My own private Germany : Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity / Eric L. Santner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Santner, Eric L., 1955-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National socialism--Psychological aspects.

National socialism.

Modernism (Literature)--Germany.

Modernism (Literature).

Modernism (Art)--Germany.

Modernism (Art).

Germany--Intellectual life--19th century.

Germany.

Germany--Intellectual life--20th century.

Schreber, Daniel Paul, 1842-1911--Mental health.

Schreber, Daniel Paul.

Schreber, Daniel Paul, 1842-1911--Influence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (215 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (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 Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle 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. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

Introduction

One. Freud, Schreber, and the Passions of Psychoanalysis

Two. The Father Who Knew Too Much

Three. Schreber's Jewish Question

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [147]-192) and index.

ISBN:

9786612752384

9781400806959

140080695X

9781282752382

1282752383

9781400821891

1400821894

9781400813261

1400813263

OCLC:

705527006