Original subtitles

You have... You have eyes.

You have hands.

You have you have

Hot

you have hot

of love

you

have strength

The hearing has been convened today to hear Daniel Paul Schreiber contest the

compulsory order for his psychiatric treatment and close supervision.

His plea is based on this manuscript.

It is a detailed account of his sickness written over many years.

We have come to understand that preliminary plans have been drawn up for

its eventual publication.

The negotiator...

was Dr. Schreiber himself.

Dr. Schreiber offers himself as author and his skill as negotiator

as evidence that his judgment in many fields of life goes

unmentioned.

Dr. Schreiber, you requested the opportunity to make your case personally

before judgment is given.

I would also like to request that I may read a prepared statement.

I wish to publish my memoirs to give others the chance to

judge whether my so-called delusions are in fact revelations of

God's work and God's relation to man.

They are.

And I believe history will agree with me.

He is writing trying to convince people that he is safe enough to leave the

asylum and to be trusted.

And it seems fairly convincing.

But there's another layer,

another level in which he's writing to someone else, some other.

Is it his father, you know, the educationalist? Is it the mother who's

amazingly absent in the memoirs?

Although, of course, one has to say there is this mysterious chapter three,

the enigmatic chapter three, where all the family history is laid, and yet it's

been censored and removed for all time.

Schreber's document is a valuable narrative of a very dangerous and

complex process which he feels could kill him.

As such, there's a tremendous amount to learn from the document.

Schreber has a very important place in the modernizing of madness.

There's a way in which madness in times before Schreber is a kind of

timeless, traditional madness.

But with Schreber, we come into a very obvious modernity. Typewriters and

automobiles, very interesting as a pivotal figure.

Sapien. Hello.

I'm so sorry.

Yes.

We seem to be cursed.

Your wife has lost a great deal of blood.

She must be cared for with the greatest possible attention in the next few

weeks.

Anything.

Whatever is needed.

I'm so sorry, Paul.

I'll hold you.

I'll keep you safe.

He was very successful in his career, so obviously there was a part of him that

was functioning as you would

expect from a healthy man rather than someone affected by a psychotic

condition.

We really don't know exactly why people become mentally ill like this.

We can speculate.

There may be aspects to do with the family.

There might be aspects to do with his past, his experiences, pressure, stress.

I suspect the stress of becoming a Supreme Court judge must have had

something to do with it.

Liz, you frighten me.

You are awake?

It's the middle of the night, Paul.

The lights evoke me again.

Listen.

I hear nothing.

Perhaps there's a mice behind the walls.

These walls are solid, Sebastian.

I want you to listen.

I want to know what's happening in this house.

Try and remain calm, Paul.

I would like to know what's happening in this house.

Do. Please.

Tell me.

This

melancholic

period will soon draw to a natural close.

God willing.

That's what he said.

Patience. Patience is required.

We should be aware that our diagnosis is based not

on our interviewing and talking with and listening to a real

person, but it's based on reading a book, starting with Freud and then many

others who followed him.

They all analyzed his book rather than analyzed Schreber.

In a sense, his memoirs bring him closer to us.

So when we try and diagnose, which we have to in order to help him and get him

treatment, there's a sense in which we also have to enter his world.

It's a psychotic world, a world which is very uncomfortable for people.

We can walk along the road and forget that there is another possibility of

seeing.

Can you see my face?

If we think back to the second half of the 19th century,

then the psychiatrists at that time have been in a very difficult position.

In the early part of the century, German psychiatry was almost metaphysical in

its way of understanding psychiatric conditions.

And in the second half, there was an almost revolution in terms of trying to

understand and categorise mental illness.

If a clinician, a doctor, has particular theoretical views,

then it is inevitably going to affect the...

the plan of treatment for the patient.

Over excitement is highly damaging.

Rest, more rest.

What I see is every fiber of your being overstretched to the point of breaking.

It might assist you to think of your mind as a calculating mechanism, a

delicate structure regulated by invisible ratchets and pendulums of gods

devising.

Whatever was going on in the late 19th century in Germany was obviously

challenging the notion of the soul and religion, because during that

time there was a huge investment in trying to understand

brain function and the function of the nervous system in general.

It's a work of art.

