Disruption of human subjectivity: An exploration of language and psychosis (Daniel Paul Schreber, Germany)

My doctoral dissertation, entitled “Disruption of Human Subjectivity: An Exploration of Language and Psychosis,” takes a very specific approach in examining a highly complex, yet fundamental issue: the existential question of what it is to be ‘human.’ To address a question of this scope, I focus on what it is not to be ‘human,’ i.e., when the process of ‘humanization’ or in academic terms, ‘subjectivization’ takes a turn that positions one outside of what Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) calls the Symbolic Order. My dissertation thus examines the conditions of subjectivity in relation to language and psychosis.; It is my principal argument that psychosis is a break or disruption with the Symbolic Order; the delusion, as such, is the re-establishment of a signifying structure—albeit one where the psychotic functions as the master signifier par excellence. The phenomenon of psychosis is central to my work because it so clearly provides a model of the disintegration of subjectivity; that is, to the extent that psychosis ‘defamiliarizes’ the subject, reveals the subject ‘in pieces,’ so to speak, it provides an extremely productive site to critically analyze the modern conception of the cogito.; I am carrying out my analysis primarily through a close reading of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkrankin). Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) was an Appeal Court judge in Dresden who wrote a detailed account of his paranoid delusions. While several biographical and theoretical accounts have been written on Schreber, none of these accounts undertakes a close structural analysis of psychotic language as it relates to the construction (and disintegration) of ‘social reality’ understood as the conglomerate of intersecting ideologies. Moreover, none of the existing scholarship in this field is semiotic in nature (versus historic).