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The psycho-analytic VIew of psychogenic disturbance of VIsion 3 страница




 

(a) The medical officer lays stress upon two points as being of chief importance: the patient’s assumption of the role of Redeemer, and his transformation into a woman. The Redeemer delusion is a phantasy that is familiar to us through the frequency with which it forms the nucleus of religious paranoia. The additional factor, which makes the redemption dependent upon the man being previously transformed into a woman, is unusual and in itself bewildering, since it shows such a wide divergence from the historical myth which the patient’s phantasy is setting out to reproduce. It is natural to follow the medical report in assuming that the motive force of this delusional complex was the patient’s ambition to play the part of Redeemer, and that his emasculation was only entitled to be regarded as a means for achieving that end. Even though this may appear to be true of his delusion in its final form, a study of the Denkwürdigkeiten compels us to take a very different view of the matter. For we learn that the idea of being transformed into a woman (that is, of being emasculated) was the primary delusion, that he began by regarding that act as constituting a serious injury and persecution, and that it only became related to his playing the part of Redeemer in a secondary way. There can be no doubt, moreover, that originally he believed that the transformation was to be effected for the purpose of sexual abuse and not so as to serve higher designs. The position may be formulated by saying that a sexual delusion of persecution was later on converted in the patient’s mind into a religious delusion of grandeur. The part of persecutor was at first assigned to Professor Flechsig, the physician in whose charge he was; later, his place was taken by God Himself.

 

I will quote the relevant passages from the Denkwürdigkeiten in full: ‘In this way a conspiracy against me was brought to a head (in about March or April, 1894). Its object was to contrive that, when once my nervous complaint had been recognized as incurable or assumed to be so, I should be handed over to a certain person in a particular manner: my soul was to be delivered up to him, but my body - owing to a misapprehension of what I have described above as the purpose underlying the Order of Things - was to be transformed into a female body: and as such surrendered to the person in question¹ with a view to sexual abuse, and was then simply to be "left on one side" - that is to say, no doubt, given over to corruption.’ (56.)

 

‘It was, moreover, perfectly natural that from the human standpoint (which was the one by which at that time I was still chiefly governed) I should regard Professor Flechsig or his soul as my only true enemy - at a later date there was also the von W. soul, about which I shall have more to say presently - and that I should look upon God Almighty as my natural ally. I merely fancied that He was in great straits as regards Professor Flechsig, and consequently felt myself bound to support him by every conceivable means, even to the length of sacrificing myself. It was not until very much later that the idea forced itself upon my mind that God Himself had played the part of accomplice, if not of instigator, in the plot whereby my soul was to be murdered and my body used like a strumpet. I may say, in fact, that this idea has in part become clearly conscious to me only in the course of writing the present work.’ (59.)

 

‘Every attempt at murdering my soul, or at emasculating me for purposes contrary to the Order of Things (that is, for the gratification of the sexual appetites of a human individual), or later at destroying my understanding - every such attempt has come to nothing. From this apparently unequal struggle between one weak man and God Himself, I have emerged as the victor - though not without undergoing much bitter suffering and privation - because the Order of Things stands upon my side.’ (61.)

 

In a footnote attached to the words ‘contrary to the Order of Things’ in the above passage, the author foreshadows the subsequent transformation in his delusion of emasculation and in his relation to God: ‘I shall show later on that emasculation for quite another purpose - a purpose in consonance with the Order of Things - is within the bounds of possibility, and, indeed, that it may quite probably afford the solution of the conflict.’

 

¹ It is shown from the context in this and other passages that ‘the person in question’ who was to practise this abuse was none other than Flechsig. (See below.)

