Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) came to prominence as one of history’s most famous madmen in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911). Freud’s study psychoanalyzed Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a detailed account of the German Judge’s psychotic breakdowns in which he battled against numerous antagonists, from God and the Devil to his own body and lexicon. D. Harlan Wilson’s Schreberfiktion case study is at once about, around and beyond Memoirs as well as the many secondary texts it has engendered. As the formerly make-believe aspects of the science fiction genre continue to materialize in the real world, Schreber’s pathology becomes more and more relevant; his imagination and intellect, his anxiety and dread, his solipsism and megalomania point to the pathological unconscious that animates contemporary technological society. Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real. Science fiction explored the effects of the New in the Next, the Near and, in some cases, the Now. Galvanized by Schreber, this book maps the next stage: the New in the Never.
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The memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber’s imploding/projecting ego heralded all of our POST disciplines and eras. The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is their phantasmagoria and last hurrah. What if every social media post were meaningful? Overstimulation unto breakdown! By ratcheting up the Schreber-Effect to throw a fit with our digital era, D. Harlan Wilson has at least—at last!—put the NEW (German pronunciation) into NEVER.
– LAURENCE A. RICKELS, author of Nazi Psychoanalysis, Germany: A Science Fiction, and The Psycho Records
“Schreber is forever. This is a scintillating sexual and scatological fantasia on Schreber’s immortal book and an uproarious parody on psychosis. Wilson cautions: ‘The characters and events in this book are fictitious.’ Freud warned: ‘It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory that I should
like to admit or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe’—applicable to delusions of Schreber’s interpreters too.” —HENRY ZVI LOTHANE, author of In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry
“Dementia as a way of being in narrativity and other, lesser modes of existence, duck-and-cover brilliant, dark energy all the way down, D. Harlan Wilson’s The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is a magnificent switching station for all tomorrow’s parties.” —LANCE OLSEN, author of Nietzsche’s Kissesand Dreamlives of Debris
