Radical Psychology
Volume Seven, 2008
Mere and Divine Madness: Bush,
Schreber and the Contexts of Insanity
Mark S. Roberts [
*]
The Contexts of Insanity
Mere Insanity
The worst possible habit among the presumably insane is to be merely
mad, since the merely mad are bereft of the kind of context by which
their madness can be ameliorated and justified. The merely mad
are simply the inevitable recipients of the label of madness, being in
fact the 'laboratory rats' and 'guinea pigs' for the establishment of a
set of infinitely complex rules, standards and observations which,
taken in sum, constitute the traditional context for identifying the
insane. For the most part, these individuals are measured in their
insanity by a number of 'objective' standards, many of which have been
inscribed in modern mainstream psychiatric nomenclature.
The above was not, however, always the case. Prior to the development
of a scientific psychiatric nomenclature of psychosis, most people were
categorized as insane on varying and often idiosyncratic bases. For
example, in what Michel Foucault (1973)
calculated as the age of
reason, madness was determined on the basis of the gross deviation of
certain internal substances:
But this movement is quite particular
in mania; it is continuous, violent, always capable of piercing new
pores in the cerebral manner, and it creates, as the material basis of
incoherent thoughts, explosive gestures, continuous words which betray
mania . . . An infernal water gathers in the secrecy of its movements,
all the images in which mania takes its concrete form (p. 26).
The isolation of the 'substance' of madness led to new ways of
explanation. Once an internal context could be established for mania,
the specific symptoms of this sort of 'mental disease' could be
articulated in an orderly fashion. On this, Foucault writes:
The essential symptoms of mania result
from the fact that objects do not present themselves to the sufferer as
they are in reality. The delirium of the maniac is not determined by a
particular error in judgment; it constitutes a defect in the
transmission of sense impressions to the brain, a flaw in
communication. In the psychology of madness, the idea of truth as the
'conformity of the conformity of thought to things' is transposed in
the metaphor of a resonance, a kind of musical fidelity of the fibers
to the sensations which make them vibrate (p. 154).
Once truth or fidelity to the state of reality became the criterion for
deviation, a relatively definitive context for madness could be
established. Those whose sensory apparatuses malfunctioned could now be
classified in accordance with these various malfunctions.
Hallucination, illusion, delusion, paranoia, and the like, became
legitimate symptoms of sensory malfunction. Moreover, certain forms of
physical, social and sexual degeneration were seen as clear indications
of madness; the slovenly, afflicted, physically disabled, women,
chronically impoverished were seen as prime carriers of madness:
Foucault attributes this attribution of heightened sensitivity to inner
movements in women to the uneven distribution of liquids and solids:
The sympathetic sensibility of her
organism, radiating through her entire body, condemns woman to those
diseases of the nerves that are called vapors. 'The women whose systems
have generally more mobility are more subject to nervous diseases,
which are also more serious in them' . . . Diseases of the nerves are
diseases of corporeal continuity. A body too close to itself, too
intimate in each of its parts, an organic space which is, in a sense,
strangely constricted (p. 156).
At the point at which a discursive site for madness could be
scientifically determined, that is, determined at least within the
rigors of the internal movements of humors and vapors, the study of
madness could turn to a typology of the subjects of madness. Madness
did not travel across sexes and classes, but was limited definitively
to certain types of individuals. The signs of madness were not
generalized but, rather, contextualized. This, of course, contributed
in large part to the creation -- with much intervening analysis -- of
the
modern sciences of psychiatry and psychology. The restriction of
madness to a specific site invoked a spate of documentation devoted to
the enlargement and study of these sites. The carrier of madness, of
mania, hysteria, paranoia, melancholy, could now become the source of
all the information necessary to treat such disorders, since the
internal movements held a wealth of data about the external actions and
behaviors of the presumably mad.
Although, as I have mentioned above, there was an enormous amount of
intervening study of madness, the modern classifications were largely
the work of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926).
Kraepelin (1891/1991) proposed that
mental illness was identifiable in terms
of
certain organic categories, stemming from brain lesion or other
pathogonomic symptoms. In fact, Kraepelin postulated that
virtually all forms of mental illness identified in the nineteenth
century and earlier had a specific correlate in the brain and were thus
categorizable in terms of some sort of internal mental pathology
manifest in a number of symptoms. Kraepelin’s categories represented a
considerable step forward in identifying the sources of mental
pathologies, and, indeed, his distinction between such disorders as
schizophrenia (dementia praecox) and paranoia is still in some part
observed today.
