Don't forget that all representing is nonsense.

The remarkable late nineteenth-century case of the bellowing Judge Daniel Paul Schreber is relatively well, if generally indirectly, known. He has been analysed in absentia by Freud and Lacan. He has been studied posthumously by psychiatrists, psychologists, intellectual historians, literary critics and cultural theorists. We will arrive at these texts soon enough. His own meticulously judicious record of her time in treatment, first in a university clinic and latterly incarcerated in Sonnenstein Asylum, has been widely translated and the questionable Anglophone version of this extraordinary extra-judicial document has been through two editions with Harvard University Press and has then been reprinted as a ‘Classic’ by the New York Review of Books, and thus is available, although as we will see less often read than previewed through secondary sources. And then, just to stick to highlights, there is Schreber the movie, and more recently the mixed-genre biopic Shock Head Soul. His name has long stood as an emblem of antipsychiatry. A dual-language version of his text is available on the Internet. Schreber has thus, over the century and more since his demise on 14 April 1911, acquired a certain notoriety in psy-circles and beyond. In a more academic vein, by way of final flourish, he is the subject of a monumental defense by Zvi Lothane, as well as being the subject of a bravura interpretation of his demonic possession by Ewan Fernie. He has, postmortem, been analysed to death. It is time, and let me repeat the prolegomenal point, to return to Schreber, and in particular to revisit and rescue his text from the various and multiple misappropriations, preclusions and foreclosures that have been perpetrated upon it by analysts obsessed with ‘curing’ the diseased and deceased author or more usually simply scoring disciplinary points by projecting their theories of psychosis on to the mutable body of the man imagined beyond the text. The tendency, as Lothane has ardently argued, has been to diagnose, explain and symptomise Schreber rather than to stay with what we have, namely the text of the jurist and latterly senior judge who first suffered affective indisposition in 1884 when he tried to escape from the bench and the law by standing unsuccessfully for election to the Reichstag.