In 1884, distinguished German jurist Schreber (1842-1911) began a series of mental collapses that afflicted him the rest of his life. He produced this account while confined to a psychiatric hospital; it was published as Denkwnrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken in 1903. It has become one of the most read and studied works in psychiatric literature since Freud's celebrated 1911 paper about it. The translation was first published by W. Dawson, London in 1955. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."