His method in identifying and distinguishing these disorders was
strictly contextual. Virtually all mental disorders revealed a number
of symptoms, but each disorder could have symptoms similar to
others. No specific symptom was considered intrinsic to a mental
disorder. The key to identification and classification was therefore
whether a specific pattern of symptoms could be detected in the
patient. The key term here is of course in the patient. For Kraepelin,
as for much of late nineteenth century psychiatry, the site of madness
was wholly determined by the patient’s symptomatology, regardless of
the external conditions that might affect the disorder. The mad person
for Kraepelin, as R.D Laing (1969)
often points out, is indeed the
axis, the locus of the disease process. In his search to resituate the
axis of madness, to place it in large measure outside the patient, in
the familial or social structures, Laing characterizes the absolute
internalization of psychosis in the psychiatric professions in the
following way:
“The patient, however, is diseased in a medical sense, and it is a
matter of diagnosing his condition, by observing the signs of his
disease” (p. 28).
Though Freud and Kraepelin differed significantly regarding the sources
of mental illness -- a vast departure based on psychological and
organic
etiologies, respectively -- Freud made no less of a contribution to
isolating and identifying the merely mad. The case of Daniel Paul
Schreber (1844-1911) is exemplary in this regard. Freud’s (1911)
reading of
Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903/2000),
“Psychoanalytic
Notes
Upon an Autobiographical Account of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”
(Freud, 1911), was to become the locus
classicus of the general psychoanalytic
theory of psychosis. But even given its important place in the
development of psychoanalytic theory, the reading is largely schematic,
incorporating most of the standard concepts of psychoanalysis. Freud
argued that what transpired in the case was a simple variant of the
Oedipus complex, which in this particular instance was solved in a
negative way. Schreber held a feminine position toward his father, a
position that was later transferred to his first doctor, Emil Flechsig,
and afterwards to the ultimate father figure: God. In resisting this
transference, Schreber assumed a defensive position which ultimately
evolved into a delusion of persecution. Persecution in turn took the
form of castration fantasies, followed by a desire to become a woman.
Freud saw all this as an inability on Schreber’s part to reconcile the
object of erotic fantasy and the object of persecution, at which point
Schreber simply replaced the figure of Flechsig with that of God. This,
Freud suggested, allowed Schreber to willingly submit to the sexual
advances of God, and thus inscribe himself within the cosmic order of
things, the so-called “Order of the World” (Allison, de Oliveira,Roberts, & Weiss,
1987, p. 3).
Whether Freud’s reading of the case is correct or not is of little
consequence here. What is, though, is that, like Kraepelin, Freud
erected a set of diagnostic criteria into which he was able to fit
Schreber’s unusual thoughts and behavior. His early sexual attachment
to Flechsig, the transference from Flechsig to God, were the operators
that explained the fantasies of sexual intercourse with God, his
transformation into a woman, his persecutory and paranoid fantasies,
and, in the end, the entire delusional, visionary, and hallucinatory
content of the Memoirs.
Schreber quite easily entered the traditional
realm of the merely mad, in that there was a ready psychoanalytic
diagnostic explanation that served to fully account for virtually all
of his thoughts and actions. For Freud, Schreber could be nothing but
mad, simply because virtually everything he thought and acted upon was
already inscribed in the symptomological and nosological discourses of
psychoanalysis.
To be merely mad, then, is not necessarily to act directly contrary to
the set laws of reason, civil society, and normalcy, but, more so, to
have one’s acts and thoughts fit into a concept formation of madness,
that is, an organized, consensual, and “scientifically” determined view
of what it is to be mad. In this sense, madness is limited to the mad,
and, subsequently, acts of madness can only take place within the topos
of madness, whether that topos
is determined symptomologically,
nosologically or psychologically. Thus, what appear to be mad acts that
fall outside the context of
mere madness are invariably attributed by
societies and experts to areas that stand quite apart from the
traditional contexts of madness, primarily to those of religion and
politics.