What is it?

It's your mind.

Woven from an exquisitely fine net of nerves.

What is it?

It's your soul.

It's a work of art.

Oh no, it's much, much more.

It's a cacophony of telegraphed messages from the brain to the liver.

To and fro.

Think of it as the very root of the idea.

Word made flesh.

To and fro, to and fro.

It's this flood of messages which is out of rhythm in your husband.

He's so unhappy, Doctor.

marvellous advances since you last were here.

New drugs, new approaches, heavy sedation, the stilling of unruly cross

rhythms.

I pray you will return my husband to me as you did before.

Of course.

What strikes one from Schreber's memoirs is that he is so

alone.

One sees over and over the sense in which He describes how God has withdrawn

to this enormous distance and really only has relationship with the dead.

Seems to me this reflects something about his own sense of himself as a

person or as a human subject has died, something in him has died.

Of course we can help him with various kinds of physical treatments to

help make him feel more alive again in a way. But to my mind, by trying to help

the patient feel that they're not alone, that in itself is healing.

Sabine, you must help me.

Paul, stop this nonsense.

Please sign this, as I've repeatedly asked you.

You must help me.

My soul is to be given to the unnamed

person.

And my body...

is to be made female for sexual abuse by him.

Paul, stop!

You're upsetting yourself and distressing me.

Paul?

Paul. Please.

Please play the piano.

Why don't you say it to her?

Do it for me.

Why not say it aloud? Please play the piano for me.

I do like it, so will you play the piano?

Is it my fault he's ill?

It's most definitely not your fault. No, it isn't your fault. I know very often

relatives... Oh, no, you can't blame yourself.

It's quite common.

The reason is, the reason that he seems to be worse when you come is that he's

reminded of what he's lost.

He feels better in your presence.

He feels more relaxed.

He knows that you can tolerate even some of his...

most extreme behaviours as you have indeed over a number of years now with

so much patience and tolerance and that allows him to be freer to express

himself. If you develop schizophrenia you become extremely sensitive and so

it's a very common experience that when people who are close to the patient who

the patient has a powerful emotional bond with

their symptoms can often get worse. In one sense, it's a good thing that he

feels pain when he sees you because he's being reminded of the good things of

life.

What does all this remind you of? His obsession with rotting and the softening

of the brain.

He speaks of many things, sir.

Miracles, visions, systems of hidden meaning coded in the

world.

You know, he believes himself a mystic.

Yes, but what of the softening and the rotting?

Well, he talks of the lust plague, sir.

Exactly.

The lust plague.

With good reason, man his class and age.

first thing to look for.

In the late 19th century, the asylums had a lot of people with neurosyphilis

and the incidence was increasing, so about 10% of all people in asylums were

suffering from syphilis.

So anybody presenting with a mental illness in their 40s or 50s were

initially assumed to have syphilis, moving into the nervous system.

If anything, Schreber's illness improved, at least during the middle

phase, so that suggests that this was primarily schizophrenia and not

neurosyphilis.

His brother was a paretic, you know, tertiary syphilis.

put a bullet through his brains or what was left of them. Poor fellow.

I see.

You've read the brother's autopsy?

No, she told me.

I was terrified she was infected herself, but I examined her.

Utter nonsense.

Poor woman has a lot to put up with.

What am I to think of these disgusting effusions?

Fantasies of being a woman, daydreaming of being violated like some ten-phenic

whore. My dear Frau Schrever, restrain yourself.

You cannot let your husband's afflictions undue to excite you.

I believe we're here to discuss your health.

Your pulse is weak.

Irregular. Fast.

You neglect yourself.

You overtax yourself.

These blooms of your husband's overheated brain are like...

A fever, when an overheated body attempts to regulate its temperature.

It's degrading to see him so abject.

Pathetic.

His dignity is everything to him, and now he grovels on the floor like a

whipped dog. Now let us return to your afflictions, please.

The crying, the laughing, I believe all organically linked to the misfortune of

your miscarriages.

Let me explain.

Here, the womb, lies a seat of the unhappiness of so many patients

of the affair of sex.

Now we developed a simple procedure to remove this source of emotional

instability and torment.

The reproductive organs are, when they are poisoned in some way or another, the

poison of body and soul.

