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

Description

In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his ^IMemoirs of My Nervous Illness^N (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the ^IMemoirs ^Ninto the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible^I ^Nas^I ^Na sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-sicle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. "Immensely provocative, Santner's work compels a deep rethinking of the question of modernity and of our persistent and seemingly inescapable sense that the world is out of joint.... The author does a brilliant job of situating Schreber's work and life in the specific context of fin-de-sicle Germany, "--James Surowiecki, The Boston Phoenix Literary Section "Rarely does one come across a book that is so deeply satisfying.... It sets up a new standard for using psychoanalytic notions to analyze ideological and political phenomena. Once the impact of the book is felt, nothing will remain quite the same in the study of psychoanalysis and society."--Slavoj tizek