Divine Insanity
In the framework of either Kraepelin’s or Freud’s conceptions of
psychosis, many acts of religious ecstasy would surely be categorized
as mad. But, for the most part, religious acts are judged within the
context of religion per se, and are thus limited to canonical,
theological, and mythic perspectives -- frameworks that are rigorously
predetermined by a set of specialized discourses. No act, feat, or
gesture exceeds the limits of these contexts, and each act or thought
eventually finds its rightful place within them. For example, the
Catholic Encyclopedia (1990)
routinely lists no less than 21 flying
saints, all of whom were supposed to have mastered the art of
bodily levitation. In point of fact, not only is bodily levitation a
physical
impossibility -- the gravity defiers would wind up somewhere around the
former planet Pluto -- but even to make such a claim would surely fit
somewhere in the order of delusions in psychiatric diagnosis, not to
mention Hume’s (1748/1955) scathing
rejection of such acts in his essay “Of
Miracles.”
Besides routinely accepting saintly flyers, Christian writers, since
the time of St. Augustine, have created several definitive
categories for unusual visions. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists three
different types: 1) Corporeal Visions: These are the result of a
supernatural manifestation. This type of vision has two principal
modes. Either the very substance of the presence of the person will be
presented or it will be merely an appearance consisting of luminous
rays. The former would be true of either living persons or of the
glorious bodies of Christ and the Holy Virgin. The latter is realized
in the corporeal apparition of the unresurrected dead or pure spirits.
2) Imaginative visions. This sort of vision is categorized as an act of
the imagination, but it is generally considered a hallucination
The image is always assured to originate with God, and this is
confirmed by the fact the subject has no control over the intensity or
duration of the image. 3) Intellectual visions. These perceive the
object without a sensible image. The source of this image is, of
course, God. And its principal explanation rests on the fact that only
God can indeed control such a vision. In effect, the subject is led to
its understanding by, in a manner of speaking, the hand of God.
Needless to say, all of the above would fit quite neatly into virtually
any set of diagnostic categories. Reports of having flown around the
room would most certainly raise suspicions, while any one of the above
visions would fit some clinical definition of hallucination, illusion
or delusion. But none are treated this way within the context of
miraculous and mystical Christianity. On the contrary, each act, vision
or revelation is not only treated routinely within this context, but a
ready explanation, replete with “scientific” data is offered in every
case. Religious figures cannot therefore be merely mad simply because
there is a traditional set of explanations that transform what might be
considered merely mad behavior and thoughts into divine revelations,
into a profound piety that not only evades the set nomenclature of
psychiatric literature, but is revered within the context of an
entirely other literature.
Such a category transfer can also function in politics. To say the
least, the field of politics is overloaded with what might, under
ordinary circumstances, be considered acts of utter madness. For
brevity’s sake, one can take some of the thoughts and acts of the
twentieth century’s principal murderers and dictators, Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Stalin. Alan Bullock’s (1992)
comparative study presents a
detailed description of the clearly insane atrocities committed by
these two leaders. But Bullock generally contextualizes these acts
within the domain of the political. For example, when describing
Stalin’s 'paranoid personality', he argues that his well-known sense of
persecution -- a sense that led to the slaughter of millions of
'enemies' -- had its source not strictly in psychological abnormalities
and deviations, but, more so, in the domain of political forces:
The experience of “the revolution
exposed from above” left a permanent mark on Stalin. The result
was not to create doubt or remorse, rather to strengthen the paranoid
tendencies already apparent and contribute to the extraordinary episode
of the trials and purges later in the 1930’s. . . .Two other
characteristics have a particular relevance to the sort of politics in
which Stalin and Hitler were engaged. First, the strength of such
delusions is increased the more they have a nucleus of fact. This was
provided in Stalin’s case by the tradition of conspiracy in Russian
revolutionary politics, with the constant formation of factions and the
bitterness of disputes. . . .Second, the development of the paranoid
personality is not necessarily disabling. It is compatible with
the exercise of political abilities of high order; as speaker,
organizer, leader. In situations of crisis it can give positive
advantage, providing a powerful source of energy and self-confidence,
the conviction of being right, and a spur to the relentless pursuit of
enemies (pp. 360, 362, 363).
In essence, Bullock is suggesting that even through Stalin and Hitler
may have been considered paranoid under more rigorous clinical
scrutiny, their respective personalities could be explained within the
contextual exigencies of politics. Neither Stalin nor Hitler were
merely mad, but, given the surrounding conditions, their colossal
insanity was largely neutralized by the frameworks of the politics in
which they were immersed.