 

These statements are of decisive importance in determining the view we are to take of the delusion of emasculation and in thus giving us a general understanding of the case. It may be added that the ‘voices’ which the patient heard never treated his transformation into a woman as anything but a sexual disgrace, which gave them an excuse for jeering at him. ‘Rays of God¹ not infrequently thought themselves entitled to mock at me by calling me "Miss² Schreber", in allusion to the emasculation which, it was alleged, I was about to undergo.’ (127.) Or they would say: ‘So this sets up to have been a Senatspräsident, this person who lets himself be f--d!’³ Or again: ‘Don’t you feel ashamed in front of your wife?’

 

That the emasculation phantasy was of a primary nature and originally independent of the Redeemer motif becomes still more probable when we recollect the ‘idea’ which, as I mentioned on an earlier page, occurred to him while he was half asleep, to the effect that it must be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation (36.) This phantasy appeared during the incubation period of his illness, and before he had begun to feel the effects of overwork in Dresden.

 

Schreber himself gives the month of November, 1895, as the date at which the connection was established between the emasculation phantasy and the Redeemer idea and the way thus paved for his becoming reconciled to the former. ‘Now, however,’ he writes, ‘I became clearly aware that the Order of Things imperatively demanded my emasculation, whether I personally liked it or no, and that no reasonable course lay open to me but to reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman. The further consequence of my emasculation could, of course, only be my impregnation by divine rays to the end that a new race of men might be created.’ (177.)

 

¹ The ‘rays of God’, as we shall see, are identical with the voices which talked the ‘basic language’.

² [In English in the original.]

³ I reproduce this omission from the Denkwürdigkeiten, just as I do all the peculiarities of their author’s way of writing. I myself should have found no reason for being so shamefaced over a serious matter.7

 

The idea of being transformed into a woman was the salient feature and the earliest germ of his delusional system. It also proved to be the one part of it that persisted after his cure, and the one part that was able to retain a place in his behaviour in real life after he had recovered. ‘The only thing which could appear unreasonable in the eyes of other people is the fact, already touched upon in the expert’s report, that I am sometimes to be found standing before the mirror or elsewhere with the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, false necklaces, and the like. This only occurs, I may add, when I am by myself; and never, at least so far as I am able to avoid it, in the presence of other people.’ (429.) The Herr Senatspräsident confesses to this frivolity at a date (July, 1901) at which he was already in a position to express very aptly the completeness of his recovery in the region of practical life: ‘I have now long been aware that the persons I see about me are not "cursorily improvised men" but real people, and that I must therefore behave towards them as a reasonable man is used to behave towards his fellows.’ (409.) In contrast to the way in which he put his emasculation phantasy into action, the patient never took any steps towards inducing people to recognize his mission as Redeemer, beyond the publication of his Denkwürdigkeiten.

 

(b) The attitude of our patient towards God is so singular and so full of internal contradictions that it requires more than a little faith to persist in the belief that there is nevertheless ‘method’ in his ‘madness’. With the help of what Dr. Schreber tells us in the Denkwürdigkeiten, we must now endeavour to arrive at a more exact view of his theologico-psychological system, and we must expound his opinions concerning nerves, the state of bliss, the divine hierarchy, and the attributes of God, in their manifest (delusional) nexus. At every point in his theory we shall be struck by the astonishing mixture of the commonplace and the clever, of what has been borrowed and what is original.

 

The human soul is comprised in the nerves of the body. These are to be conceived of as structures of extraordinary fineness, comparable to the finest thread. Some of these nerves are suited only for the reception of sense-perceptions, while others (the nerves of understanding) carry out all the functions of the mind; and in this connection it is to be noticed that each single nerve of understanding represents a person’s entire mental individuality, and that the presence of a greater or lesser number of nerves of understanding has no influence except upon the length of time during which the mind can retain its impressions.¹

 

Whereas men consist of bodies and nerves, God is from His very nature nothing but nerve. But the nerves of God are not, as is the case with human bodies, present in limited numbers, but are infinite or eternal. They possess all the properties of human nerves to an enormously intensified degree. In their creative capacity - that is, their power of turning themselves into every imaginable object in the created world - they are known as rays. There is an intimate relation between God and the starry heaven and the sun.²

