Chapter 3 of Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten
Austin Gross
Julia Evans
A response to Austin Gross’s questions - see his email. This follows and is also available: Schreiber’s case revisited with echoes noted in the family of Fred West by Julia Evans on January 11, 2015 : Available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11364
In researching these questions I became intrigued by the absence of any mention of Schreber’s mother, and the very few comments on his wife. Further, I propose that there are similarities between Schreber’s plight and the experiences of Fred and Rose West’s three older children. I propose that the women should not be left out of the case history and at http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11364, I explore these absences and make some provisional conclusions about links to the family of serial killers Rosemary & Fred West.
Schreiber’s case revisited with echoes noted in the family of Fred West
Content
A. The omissions from the ‘Memoirs’ & the Superior Court judgment
Second Part
B. Daniel Paul Schreber’s (Schreber’s) relationships with his family
Third Part :
C. Comparison with Fred & Rosemary West and their family
Fourth Part :
D. Similarities between the two cases : Fathers, Mothers, punishing regimes
Appendix I
Timeline of Schreber’s illness
Endnotes – References
A. The omissions from the ‘Memoirs’ & the Superior Court judgment
From ‘Memoirs of my nervous illness’[i] p43 [see endnote i for reference] :
Chapter 3 – The content of Chapters 1 and 2 was a necessary preliminary to what follows. What could so far only partially be put up as axiomatic, will now be proved a far as at all possible.
I will first consider some events concerning other members of my family, which may possibly in some way be related to the presumed soul murder; these are all more or less mysterious, and can hardly be explained in the light of usual human experience.
[The further content of this chapter is omitted as unfit for publication]
Further deletions are given in the footnotes to the 2000 (See endnote i) edition of Memoirs. P454 :
Footnotes : There are no footnotes 17, 18 & 102. Footnotes 24 & 91 were not printed because they referred to Flechsig (One of Schreber’s physicians).
Footnote 28 is missing. It was not printed because it contained a reference to the reigning King.
So the edits or omissions are related to his family, probably his wife, Dr Flechsig and the King.
From Memoirs : Appendix E, Judgment of the Royal Superior Country Court, Dresden of 14th July 1902 :
Reference to the Lower Court’s judgment by the Superior Court
p409 [i] – The Country Court in its judgment of 13th April 1901 dismissed Dr Schreber’s action. … nevertheless there was a danger of unreasonable action. … p409 In two matters the detrimental effect of Dr Schreber’s delusional ideas on his whole outlook, is particularly clear: in his relation to his wife who suffers much from his delusion of being unmanned, and to whom, when she tries to object to his ideas, he always readily suggests that she could divorce him. Further, plaintiff has the urgent desire to make his “Memoirs” known to the public in print, and strives to have the order of tutelege rescinded mainly to be able to conclude a valid contract for publishing his manuscript. Actually the “Memoirs” are quite unfit for publication; plaintiff would thereby compromise his family and himself in an unheard-of fashion, might even expose himself to the danger of criminal prosecution. That plaintiff cannot recognize this himself proves to what extent, in consequence of his pathologically altered conception of the world, the proper appreciation of the actual circumstances of life, the capacity of distinguishing between the permitted and the impermissible, have been lost.
The Superior Court’s judgment on the Lower District Court’s
P414 - (b) The second example of to what extent he acts under the compulsion of his pathological ideas was seen by the District Court in the content of the “Memoirs” and his wish to see them published.
He never concealed from himself and in fact expressed in the Preface to the “Memoirs” that there are certain objections to their publication. Should they reach the printer, he would continue to keep in mind erasing certain passages and toning down certain expressions beforehand. He does not intend publishing them in their present form. He only submitted the manuscript for inspection to the publishers in Leipzig with whom he entered into negotiations about the publication of the “Memoirs.”
Even if the manuscript remained completely unaltered he wishes to protest strongly that he would thereby “compromise” any member of his family, as the District Court seems to [p416] assume. There can be no question of this. The “Memoirs” do not contain the least that might be constructed as damaging to the reputation of his father, his brother or his wife. Plaintiff accepts fully any risk of compromising himself in publishing his “Memoirs”. The worst that could befall him is that one would consider him mentally deranged and this one does in any case. Actually he believes that there is no danger that anybody who reads his “Memoirs” carefully would think less of him afterwards than before. At all times his only aim has been to discover the truth.
P438 – The appellant knows that this might have unpleasant consequences for him. But he is justified in denying the accusation of the Lower Court that he had written anything in the “Memoirs” damaging to the honour of his family. It is a fact that nothing of the kind can be found in the manuscript.
