Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Author(s): Daniel Paul Schreber (Author)
- Publisher: New York Review Books
- Publication Date: Aug. 31 2000
- Edition: Revised ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 488 pages
- ISBN-10: 094032220X
- ISBN-13: 9780940322202
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Amazon
Schreber had a hard time believing in the “fleeting-improvised-men” who flitted in and out of his life, and grew convinced that he was the only human left in a world of shadows. But he did know that something was wrong. He would hear the birds in the asylum’s garden ask him, over and over, “Are you not ashamed?” And he was aware that his bellowing, banging on the piano, and other bodily manifestations of God’s manipulation of his nerves (or “miracles”) were startling to others, to say the least. Many of Schreber’s delusions had to do with escaping his body–the constant babble of thousands of voices in his head were infuriating, as was his inability to cease thinking: The sound which reaches my own ear–hundreds of times every day–is so definite that it cannot be a hallucination. The genuine “cries of help” are always instantly followed by the phrase which has been learnt by rote: “If only the cursed cries of help would stop.” Memoirs of My Nervous Illness succeeds on many levels: as a memoir, as imaginative literature, and as a serious work of mythology. Flechsig makes a menacing and inscrutable villain, representing materialistic thinking and conventional reality–no help at all. Schreber, meanwhile, is the classic hero, struggling to stay sane in a cruel and capricious universe. –Therese Littleton
About the Author
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