Thus, the divinely mad fall decidedly outside the general frameworks of
psychiatric diagnosis. They may demonstrate psychotic characteristics,
but most of these characteristics are explainable in other terms, in
discourses remote from those central to psychiatry and psychology. The
merely mad, on the other hand, are not only held to the letter of
psychiatric discourses, but are often the very sources of the technical
language of these discourses. Schreber held the key to the
psychoanalytic explanation of psychosis for both Freud and Jacques
Lacan; Hitler, Stalin, St. Theresa et al. were “sanctified” in wholly
other spheres. But is such a distinction real or only made apparent by
the varying readings, forms of representation, and meanings intrinsic
to different disciplines and discourses?
The Madness of Two Presidents
There are trained killers coming here
to get us
– George W. Bush
…all creation on earth would have to
perish…
– Daniel Paul Schreber
The above two quotes come from two presidents, one the current
president of the United States, the other the president of the Royal
Superior Court in Dresden during the last decade of the nineteenth
century. Both quotes report an imminent disaster soon to befall
humanity. Bush issues his dire warning within the context of nearly
absolute political power and authority, its literal meaning appearing
to remain secondary to a larger purpose. Schreber’s warning, much
unlike Bush’s, emanates from the insane asylum at Sonnenstein -- a
place
where Schreber had been transferred after having been declared mentally
ill, and having passed through several earlier stages of
institutionalization.
Given their wildly varying contexts, the two claims appear to be
entirely unrelated. In Bush’s case, the seemingly delusional threat of
imminent danger, death and destruction appears largely ameliorated by
the obvious fact that its content is for the most part the result of
some ulterior, presumably rational, plan -- one intended to influence
public opinion so as to realize certain political and ideological
objectives. Those in agreement with Iraq war policies and the plan to
fight world-wide terrorism might take the utterance as basically
factual -- perhaps a bit exaggerated -- and intended as an extension of
the Bush Administration strategy. Others opposed to the
Administration’s policies might take the utterance to be patently false
and as sheer propaganda intended to bolster a failed course of action.
In short, virtually no one would reasonably assume that Bush’s warning
in any way indicated that he was mad, delusional or incoherent. On the
other hand, in Schreber’s case, the oddity of the claim would always be
seen within the context of both his presumed mental illness and the
dire conditions under which the claim was uttered. Many of Schreber’s
interpreters take the delusion of the end of the world as a decisive
component in a much larger paranoid scheme -- one that was indicative
of his complete mental breakdown.
But, on further examination, President Bush is in many respects as mad
as or even madder than President Schreber. Both claims are, I will
argue, quite similar, and are separated for the most part by certain
approaches to and readings of representational, psychological, and
political discourse characteristic of the periods in which they were
uttered, that is, what I have referred to above as contexts.
Moreover, the parallels are not limited to this set of statements
alone. There are numerous other acts, behaviors, assertions and
gestures that tie the two presidents together in their madness. Thus,
taken out of their political, historical and discursive contexts, Bush
and his administration’s policies and visions do indeed have a
delusional character, one far more pernicious than Schreber’s since
they are, unfortunately, imbued with immense power and, in the end,
painfully 'real'.
The
Two Presidents on a Collision Course: Persecutions, the Survivor, the
Inner and Outer Voices, God’s Plan, and the Desire for a Dead Planet.
Persecutions
Even given the apparent differences between the two presidents, there
are still numerous points of connection between them -- points which,
taken outside their respective contexts of representation and politics
as usual, show some noteworthy similarities. To begin with, President
Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is replete with claims of
virtually endless plots and conspiracies intended to persecute him in
some way or other. His first doctor, Emil Flechsig, is most often
viewed as the main perpetrator of these devious schemes. Flechsig, it
seems, had, from the very beginning of Schreber’s illness, concocted an
intricate plan to control him in virtually all his human activities,
both of a physical and mental nature. The first phase of this
persecutory scheme was termed “soul murder.” President Schreber
believed that Flechsig was determined to destroy him by killing his
soul and thus beginning his transformation into a woman (a process
Schreber called 'unmanning'):
“ever since the beginning of my contact
with God (mid-March 1894) . . . somebody committed soul murder, at first
Flechsig was named as instigator of the soul murder.. .In this way a
plot was laid against me, the purpose of which was to hand me over to
another human being after my nervous illness was recognized or was
assumed to be incurable. . .” (pp. 23, 56-57). Schreber goes on
to describe the plot in even greater detail: “Always the same idea. . .
was to ‘forsake’ me, that is to say, to abandon me. . .sometimes also
by killing me and later by destroying my reason (by making me
demented)” (p. 142).