 

¹ The words in which Schreber states this theory are italicized by him, and he adds a footnote, in which he insists that it can be used as an explanation of heredity: ‘The male semen’, he declares, ‘contains a nerve belonging to the father, and it unites with a nerve taken from the mother’s body to form a new entity.’ (7.) Here, therefore, we find a quality properly belonging to the spermatozoon transferred on to the nerves, which makes it probable that Schreber’s ‘nerves’ are derived from the sphere of ideas connected with sexuality. It not infrequently happens in the Denkwürdigkeiten that an incidental note upon some piece of delusional theory gives us the desired indication of the genesis of the delusion and so of its meaning.

 

² In this connection see my discussion below on the significance of the sun. - The comparison between (or rather the condensation of) nerves and rays may well have been based on the linear extension which they have in common. The ray-nerves, by the way, are no less creative than the spermatozoon-nerves.9

 

When the work of creation was finished, God withdrew to an immense distance (10-11 and 252) and, in general, resigned the world to its own laws. He limited His activities to drawing up to Himself the souls of the dead. It was only in exceptional instances that He would enter into relations with particular, highly gifted persons,¹ or would intervene by means of a miracle in the destinies of the world. God does not have any regular communication with human souls, in accordance with the Order of Things, till after death.² When a man dies, his spiritual parts (that is, his nerves) undergo a process of purification before being finally reunited with God Himself as ‘fore-courts of Heaven’. Thus it comes about that everything moves in an eternal round, which lies at the basis of the Order of Things. In creating anything, God is parting with a portion of Himself, or is giving a portion of His nerves a different shape. The apparent loss which He thus sustains is made good when, after hundreds and thousands of years, the nerves of dead men, that have entered the state of bliss, once more accrue to Him as ‘fore-courts of Heaven’ (18 and 19 n.).

 

Souls that have passed through the process of purification enter into the enjoyment of a state of bliss.³ In the meantime they have lost some of their individual consciousness, and have become fused together with other souls into higher unities. Important souls, such as those of men like Goethe, Bismarck, etc., may have to retain their sense of identity for hundreds of years to come, before they too can become resolved into higher soul-complexes, such as ‘Jehovah rays’ in the case of ancient Jewry: or ‘Zoroaster rays’ in the case of ancient Persia. In the course of their purification ‘souls learn the language which is spoken by God himself, the so-called "basic language", a vigorous though somewhat antiquated German, which is especially characterized by its great wealth of euphemisms’.4 (13.)

 

¹ In the ‘basic language’ (see below) this is described as ‘making a nerve-connection with them’.

² We shall find later that certain criticisms against God are based on this fact.

³ This consists essentially in a feeling of voluptuousness (see below).

4 On one single occasion during his illness the patient was vouchsafed the privilege of seeing, with his spiritual eyes, God Almighty clear and undisguised before him. On that occasion God uttered what was a very current word in the basic language, and a forcible though not an amiable one - the word ‘Slut!’ (136). [In German ‘Luder’. This term of abuse is occasionally applied to males, though much more often to females.]

 

God Himself is not a simple entity. ‘Above the "fore-courts of Heaven" hovered God Himself, who, in contradistinction to these "anterior realms of God", was also described as the "posterior realms of God". The posterior realms of God were, and still are, divided in a strange manner into two parts, so that a lower God (Ahriman) was differentiated from an upper God (Ormuzd).’ (19.) As regards the significance of this division Schreber can tell us no more than that the lower God was more especially attached to the peoples of a dark race (the Semites) and the upper God to those of a fair race (the Aryans); nor would it be reasonable, in such sublime matters, to expect more of human knowledge. Nevertheless, we are also told that ‘in spite of the fact that in certain respects God Almighty forms a unity, the lower and the upper God must be regarded as separate Beings, each of which possesses its own particular egoism and its own particular instinct of self-preservation, even in relation to the other, and each of which is therefore constantly endeavouring to thrust itself in front of the other’ (140 n.). Moreover, the two divine Beings behaved in quite different ways towards the unlucky Schreber during the acute stage of his illness.¹

