Introduction: “Aesthetic Subjects”

When Sigmund Freud read Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, he found not so much an accomplished work of literature or a narrative of great aesthetic merit as a text that developed his thoughts on the psychology of paranoid delusions. Freud never met with Schreber, never saw him in clinical consultation, and had little knowledge of the particularities of his family life, aside from what Schreber himself recorded. Nevertheless, Freud treated the memoir—what we might describe as Schreber's literary “self-portrait”—as a self-narration of the same order as those free associations furnished by Freud's clinical patients on the couch. In writing the story of his life, Schreber provided the material Freud needed to theorize the formation of paranoid delusions. In other words, through Freud's psychoanalytic optic Schreber's literary memoir became a scientific case-study like in kind to other case studies, which provisionally promise to ground “speculative” hypotheses in empirical data. The story Schreber tells about his self, about his “nervous illness,” became the bedrock of the story Freud was in the process of telling about the Oedipus complex, repressed homosexuality, and the genesis of paranoia.

Since Freud's initial analysis of Schreber's case, psychoanalytic critics have challenged Freud's account on many fronts, indexing further details about Schreber's family history (Niederland, 1984), elaborating the backdrop of his treatment with Dr. Flechsig (Israels, 1989), and shifting the root cause of Schreber's symptoms from homosexuality to the deprived relational context of his childhood (Kohut, 1978). Yet, as much as these critiques are in line with important expansions and developments of psychoanalytic theory (clinically and conceptually conceived), what they elide is the methodological importance of Freud's engagement, in this case, with aesthetics. Within the annals of psychoanalytic theory, Freud's reading of Schreber's memoirs is not known as a famous i