The Strange Case of Daniel Paul Schreber
Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 23 years ago, in 2001, on the World Wide Web.
UPS, bless their hearts, just delivered me the copy of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness that I ordered from bn.com. The book is a German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber’s account of his own psychotic delusions while imprisoned in an asylum, and is one of the most celebrated cases of psychosis in the literature (through the memoirs, Schreber was analyzed by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Szasz, and many others). The book was also a major source of inspiration for Alex Proyas’s stunning movie Dark City (Kiefer Sutherland’s character is named Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber) and it will be very interesting to re-read the movie in light of Schreber’s madness. Sadly, there is very little on the web that takes any notice of this link, which is probably partly due to Proyas not having mentioned it in interviews. There is apparently an article in the Times Literary Supplement which explores the connection, but I’ve been unable to find anything more than some excerpts online. Sigh.