 

In the days before his illness Senatspräsident Schreber had been a doubter in religious matters (29 and 64); he had never been able to persuade himself into a firm belief in the existence of a personal God. Indeed, he adduces this fact about his earlier life as an argument in favour of the complete reality of his delusions.² But any one who reads the account which follows of the character-traits of Schreber’s God will have to allow that the transformation effected by the paranoic disorder was no very fundamental one, and that in the Redeemer of to-day much remains of the doubter of yesterday.

 

¹ A footnote on page 20 leads us to suppose that a passage in Byron’s Manfred may have determined Schreber’s choice of the names of Persian divinities. We shall later come upon. further evidence of the influence of this poem on him.

² ‘That it was simply a matter of illusions seems to me to be in my case, from the very nature of things, psychologically unthinkable. For illusions of holding communication with God or with departed souls can properly only arise in the minds of persons who, before falling into their condition of pathological nervous excitement, already have a firm belief in God and in the immortality of the soul. This was not by any means so, however, in my case, as has been explained at the beginning of this chapter.’ (79.)

 

For there is a flaw in the Order of Things, as a result of which the existence of God Himself seems to be endangered. Owing to circumstances which are incapable of further explanation, the nerves of living men, especially when in a condition of intense excitement, may exercise such a powerful attraction upon the nerves of God that He cannot get free from them again, and thus His own existence may be threatened (11). This exceedingly rare occurrence took place in Schreber’s case and involved him in the greatest sufferings. The instinct of self-preservation was aroused in God (30), and it then became evident that God was far removed from the perfection ascribed to him by religions. Through the whole of Schreber’s book there runs the bitter complaint that God, being only accustomed to communication with the dead, does not understand living men.

 

‘In this connection, however, a fundamental misunderstanding prevails, which has since run through my whole life like a scarlet thread. It is based precisely upon the fact that, in accordance with the Order of Things, God really knows nothing about living men and did not need to know; consonantly with the Order of Things, He needed only to have communication with corpses.’ (55.) - ‘This state of things... I am convinced, is once more to be brought into connection with the fact that God was, if I may so express it, quite incapable of dealing with living men, and was only accustomed to communicate with corpses, or at most with men as they lay asleep (that is, in their dreams).’ (141.) - ‘I myself feel inclined to exclaim: "Incredibile scriptu!" Yet it is all literally true, however difficult it may be for other people to grasp the idea of God’s complete inability to judge living men correctly, and however long I myself took to accustom myself to this idea after my innumerable observations upon the subject.’ (246.)

 

But as a result of God’s misunderstanding of living men it was possible for Him Himself to become the instigator of the plot against Schreber, to take him for an idiot, and to subject him to these severe ordeals (264). To avoid being set down as an idiot, he submitted himself to an extremely burdensome system of ‘enforced thinking’. For ‘every time that my intellectual activities ceased, God jumped to the conclusion that my mental faculties were extinct and that the destruction of my understanding (the idiocy), for which He was hoping, had actually set in, and that a withdrawal had now become possible’ (206).

