Schreber’s Memoirs: the Crisis of the Autobiographical Pact and the Ethics of Taxonomy
Schreber’s Memoirs: the Crisis of the Autobiographical Pact and the Ethics of Taxonomy

Summary/Abstract: Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) starts to write Memories of my nervous illness in 1900 (during his stay at Sonnenstein Asylum) and he publishes it in 1902, before leaving the sanatorium. His personal account on schizophrenia is an essential reading for the clinical, psychoanalytic and psychological training, but the filter that will be adopted in this study will pertain to a different angle, concerning to a greater extent the formal considerations, the convention of classification – be it nosology or stratification of discourse. By a strict defamiliarization of Schreber’s writing from the usual context of symptomatology/pathology and by initiating a theoretic enclave where the reading of the Memories meets the auctorial intention (materialized quite from the title of the work) – thus, a literary examination – we may discover the subversive mechanics of ethics and politics affecting such a borderland and puzzling issue, unfolded best in the question whether the text produced by a recipient of mental illness has literary dignity. Thus, the present study will tackle the identification of the textual legitimate approach to Schreber’s anamnestic exercise, the identification of the proper receptive stance to such a compendium of disjointed ontic syntax, and the proper managing of a mutilated autobiographical pact that lacks a strong coherence guarantee that would have been otherwise integrated in the structural categories of reality, hypothetical loyalty to the objective truth, etc.

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