I suggest that, as the Supreme Court did not consider the materials to be damaging, then the omissions must have been insisted on by a combination of his wife probably with Drs Weber & Flechsig. The suppression of the references to the King may have been linked to his appointment, by the King, as a Presiding Judge (see Appendix I – the timeline of Schreber’s illness). Foototes on Dr Flechsig also disappear. Now Schreber states in his ‘Memoirs’ [[ii]] that his wife keeps a portrait of Dr Flechsig on her writing table. Sigmund Fred in ‘Notes on a case of paranoia’ : 1911 states: It may be added that there were certain people by whom he thought he was being persecuted and injured, and upon whom he poured abuse. The most prominent of these was his former physician, Flechsig, whom he called a ‘soul-murderer’; and he used to call out over and over again: ‘Little Flechsig!’ putting a sharp stress upon the first word. So no wonder Flechsig gets removed from ‘Memoirs’ and it does not seem to me unrelated to the portrait displayed on Schreber’s wife’s writing table.
So the initial answers to Austin Gross’s questions are
1) Schreber’s wife seems to have successfully removed and destroyed Chapter 3 even though the Supreme Court did not find it contained anything defamatory.
Questions 2) & 3) is that despite much effort Chapter 3 and some of the footnotes, do not seem to exist. People have, however, dug around the Mental Institutions archives and found letters addressed to Schreber and his doctors’ reports. As a first stop do consult David Ferraro (2010), see endnote x, which ties this material together in an interesting summary and also has an excellent reference list. A wild idea is that there may very well be a full copy of the ‘Memoirs’ in the Dresden Supreme Court’s archives.
Second Part continued at Schreiber’s case revisited with echoes noted in the family of Fred West by Julia Evans on January 11, 2015 : Available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11364
[i] Memoirs of my nervous illness : Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) : Published 1903 : Translated and edited by Ida MacAlpine & Richard A. Hunter : New York Review Books : 31st January 2000 : Introduction by Rosemary Dinnage.
[ii] p142 of Sigmund Freud : Psychoanalytical notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) : 1910 : in Volume 9. Case Histories II : Penguin Freud Library : We learn that Dr Schreber had been married long before the time of his ‘hypochondria’. ‘The gratitude of my wife’, he writes, ‘was perhaps even more heartfelt; for she revered Professor Flechsig as the man who had restored her husband to her, and hence it was that for years she kept his portrait standing upon her writing-table.’ And in the same place: ‘After my recovery from my first illness I spent eight years with my wife – years, upon the whole, of great happiness rich in outward honours, and only clouded from time to time by the oft-repeated disappointment of our hope that we might be blessed with children.’ [p46 of Memoirs [i]]
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Julia Evans
Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my nervous illness & the commentaries
Availability, in electronic form, is given below.
The Samuel Weber (1973) commentary has details of all the information published since 1903. It also has a very good map of the content of the ‘Memoirs’. Chapter 3 is still missing:
1) Memoirs of my nervous illness: 1903: D. P. Schreber or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=293 In the original German with the English translation by its side.
2) Case history of Schreber: 1910: Sigmund Freud or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=244
3) Translator’s introduction & analysis of D. P. Schreber’s case: : 1955: Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter or available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=368
4) Introduction to Schreber’s ‘Memoirs of my nervous illness’: 1973: Samuel Weber
or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=367
5) Translator’s introduction & analysis of D. P. Screber’s case: : 1955: Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter or available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=368
6) On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis : 1955-1956 : two most important parts of Seminar III : Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=658
This is dated December 1955 to January 1956 at the end of the text.
7) Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955-1956: from 16th November 1955: Jacques Lacan or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=657
8) Editor's Introduction (Psycho-Analytic Notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) [Case of Schreber] : 1958 : James Strachey
Available Case history of Schreber: 1910: Sigmund Freud or here
9) Presentation of the ‘Memoirs’ of President Schreber in French translation: November 1966: Jacques Lacan or available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=370
10) Introduction by Rosemary Dinnage : 2000 :
Memoirs of my nervous illness : Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) :
Reprinted by The New York Review of Books, Inc, United States, 2000.
To be posted to LacanianWorks.
10) Introduction to ‘A bi-lingual edition of Schreber’s Memoirs of my mental illness/ Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken’: August 2005: Richard G. Klein or available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=369
11) Schreiber’s case revisited with echoes noted in the family of Fred West by Julia Evans : 11th January 2015 : Available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11364
On 12 Jan 2015, at 14:13, Julia Evans <ju...@julia-evans-psychoanalyst.org.uk> wrote:
A response to Austin Gross’s questions - see his email. This follows and is also available: Schreiber’s case revisited with echoes noted in the family of Fred West by Julia Evans on January 11, 2015 : Available here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11364
Content
A. The omissions from the ‘Memoirs’ & the Superior Court judgment
Second Part
B. Daniel Paul Schreber’s (Schreber’s) relationships with his family
Third Part :
C. Comparison with Fred & Rosemary West and their family
Fourth Part :
D. Similarities between the two cases : Fathers, Mothers, punishing regimes
Appendix I
Timeline of Schreber’s illness
Endnotes – References
On 17 Dec 2014, at 07:20, Austin Gross <aus...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!Am I right that, after a hundred years, we still have no idea what was censored in chapter three of Schreber's memoirs?I haven't managed to track down one of the more recent editions to be printed in Germany, and nothing on Google indicates that the censored chapter was restored.Is this chapter not even conserved somewhere in someone's archive or private collection?Has anybody made any efforts so far to track it down?Thanks,Austin--
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