Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, jurist, scholar, self-confessed poetaster, spiritualist and pianist fell famously ill first when, as a junior judge, he stood and failed to get elected to the Reichstag, the German parliament, in the fall of 1884. His ignominious defeat at the poles triggered a nervous breakdown, manifested in insomnia, hypochondria and weight loss. It resulted in a relatively brief stay in the Leipzig clinic run by Professor Flechsig, who on this occasion seems to have cured the judge. Eight years later, soon after his appointment to a senior judicial position, Senatspräsident of one of the three Chambers of the Royal Court of Appeals in Dresden, he suffered a second breakdown marked most notably by gender dysphoria and, to coin a phrase, Scriptarrhea, or the drive to write – the Thoth complex, which insists, in good juristic fashion, upon inscription, a record, and in consonance with the Statute of Frauds, is impelled by the postulate of the parol evidence rule, namely that writing is the best proof.

Schreber's uniqueness lies not in his nervous breakdowns, which are common enough in the legal profession, but in the uniquely detailed, extraordinarily candid and paradoxically lucid account of his nervous indisposition, his transitional desire and his critique of law, published in 1903, with a rather early modern length of title as Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken nebst Nachträgen und einem Anhang über die Frage: ‘Unter welchen Voraussetzungen darf eine für geisteskrank erachtete Person gegen ihren erklärten Willen in einer Heilanstalt festgehalten werden?’. A denizen of the late nineteenth century, he fell through a mental hole and abandoned his profession for unusual but highly articulate spiritual, libidinal and juristic reasons. It will be argued here that in his unflinchingly forthright description of his gender dysphoria and her transitional experiences, in his delineation of anger and pain, she authored a radically novel and surprisingly visceral critique of the masculine body, and of the law that it manifested, a positive theory of the highly tenuous spiritual grounds of judgement and an engendered conception of justice and right. It is in the manner and method of law, out of respect for the Judge's writings and in honor of their creativity and often judicious insights, that the starting point of any encounter with Schreber must be his frequently ignored and prejudicially labelled text.