As time elapsed, Schreber envisioned even greater complications in the
various plots against him. As a result, Dr. Flechsig proceeded to
take complete control over all of his functions, even those as basic as
defecating. Schreber, deeply offended by this attempt at absolute
domination, found this restriction to be an affront to his
intelligence, arguing that someone of his high position -- President of
the Superior Court at Dresden -- should surely be allowed to shit of
his own volition. Persecution did not stop at external control of his
biological functions. Physical injuries, in the form of 'miracles',
were done to his entire inner organ system as well:
“The miracles enacted against the organs of the thoracic and abdominal
cavities were very multifarious. I know least about those concerning
the heart; I only remember I once had a different heart. . .”
(Schreber, 1903/2000, p. 263) . These
restrictions on his behavior, his
thought, the attacks on his very physical well-being, his personal
freedom intensified to such an extent that a “final plan” began to
emerge. In brief, Schreber envisioned a vast cosmic stratagem,
organized around his transformation into a woman, which might, in the
end, result in his being impregnated by God and giving birth to a new
race of humans. “It is only as possibilities which must be taken into
account that I mention that my emasculation may even yet be
accomplished and may result in a new generation issuing from my womb by
divine impregnation.” (p. 263.). And further: “Nothing of course could
be envisaged as a further consequence of unmanning but fertilization by
divine rays (i.e., God) for
the purpose of creating new human beings. .
. .” (Schreber, 2000, p. 263)
All of Schreber’s visions and proclamations have of course been
characterized by his various doctors and many of his later commentators
as delusional and as the stuff psychosis is made of. Freud based
his entire theory of psychosis on this very case, as did Lacan, in his
famous essay in Ecrits.
(Lacan, 2006). Although the explanations
vary,
there is one overriding theme in virtually every reading: the fact that
Schreber tends to blame his problems on others, on external
interferences ranging from his doctors to God himself. His entire
analysis of his own condition, of his “nervous illness” is centered on
the implantation, the miraculous, spontaneous appearance of certain
uncanny facets of his existence during his stay at both Flechsig’s
nerve clinic and the Asylum at Sonnenstein. His delusions were
not exactly his, but, rather, implanted in his mind through what he
called “nerve-connections,” as a means of driving him insane. The plot
to “unman” him was at first Flechsig’s, and then later attributed to
God. His intense pain, the destruction of his organs, were also part of
an ulterior plot to destroy his reason. Indeed, nothing that happened
to him actually happened by him. His agency was tethered and
silenced
by the environment into which he was thrust; he wasn’t actually mad but
simply driven to this state by outrageous intrusions over an extended
period of time. [1]
The other president, Bush, though not expressing quite as colorful and
effusive delusions as President Schreber, often, likewise, complains
about insidious persecution. The persecutory charges are almost always
leveled regarding some malfunction of Bush administration policy, and
are uniformly attributed to the 'enemy', whether they be insurgents in
Iraq, or Democrats, or the full array of liberal organizations. Bush,
like Schreber, cannot commit an error of his own accord, but, rather,
the errors are almost exclusively created by some external source, that
is, his 'enemies'. Now, it should be noted, even though it is
often the case that many politicians routinely blame their failures on
the opposition, Bush’s complaints tend to be unusually persistent,
extreme and inflexible. Justin A. Frank, in his book Bush on the Couch
(2004), tends to attribute these charges
to symptoms characteristic of
megalomania:
The combination of paranoia and
protective delusion leads inexorably to
the cause of the formulation: the summary analysis of Bush’s psychic
state. A careful consideration of the evidence suggests that behind
Bush’s affable exterior operates a powerful delusional system that
drives his behavior. The most precise psychiatric term to describe his
pathology is most frequently used to identify a particular condition
exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we will see, has broader
applications as well: megalomania . . . A megalomanic sees himself as
the center of the world, the one figure who has all the answers. He
tolerates no disagreement, and sees external reality as either
threatening or nonexistent (p.
200).
