Lunatic asylums and the writings of lunatics were part of the amazing growth in fin-de-siècle bizarrerie, and none more so than those of Daniel Paul Schreber. In the autumn of 1893, Schreber, an important judge in the German city of Dresden, suffered a nervous collapse. He came under the supervision of Dr Paul Emil Flechsig in Leipzig: Schreber's parents approved of Flechsig, because Schreber's father was a doctor and an educationalist of the same social standing. Daniel was first 'looked after' by Flechsig and then was moved and spent nine years in a loony bin in Saxony, where he wrote his memoirs, published in 1903.
The account Schreber gives of his breakdown is extraordinary: what is no less extraordinary is what a whole host of psychiatric authors, most famously Freud, were to make of the case once it was published. What happened to this judge, with his happy but - very importantly - childless marriage, his booming career and his personal professional success?
First, in his dreams, he imagined being a woman and being fucked and what a pleasure that might be. Then - around the spring of 1894 - he began to be visited by the supernatural. God was communicating through nervous rays which He emitted straight to Schreber. The problem was that Flechsig, the mad doctor, was interrupting these transmissions.
After breaking the contact with God, Flechsig set about turning Schreber into a woman: he would then 'misuse' that female body before dumping it. This misuse amounted to what Schreber called "soul murder". After consulting shrinks other than Flechsig, Schreber upped the ante. Doctors, he decided, were simply usurpers: Schreber started receiving transmisions again and, as it turned out, it was God Himself who was "unmanning" him. God was turning him into a really sexy woman, "a female harlot". In fact, Schreber had become so horny that God could not take it. He had to give Schreber chest pains and buzzings in the ears and instructions in his head and send little men to stand around his head and mess with it. God both desired and venerated Schreber, turning him into a chaste Madonna and (the oldest story) also the best lay in Heaven. Schreber's penis disappeared, he grew breasts and became a she of staggering voluptuousness. God had a real struggle on his hands, wanting and loathing the ultimate woman.
Then finally, the big one. In this new and utterly desirable state, Schreber realised he was the sole surviving human being. When God finally came to realise this, He would impregnate Schreber and a new virgin birth would redeem the world and restore original bliss. Happy with all of this, Schreber left the asylum in 1902 and went to live with his mother. He died in 1911 and the interpreters got going on the true meaning of his memoirs.
For Sigmund Freud, this was the original case of paranoia, because for Freud, paranoia was caused by repressed homosexual longings: they are all gunning for you but you can't admit that you want them to, because they are men -men like God or Dr Flechsig, or as Freud saw it, Schreber's dead father and brother. It doesn't take much to see what we might learn about Freud from his interpretation of Schreber. Schreber himself came to celebrate his womanliness, his fecundity and it's not hard to see why: he wanted to have the children his wife (six miscarriages) had failed to produce.
But what Schreber embraced and openly yearned for, Freud had to reinterpret as hidden and repressed - as longings to be buggered. No matter how in-your-face Schreber's story, for psychiatry and psychoanalysis it had to be re-written. Schreber was writing at a time when the world was degenerating. He or she was the solution. Life was threatened but Schreber had read into geology, into Persian religion and into ideas of spontaneous generation. His female fecundity was waiting at the end of time to have God's child and restart a catastrophic disaster with new life. Of this, Freud tells us nothing.
Weirder yet, Freud says nothing of the possibility that the persecutions Schreber suffered were not delusions at all, but traumatic memories of harsh forms of discipline laid down by his father. Schreber's dad had all kinds of machines for correct posture and proper child movement. Straitjackets for kids were Papa S's speciality, and these were the tortures Schreber recalled when he was "mad".
Schreber had enough. In his breakdown, he saw - and, with his sex change, became - the solution to the planet's looming disaster. He wanted give birth to a new world. All his agonies were trivial because he could say that "eternity was in his service".
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