Surgical intervention can remove, as it were, the toxic tissue and the poisoned

emotion in one cut.

No.

Not me.

My womb is fruitful.

Our problems... The problems we have, they come from him.

I hope I can rely on your absolute discretion as my

physician,

as well as my husband's physician.

I have a child.

She's nearly six now.

I see.

How long have you been married? He knows.

It's a secret my husband shares with me.

a leper leading lepers, a leper led by lepers.

Freud, based on what Schreber himself says, manages

to create a whole theory about paranoia rooted in the very complex

and conflictual relationship that Schreber had with his father.

You must eat.

Because you're too stupid, perhaps.

His father also happened to be a doctor, like Flexig. And the father also happens

to be God the Father.

So these three, his own father, the doctors, the whole profession of

psychiatrist and God, all get confused in this

very ambivalent, very complex relationship that Schreber has with

them.

Why don't you say it aloud?

A leper.

Leading lepers.

To order of the world. Order of the world. Order of the world.

All you must eat.

Eat.

Why don't you say it aloud?

Because you're too stupid, perhaps.

This is very bad business for everybody, Paul.

Because you're too stupid, perhaps.

He is what he has become as a result of various experiences which he might have

had as a child.

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

The relationship between the clinician and the patient is fundamental to a good

outcome. It's important to be able to keep enough of a distance or enough

objectivity not to become overwhelmed by the level of the distress of the

patient. And there are times when, even for experienced clinicians, the level of

distress is very difficult to withstand.

But I think that balance is a very important one.

And unfortunately, sometimes if people find the distress too great, they fall

back on a much more mechanistic, repressive type of regime to deal with

the distress which they can't cope with. And the patient, I think, suffers as a

consequence.

Well, according to the reports, he's...

Certainly demanding, exhausting, and quite possibly incurable.

Well, he has been difficult with his wife about his income.

After all, we rely on her to pay us.

But let it be clear, young man.

Segregation or isolation are frankly the storage of incurables.

has never been our priority.

Why don't you bring her in?

We know with Schreber's illness, he's still experiencing hallucinations and he

still has his delusional bleeds.

This suggests he does have what's called process schizophrenia and in those

circumstances there is no cure in the sense that it can be reversed and he can

be restored essentially to normal.

Nevertheless we can treat people with schizophrenia to minimise their symptoms

and to minimise the impact of their symptoms on their daily life.

Certainly towards the latter part of the 19th century they were in fact quite

successful in understanding and separating out many of the conditions

which, even today, we use similar classification systems.

The problem for them was that, although they were able to classify, their level

of treatment options was very limited indeed.

You left these, my dear.

Sir.

We have a delicate matter to discuss this afternoon.

I believe that the Flexic has informed you that your husband is upsetting not

just other patients, but staff as well.

He has even boxed their ears. He's a man of the highest standing.

The strictest of discipline.

Of course.

Your photograph still stands on my desk.

I tell everyone.

He's the man... Yes, indeed. But I'm very sorry to say that on this occasion,

according to the reports before us, he's quite possibly

incurable.

I want to stress that we pass no judgment on your husband.

Other than a professional judgment, there is strictly here...

for the business of cure.

Well, simply put, others are much better equipped to help him now than us.

I see.

I knew you would.

Dr Flexig says he missed me.

My father sends fond greetings from Berlin.

He hopes for your return to health.

All their sense is having is destroying the Biennale.

What's the chief couldn't...

I

cannot take responsibility.

Constant, hostile miracles directed against me.

The breaking of the piano string miracles.

The choking miracles.

There was just this one skeleton creature.

Skeletons.

our Father which art in heaven

hallowed be thy name

thy kingdom come

thy will be done in

earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread

Paul

I cannot do this anymore. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them

their trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Paul. Paul.

I cannot do this anymore.

You must sign this.

They said you must at the office.

But again, it's stealing, it's theft.

What reason do you give me to ignore this request?

First your companionship and now your modest income is denied to me as your

wife.

You're dead.

You're dead.

Perhaps now is the appropriate moment to ask Dr. Tauscher to testify.

I've been Dr. Schreber's physician for quite an extended period of time, and

even after Dr. Schreber's removal from my own professional care, I've retained

in friendly contact with the patient.