Frank’s proxy diagnosis is buttressed by Mark Crispin Miller’s
observations in his book, The Bush Dyslexicon (2002). Here Crispin
Miller proposes, among many other things, that Bush’s political style
involves an insidious habit of blaming others for undermining his
efforts while, at the same time, using similar tactics against the
presumed plotters. The key term is of course 'plotters'. Bush, Miller
argues, “was always quick to charge his adversaries with doing the sort
of things to him that he had done -- and was still doing -- to them. .
. In the presidential contest, Bush was always quick to cry that he was
being hit below the belt. Meanwhile, Bush always represented his
attacks as mere defenses -- even when his team struck first” (pp.
250-251). In other words, much like Schreber, Bush identifies the
source of his suffering -- his political failures and negative
criticism -- as strictly outside and thus tends to obscure or
completely eliminate his complicity in these problems. This deeply
protective behavior is further typified by Frank as a means of
mitigating the fear of 'internal persecution' : “The defining
characteristic of adult megalomania is the need -- driven by terrifying
fear of internal persecution -- to pinpoint and then annihilate all
persecutors seen as outside threats.” (Frank,
2004, p. 203).
The Survivor
I had to fight a sacred battle for the
greater good of mankind.
--Daniel Paul Schreber
Bush was tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody.
--Bob Woodward
(Commenting on Bush’s impatience
preceding the attack on Afghanistan)
In his examination of the relationship between paranoia, megalomania
and power, Elias Canetti (1984) conceives a figure representative of
all three of these conditions: the survivor. For him, the survivor
emerges at just about every point in the history of military, political
and social power, and epitomizes the need to survive by destroying
one’s enemies:
The moment of survival is the moment of
power. Horror at the sight of
death turns to satisfaction that it is someone else dead. The
dead man lies on the ground while the survivor stands. . . . In
survival each man is the enemy of every other, and grief is
insignificant measured against this elemental triumph. Whether the
survivor is confronted by one dead man or by many, the essence of the
situation is that he feels unique. He sees himself standing there alone
and exults in it (p. 227).
The characteristic trait of the survivor, then, is to assure his own
threatened existence by killing others, or, in many cases, standing
triumphantly before a comforting field of corpses. Moreover, the
survivor, Canetti maintains, cannot exist without enemies. He is
determined to save his people by defeating his enemies and, if need be,
to sacrifice himself; he is the source of salvation and of survival for
the masses. Schreber makes precisely this sort of claim when discussing
his true mission: “I had to solve one of the most intricate problems
ever set for man and. . . I had to fight a sacred battle for the
greatest good of mankind.” (Schreber, p. 139) But, in the end,
this is just a ruse: “The deception is complete. It is the deception of
all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in
reality, they send their people to death, so that they themselves may
stay alive longer” (Canetti, 1984, p.
241).
His own fear and fear mongering are the driving forces behind both the
power and the strategy of the survivor. He spreads fear and a sense of
danger, and, if he is in a position of command, fear spreads
proportionately as his commands are carried out. His own fears are
mitigated only by making an example of someone: “He will order an
execution for its own sake, the guilt of the victim being almost
irrelevant. He needs
execution from time to time and, the more his
fears increase, the more he needs them. His most dependable, one might
say his truest, subjects are those he has sent to their deaths.” (p.
232). The survivor’s personal fear also extends to the despot. The
despot is his enemy, in that the despot is the projection of his own
weaknesses and shortcomings. But, conversely, the survivor is the
living example of the despot’s weaknesses: he survives, while despots
consider survival their prerogative. In short, both are inimical to one
another because both are the reflections of each other’s weakness, of
their unfulfilled wishes, of their megalomaniacal pursuit of absolute
power.
Although the survivor comes in virtually all forms and character types
and exists in all historical eras, one of the prime examples of this
sort given by Canetti is President Schreber. Schreber, of course, was
neither a powerful military leader nor a murderous warrior-king,
killing others so that he may survive. But he was, in Canetti’s view, a
classic paranoid, and paranoid delusions sometimes reflect fantasies
characteristic of the survivor. The foremost paranoid fantasy consists
of the, so to speak, spontaneous generation of enemies, packs of them:
“The paranoiac feels surrounded by a pack of enemies who are all after
him. . . .his terror becomes overwhelming.” (p. 456). The enemies are
purely transformable, assuming any shape the delusional mechanisms
might engender.
