The other Zarathustra: Madness, Schreber and the making of religion in 19th century Germany

The religious experiences and religious cosmology that the psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) described in his memoirs have since their publication in 1903 been interpreted by psychiatrists such as Freud and Lacan as pathological symptoms of an individual mental illness. This dissertation follows however other attempts to place Schreber's Denkwurdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken in the context of its time, namely by presenting it as the product of a clash of two worldviews. The religious cosmology and experiences that Schreber described were constructed from the dualist transcendent worldview of Schreber's upbringing, and the monist worldview it pitted against, namely that of evolutionist popular-scientists and of psychiatrists who influenced Schreber in the years before his illness. I argue that special characteristics of Schreber's experiences and arguments that can be seen as pathological now emerge as expressions of transcendental dualist cultural concerns or of consequences of an immanent monist worldview. To these belong the disasters Schreber believed resulted from hypnosis allegedly performed on him, the very physical character of Schreber's experiences, his reservations about the ability of language as a tool for revelation, and a new notion of divinity as a mere part of nature. As a result, Schreber's Denkwurdigkeiten emerge as another Zarathustra, as an unusual religious revelatory document engaged with and representative of central religious issues of its time.