He has requested I read to you a letter he wrote recently to me.

At the tribunal, I wish to discuss under what circumstances may a person be

designated insane and additionally detained against their stated will.

In earlier centuries, as we know, unfortunates were seen as possessed by

demons and imprisoned with no recourse to justice and no help or treatment.

The question I want to ask is, do we live in more enlightened times?

I would suggest for us as a society, as rational men, as we approach the 20th

century, the issue of the dangerously insane and the harmlessly insane is the

key to the problem.

I am judged to suffer from delusion, and I'm deprived of my liberty, but I'm a

danger to no one.

I wish to contest my imprisonment, both for myself and for others in a similar

situation.

Thank you, Dr. Tauscher.

Can I ask you to read to the court the letter you wrote in reply?

I wrote to him that I firmly believed his case to be a strong one,

and that finally, if he would win... the tribunal supports,

the asylum authorities will not prevent his discharge.

A leper led by lepers.

A leper led by lepers.

A leper led by lepers. God has chosen me for his abuse.

A leper led by lepers.

A

leper

led by lepers.

Schreber underwent the whole gamut of treatments that were available at the

time. Many of these treatments, if we look back from today's perspective in

the 21st century, we'd be rather shocked and surprised at the types of treatment.

These more extreme treatments may have produced effects within the body which

could have had some sort of therapeutic effect.

God has chosen me for his abuse.

Lepers. Lepers. Lepers.

Lepers.

and shows his hands.

so so

small.

Thank you.

The distinction between the mind or the soul and the nervous system was

obviously something that preyed on Schreber's mind.

At that time, people had described peripheral nerves and were also able to

stain the brain and look at individual neurons or nerve cells and how they

connected to each other with fibers or filaments.

Schreber brought this into his delusional system.

by thinking of the nerves as being the repository of the soul.

sincerely believes that he is under the direct influence of God, that his

actions and in particular his communications in his memoir are

important or if not vital for the safety of the human race.

And then he elaborated on the fact that the whole world emanating from God was

one vast neural network so that there were fibers of nerve filaments coming

from God which were descending throughout the universe, tying things

together, including human beings.

Freud believes that Schreber suffered from delusions of grandeur, paranoid,

schizophrenic ideas.

Another way of thinking about it is that Schreber was also preoccupied with

women, with becoming a woman.

Now, to what extent is he interested in the relationship between his

masculinity and his femininity?

It seems that there's a great confusion in him about these matters.

He doesn't seem to want to get better.

He wants to get better, I'm sure, but he doesn't know himself how to.

I'm sure somewhere he does want to get better because he's clearly struggling a

lot and suffering, and I'm sure he wants his suffering to end.

Evidence from his narrative, from the way he talks, indicates to me that he's

trying very much to convince himself and others of a way through his illness.

Where does this sickness come from?

We know that in some people it runs in families, but in others there is no

evidence that it's running in families.

You can see that in the brain of someone with schizophrenia there are fewer

connections between

nervous cells, neurons, than in more healthy individuals.

So there's a lack of connectivity between brain cells and between areas in

the brain which is likely to be of significance.

It was the experience of finally being appointed to the High Court that

ended up in producing psychosis.

Probably the conflict about finally taking the position of authority might

have been too much for him. Who knows?

Whatever the cause of Schreber's illness, he is trying to piece together

a form of narrative through his delusions and his ideas that makes sense

to him in the light of his experience.

His father was a well-known physician and pedagogist who had...

extreme theories about child rearing.

Those theories amounted to the total obedience that children had to show to

their elders and to their father in particular.

The father was well known all over Germany and extremely influential with

his theories and in fact a whole generation or more of German children

were educated following his principles.

He also developed certain devices in order to control children,

devices like the Geradalter that was making sure the children would sit

straight, or Kopfalter, something that would keep their head straight all the

time, and they were almost torture.

machines in a sense and we do know that the father used those or

experimented on his own children.

It might be argued that the book is a tissue of unbelievable lies and

grotesque caricatures that have no basis in reality.

Why should we believe any claims Dr. Schreber makes?

When a patient with mental illness speaks, it's a very

complex question to know what is true in what they say.