Schreber saw black and white bears sneaking into his room at night, but
the skulking “enemies” eventually morphed into cats with shining eyes
sitting in the trees of the asylum garden, and, later, a procession of
Dominican monks who camped in his head overnight. For Schreber, the
presumed enemy took almost any form conceivable, malleable to the
extent that they might be anywhere, strike from anywhere, and
masquerade as virtually any fearsome figure. Indeed, the plot against
him was so devious that he couldn’t even be sure that the pork on his
plate would not be turned into veal, or vice versa. As his system
became more rigid and exclusive, Schreber’s world shrunk in size; it
was reduced to him and them, to him and everyone else: “As the rigidity
of his system increases the world grows poorer and poorer in real
figures, until only those remain who have a part to play in his
delusion. Finally he is left only with himself and what he rules” (p.
454).
This debilitating fear of imminent, omnipresent attack and progressive
madness led Schreber, Canetti suggests, to the final reassuring
illusion of the survivor: alone before a field of corpses. “The idea
that all other human beings had perished dominated him for years and
this of course meant that he thought of himself as being the only one.
It is difficult to resist the suspicion that behind paranoia, as behind
all power, lies the same profound urge: the desire to get other men out
of the way so as to be the only one; or, in the milder, and indeed
often admitted, form, to get others to help him become the only one”
(p. 462).
Though an admirer of fictional little caterpillars (once identified as
his favorite book), Bush most likely has not seen bears creeping into
the Lincoln bedroom, nor cats with glowing eyes in the rose garden. But
his extreme determination to rid the world of evil, to kill his (and
America’s) enemies, to sacrifice thousands of American and Iraqi lives
in a war of 'freedom', and to bravely lead his country to safety in a
time of crisis are all symptomatic of something quite similar to
Canetti’s notion of the survivor. This obsession with power and
protection, with instilling fear in the masses is well summarized by
Frances Fox Piven (2004) when she
writes:
The president followed Gőering’s
age-old formula for leading a people into war. He told Americans that
we are in danger, that we “must not ignore the threat gathering against
us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof
-- the smoking gun -- that would come in the form of a mushroom cloud”
(p. 91).
Generating fear, according to Canetti, is an important component of the
survivor’s delusional system, since the heroic salvation of his
threatened people often serves as a means of killing his enemies, his
“real” persecutors. Frank, in his psychiatric analysis, interprets this
tendency in Bush in ways quite similar to Canetti’s reading. In
commenting on his fervor to save a wounded nation after 9/11, Frank,
quoting a Bush friend, writes: “Bush knows we’re all here to serve a
calling greater than self. That’s what he’s committed his life to do.
He understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case
really the one person in the world, who has a responsibility to protect
and defend freedom.” (Frank, 2004, p. 205). And elsewhere, the typical
clash
of survivor and despot, in the person of Saddam Hussein: “When he
blurted out ‘Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out’ -- back when the war in
Iraq was still an unrealized fantasy -- his words were only symptoms of
his omnipotent delusions. Once he had rallied an army, and concocted an
excuse, to fuck his imagined persecutor, however, he was able to send
Americans to their deaths to support his magical thinking” (Frank, 2004, p.
205).
Magical thinking or political survival, the basic structures of
paranoid delusion and megalomania remain present in Bush’s actions and
thought. His utter refusal to admit mistakes, to succumb to any
resistance -- or reason -- is exactly what characterizes the survivor.
