Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."

Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) was the son of the preeminent nineteenth-century German medical authority on child-rearing. Before his mental collapse, he served as the chief justice of the supreme court of the state of Saxony.

Rosemary Dinnage is the author of The Ruffian on the Stair: Reflections on Death, One to One Experiences of Psychotherapy, and Annie Besant. She is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. She lives in London.