Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

By Daniel Paul Schreber
Introduction by Rosemary Dinnage

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

The wonderful Schreber . . . ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital.
— Sigmund Freud

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.