 

The behaviour of God in the matter of the urge to evacuate (or ‘sh--’) rouses him to a specially high pitch of indignation. The passage is so characteristic that I will quote it in full. But to make it clear I must first explain that both the miracles and the voices proceed from God, that is, from the divine rays.2

 

‘Although it will necessitate my touching upon an unsavoury subject, I must devote a few more words to the question that I have just quoted ("Why don’t you sh--?") on account of the typical character of the whole business. The need for evacuation, like all else that has to do with my body, is evoked by a miracle. It is brought about by my faeces being forced forwards (and sometimes backwards again) in my intestines; and if, owing to there having already been an evacuation, enough material is not present, then such small remains as there may still be of the contents of my intestines are smeared over my anal orifice. This occurrence is a miracle performed by the upper God, and it is repeated several dozens of times at the least every day. It is associated with an idea which is utterly incomprehensible to human beings and can only be accounted for by God’s complete ignorance of living man as an organism. According to this idea "sh--ing" is in a certain sense the final act; that is to say, when once the urge to sh-- has been miracled up, the aim of destroying the understanding is achieved and a final withdrawal of the rays becomes possible. To get to the bottom of the origin of this idea, we must suppose, as it seems to me, that there is a misapprehension in connection with the symbolic meaning of the act of evacuation, a notion, in fact, that any one who has been in such a relation as I have with divine rays is to some extent entitled to sh-- upon the whole world.

 

‘But now what follows reveals the full perfidy¹ of the policy that has been pursued towards me. Almost every time the need for evacuation was miracled up in me, some other person in my vicinity was sent (by having his nerves stimulated for that purpose) to the lavatory, in order to prevent my evacuating. This is a phenomenon which I have observed for years and upon such countless occasions - thousands of them - and with such regularity, as to exclude any possibility of its being attributable to chance. And thereupon comes the question: "Why don’t you sh--?" to which the brilliant repartee is made that I am "so stupid or something". The pen well-nigh shrinks from recording so monumental a piece of absurdity as that God, blinded by His ignorance of human nature, can positively go to such lengths as to suppose that there can exist a man too stupid to do what every animal can do - too stupid to be able to sh--. When, upon the occasion of such an urge, I actually succeed in evacuating - and as a rule, since I nearly always find the lavatory engaged, I use a pail for the purpose - the process is always accompanied by the generation of an exceedingly strong feeling of spiritual voluptuousness. For the relief from the pressure caused by the presence of the faeces in the intestines produces a sense of intense well-being in the nerves of voluptuousness; and the same is equally true of making water. For this reason, even down to the present day, while I am passing stool or making water, all the rays are always without exception united; for this very reason, whenever I address myself to these natural functions, an attempt is invariably made, though as a rule in vain, to miracle backwards the urge to pass stool and to make water.’² (225-7.)

 

¹ In a footnote at this point the author endeavours to mitigate the harshness of the word ‘perfidy’ by a reference to one of his arguments in justification of God. These will be discussed presently.

² This confession to a pleasure in the excretory processes, which we have learnt to recognize as one of the auto-erotic components of infantile sexuality, may be compared with the remarks made by little Hans in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy’.

 

Furthermore, this singular God of Schreber’s is incapable of learning anything by experience: ‘Owing to some quality or other inherent in his nature, it seems to be impossible for God to derive any lessons for the future from the experience thus gained.’ (186.) He can therefore go on repeating the same tormenting ordeals and miracles and voices, without alteration, year after year, until He inevitably becomes a laughing-stock to the victim of His persecutions.

‘The consequence is that, now that the miracles have to a great extent lost the power which they formerly possessed of producing terrifying effects, God strikes me above all, in almost everything that happens to me, as being ridiculous or childish. As regards my own behaviour, this often results in my being obliged in self-defence to play the part of a scoffer at God, and even, on occasion, to scoff at Him aloud.’ (333.)¹

 

This critical and rebellious attitude towards God is, however, opposed in Schreber’s mind by an energetic counter-current, which finds expression in many places: ‘But here again I must most emphatically declare that this is nothing more than an episode, which will, I hope, terminate at the latest with my decease, and that the right of scoffing at God belongs in consequence to me alone and not to other men. For them He remains the almighty creator of Heaven and earth, the first cause of all things, and the salvation of their future, to whom - not withstanding that a few of the conventional religious ideas may require revision - worship and the deepest reverence are due.’ (333-4.)