In my psychoanalytic work, I listen to everything that is being presented to me

and take everything very seriously.

I don't dismiss it. I don't think it's just mad or it's just irrational.

I take it very seriously.

At the same time, I never take it very literally.

It is true that what the patient is telling you usually is really their

experience.

And that you can communicate that to the patient. You can say, I believe that

what you're telling me is what you are experiencing.

And quite often it's possible to then say, my understanding of what is

happening is slightly different to yours.

Not just psychotic patients like Schreber, but also people, for instance,

who are pathological liars and who are telling lies. And I'm aware that what

they're telling me is...

is not true as such.

Nevertheless, for a pathological liar, a lie is his truth.

Dr. Schreber, you requested the opportunity to make your case personally

before judgment is given.

I would also like to request that I may read a prepared statement.

I wish to publish my memoirs to give others the chance to judge.

whether my so-called delusions are in fact revelations of

God's work and God's relation to man.

I believe they are.

And I believe history will agree with me.

But secondly,

and of the greatest importance, I would submit my beliefs on this matter

are mine to hold as my private religious beliefs without

suffering punitive legal consequences and confinement.

This is a basic religious freedom.

This is my right.

As for accusations of obscenity, and as to the publication of my book,

perhaps the worst risk I expose myself to is that people will consider

me mad.

And this they do already.

You have strength.

You have strength.

You have strength.

You have heart.

Do you have the book?

Yes, Mother.

And remember, we'd like you to address Herr Schreber as Papa.

He's not my father.

Was he a mystic or a religious man rather than a madman? Well, we could

speculate that he was all of these things.

This book will have, I'm sure, and continues to have, even now, enormous

impact in the world because of the way that he describes so clearly the almost

mythical aspects of his own internal divisions.

Please try.

Look at the ring.

It's her hand.

She made it as a gift for him.

He's been very ill.

And now he needs peace and quiet and love of his family.

Why does he need it so quiet?

For the sake of his nose and his writing.

What are you doing?

Go, go.

She is very pretty.

She is, isn't she?

As pretty as her mother.

I'm so glad you're home, Paul.

Sabian, you cannot imagine.

Everyone, Hall is home.

I wonder if the enormous interest in Schreber's

and in the published narrative, doesn't have something to do with a real change

in attitude, which pivots around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of

the 20th century, a change in attitude towards madness, a change from seeing

madness as something which is wholly other.

And surely Schreber's narrative and, of course, Freud's analysis of Schreber's

situation

Is the development of that attempt to understand madness and not simply to

treat it as total otherness?

We do know that many mystics, religious men and artists

have themselves symptoms of one sort or another which

might be considered as psychotic.

So being one thing doesn't...

exclude being the other. It is possible to be mad and at the same time to be an

artist.

You suffered.

You struggled against weakness.

You have endured.

You have overcome.

Fridolin, say hello to your new papa.

This room is forbidden to you.

Unless you knock and I bid you to enter.

Today I cannot be cross with you and I want us to be friends.

But some things are private and even

Hello, Papa.

Fridolin, it's lovely to welcome you into our family.

I hope these last few weeks you have been settling in.

And I see you have found my old childhood library.

I gave it to her. I hope you don't mind. No, take any you want. It was kept for a

child.

Do you know any of the poems?

Yes.

Go on.

Yes.

Just look at him.

There he stands, with his nasty, harrowed hands.

See, his nails are never cut.

They are grimed as black as soot.

And the Slaven, I declare, never once has combed his hair.

Anything to me is sweeter than to see shock-headed Peter.

You read very well, my dear, very prettily.

It was my favourite childhood.

No.

Now we mustn't overtake your father.

Let us look after him. Now he's restored to us.

You must rest.

Father would have agreed, I'm sure.

Your organism is poisoned.

Toxic.

It's still in need of cleansing.

And above all, rest.

Yes.

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,

thy will be done, Poor father.

His books, his plans for reform.

They poisoned him.

And wore him out.

Yes.

He certainly left his mark on the world.

A life devoted to others.

You are too stupid, perhaps.

Why don't you say it aloud?

Why don't you say it aloud?

Why don't you say it?

Because you're too stupid, perhaps?

Why don't you say it?