his new work. And goddamn it if The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is not the weirdest novel I have read in a lifetime of reading weird shit. Even for Wilson, the level of crazy-ness per page is off the rails.
Explaining what this book is no easy task. I believe Paul Schreber was a real person under the care of Sigmund Freud and I could have googled this but I decided knowing or not knowing didn't really matter. There are a ton of footnotes at the end so I suspect that Wilson did some really cool research into this book. I know there are probably levels of satire and humor that are going miles over my head. (I intend to have Wilson on our Dickheads podcast closer to the release we will ask him)
That said this book functions as 146 pages of insanity that may not be a coherent narrative, some of it are sessions notes, first-person diatribes and all other manner of words combined on the page. Wilson plays with words in such humorous ways it is entertaining throughout. I felt like reading this was like putting a puzzle together without the picture as a guide, some parts were pretty, some were funny and also delightfully co-founding.
This part that made me laugh:
"At some point all messiahs must confront the issue of their genitals."
and this line summed up the book for me:
"Conversely, there is more than one way to skin a consciousness and stitch together a monster"
I have read Wilson before, in 2007 I reviewed his Science Fiction send-up Dr. Identity and said "The level of creativity and invention that appears on every single page is what makes Dr. Identity a must-read. D. Harlan Wilson is a real talent that has me imaging Phillip K Dick writing for the Monty Python." Then I reviewed His next novel in 2008 Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria. I said at the time "Blankety Blank is not exactly horror it is a darker take on Wilson’s absurdist style that is every bit as zany...Wilson also detours into hilarious mini-chapters on the subject ranging from the film careers of Patrick Swayze to the history of Ferris wheels. "
I don't know how ten years passed since I read Wilson it was not intentional. but I thank James Reich over at Stalking Horse for sending me an advanced copy of his new work. And goddamn it if The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is not the weirdest novel I have read in a lifetime of reading weird shit. Even for Wilson, the level of crazy-ness per page is off the rails.
Explaining what this book is no easy task. I believe Paul Schreber was a real person under the care of Sigmund Freud and I could have googled this but I decided knowing or not knowing didn't really matter. There are a ton of footnotes at the end so I suspect that Wilson did some really cool research into this book. I know there are probably levels of satire and humor that are going miles over my head. (I intend to have Wilson on our Dickheads podcast closer to the release we will ask him)
That said this book functions as 146 pages of insanity that may not be a coherent narrative, some of it are sessions notes, first-person diatribes and all other manner of words combined on the page. Wilson plays with words in such humorous ways it is entertaining throughout. I felt like reading this was like putting a puzzle together without the picture as a guide, some parts were pretty, some were funny and also delightfully co-founding.
This part that made me laugh:
"At some point all messiahs must confront the issue of their genitals."
and this line summed up the book for me:
"Conversely, there is more than one way to skin a consciousness and stitch together a monster"
August 9, 2019
D. Harlan Wilson pens the case files of Schreber in this satire, science fiction of sorts. Transgressions, delusions, mishaps or a narrative battle of words that puts a semi psychosis memoir, autobiographical together.
You’ll finish this psychotic imaginative account and still not have the answers to New in the Never, but...
You’ll have a conclusion with memories that stain your hippocampus passage ways for eternity.
You’ll finish this psychotic imaginative account and still not have the answers to New in the Never, but...
You’ll have a conclusion with memories that stain your hippocampus passage ways for eternity.
December 21, 2019
Well written piece of theory-fiction. Worth the reader's time.
January 11, 2020
D. Harlan Wilson's THE PSYCHOTIC DR. SCHREBER is Ballardian bricolage par excellence, where juxtaposed fragments of theory, biography, and fiction, not to mention satire, finally cohere not only into an affecting portrait of a legendary "madman" but into a kind of alarming diagnosis of writing, reading, and other "illnesses."
June 7, 2020
I couldn’t attempt to describe what this book is any better than the blurb does. Fascinating nonetheless.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews