SOURCE: Ganz, Margaret. “Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Ilness: Art Proscribed.” In Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, edited by Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen, pp. 37-58. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Ganz focuses on the literary aspects of Schreber's Memoirs.

“… s'il est assurément écrivain, il n'est pas poète.”

—Jacques Lacan, Les Psychoses

“He pleads for his case, but is fortunately no poet, so that one can follow his thoughts without being seduced by them.”

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Reading Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [1903]) does not constitute a literary experience, even when the text has been illumined by Freud's brilliant exegesis of 1911. But if this work cannot “seduce” us in the imaginative sense of granting “une dimension nouvelle de l'expérience” (Lacan 1955-56, 91) and an aesthetic balancing of contraries, it haunts and perturbs...