 

Repeated attempts are therefore made to find a justification for God’s behaviour to the patient. In these attempts, which display as much ingenuity as every other theodicy, the explanation is based now upon the general nature of souls, and now upon the necessity for self-preservation under which God lay, and upon the misleading influence of the Flechsig soul (60-1 and 160). In general, however, the illness is looked upon as a struggle between Schreber the man and God, in which victory lies with the man, weak though he is, because the Order of Things is on his side (61).

 

The medical report might easily lead us to suppose that Schreber exhibited the everyday form of Redeemer phantasy, in which the patient believes he is the son of God, destined to save the world from its misery or from the destruction that is threatening it, and so on. It is for this reason that I have been careful to present in detail the peculiarities of Schreber’s relation to God. The significance of this relation for the rest of mankind is only rarely alluded to in the Denkwürdigkeiten and not until the last phase of his delusional formation. It consists essentially in the fact that no one who dies can enter the state of bliss so long as the greater part of the rays of God are absorbed in his (Schreber’s) person, owing to his powers of attraction (32). It is only at a very late stage, too, that his identification with Jesus Christ makes an undisguised appearance (338 and 431).

 

No attempt at explaining Schreber’s case will have any chance of being correct which does not take into account these peculiarities in his conception of God, this mixture of reverence and rebelliousness in his attitude towards Him.

 

¹ Even in the basic language it occasionally happened that God was not the abuser but the abused. For instance: ‘Deuce take it! What a thing to have to say - that God lets himself be f--d!’ (194.)4 I will now turn to another subject, which is closely related to God, namely, the state of bliss. This is also spoken of by Schreber as ‘the life beyond’ to which the human soul is raised after death by the process of purification. He describes it as a state of uninterrupted enjoyment, bound up with the contemplation of God. This is not very original, but on the other hand it is surprising to learn that Schreber makes a distinction between a male and a female state of bliss.¹ ‘The male state of bliss was superior to the female, which seems to have consisted chiefly in an uninterrupted feeling of voluptuousness.’ (18.) In other passages this coincidence between the state of bliss and voluptuousness is expressed in plainer language and without reference to sex-distinction; and moreover that element of the state of bliss which consists in the contemplation of God is not further discussed. Thus, for instance: ‘The nature of the nerves of God, is such that the state of bliss... is accompanied by a very intense sensation of voluptuousness, even though it does not consist exclusively of it.’ (51.) And again: ‘Voluptuousness may be regarded as a fragment of the state of bliss given in advance, as it were, to men and other living creatures.’ (281.) So the state of heavenly bliss is to be understood as being in its essence an intensified continuation of sensual pleasure upon earth!

 

This view of the state of bliss was far from being an element in Schreber’s delusion that originated in the first stages of his illness and was later eliminated as being incompatible with the rest. So late as in the Statement of his Case, drawn up by the patient for the Appeal Court in July, 1901, he emphasizes as one of his greatest discoveries the fact ‘that voluptuousness stands in a close relationship (not hitherto perceptible to the rest of mankind) to the state of bliss enjoyed by departed spirits’.²

 

¹ It would be much more in keeping with the wish-fulfilment offered by the life beyond that in it we shall at last be free from the difference between the sexes.

 

Und jene himmlischen Gestalten

sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib.

 

[And those calm shining sons of morn

They ask not who is maid or boy.]

 

² The possibility of this discovery of Schreber’s having a deeper meaning is discussed below.5

 

We shall find, indeed, that this ‘close relationship’ is the rock upon which the patient builds his hopes of an eventual reconciliation with God and of his sufferings being brought to an end. The rays of God abandon their hostility as soon as they are certain that in becoming absorbed into his body they will experience spiritual voluptuousness (133); God Himself demands that He shall be able to find voluptuousness in him (283), and threatens him with the withdrawal of His rays if he neglects to cultivate voluptuousness and cannot offer God what He demands (320).




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