Schreber reduced the world to him and them -- by breaking down humans
into smaller and smaller entities, by dividing the “souls” into
infinitesimal units, and, finally, disposing of all beings on the
planet by having God sneak up behind them and “ambush them.” Bush,
quite similarly, though from a diametrically different political
position, exalts at death and destruction, and the annihilation of his
presumed enemies: “Just before his sober four-minute speech on March
20, 2003, announcing the commencement of America’s bombing of Iraq,
Bush was captured on an internal White House TV monitor pumping his
fist, exclaiming ‘Feels good’ ” (p. 208). Crispin Miller
takes this tendency even one step further by tying it to what he terms
“exterminationist” thinking -- a conception developed within Christian
Reconstructionism. Bush, he argues, is so obsessed with 'ridding the
world' of 'evildoers' that he keeps a personal scorecard of al Qaeda
operatives, placing a cross over the photograph of each one killed by
U.S. forces. He also openly bragged in his 2003 State of the Nation
speech of having “done away” with at least 3,000 suspected terrorists (Miller, 2004, p. 290). This callous,
sometimes ecstatic attitude
toward death and dying, the survivor’s need to kill, or “execute” as
Canetti proposes, is also revealed in Peter Singer’s work on Bush’s
ethics, The President of Good and Evil (2004),
where he writes:
When Bush was elected president, the
federal government had not used the death penalty for thirty-eight
years. Bush reinstated it. When he was governor of Texas, that state
had more executions than any other, and Bush signed 152 death warrants
-- more than any other governor of Texas, or any other American
governor in modern times. Typically, he made his life and death
decisions after a half-hour briefing with his legal counsel… “Guess
what’s going to happen to them? They’re going to be put to death. A
jury found them guilty and -- it’s going to be hard to punish them any
worse after they’ve been put to death.” The words alone do not convey
the exaltation, almost glee, that appeared on Bush’s face when he spoke
of the coming executions of the men who had been convicted of murder. (
p. 45).
The Inner and Outer Voices
Although he undoubtedly understood all
the questions, he has not given us a single piece of useful
information. His talk was only a series of disconnected sentences
having no relation whatever to the general situation.
--Emil Kraepelin, Lectures on Clinical
Psychiatry
The miraculously created birds do not understand the meaning of the
words they speak.
--Daniel Paul Schreber
I know how hard it is to put food on your family.
--George W. Bush
Although quite articulate under normal conditions, the
institutionalized Schreber suffered endless complications with language
and expression. For the most part, he believed his speech to be
controlled rigidly by outside forces, that took the form of various
figures and conduits, some beneficent, some evil. One of the most
common sources of interference with Schreber’s speech and thought
process is the talking birds. These birds embody the souls of departed
people, and speak to Schreber in phrases that have neither emotion nor
specific meaning. This confusion of language and meaning in turn
becomes a source of consternation and desperation for Schreber, who
feels that much of the abuse that he suffers at the hands of his
“enemies” is due to fundamental misunderstandings of this sort. The
birds are so insensitive to the meaning of words that, often, they will
simply utter words that have some phonetic similarity to one another,
but which vary significantly in meaning:
It has already been said that the
sounds need not be completely identical; a similarity suffices, as in
any case the birds do not understand the sense of the words; therefore
it matters little to them -- in order to give some examples -- whether
one speaks of:
“Santiago or “Cathargo”
“Chineseenthum” or “Jesum Christum”
“Abendroth” or “Abemnoth”
“Ariman” or “Ackermann” (
Schreber
1903/2000, pp. 192-193).
One can assume, obviously, that the birds do not speak to Schreber,
but, rather, speak within him. His language system is then articulated
in a way in which the cognitive function operates in terms of what one
might call cognate semantics, that is, if words sound alike, they may
be taken to have more or less the same meaning, or no meaning at all,
since the birds do not understand the meaning of words. This confusion
in turn links together a number of linguistic inconsistencies that
plague Schreber throughout, and, in his view, is one of the sources of
his inability to convey his true thoughts. It is almost like he would
make perfectly good sense on some occasions -- e.g., having meals with
the doctors and staff at Sonnenstein -- but at other times he would
lapse
into totally confused, nonsensical, and distorted speech -- e.g., his
bouts of bellowing, which is also indicative of his general inability
to communicate and his recourse to emotive forms of expression in order
to convey certain inner messages. On still other occasions, Schreber
had great difficulties finishing his sentences -- a phenomenon he
called “the system of not-finishing-a-sentence.” Fragments of sentences
like “It will be. . .”, “Lacking now is. . .” were placed in his head
by “nerve-connections,” and, given his mental condition at the time, he
was left unable to remember how to complete them. (p. 198). When
it comes to Schreber’s language, then, virtually all personal
expression is channeled through his mind by some presumed external
means, and dependence on “outside” sources is virtually absolute: “All
the noises I hear . . .seem to speak the words which are talked into my
head by the voices and also those words in which I formulate my own
thoughts.” (p. 236).
Crispin Miller points out an interesting parallel between the above
language difficulties and Bush’s problems with expression. It seems
that Bush’s gaffes and mix-ups are largely the result of memory
difficulties, and in this respect the onset of the “endless parataxis”
of his sentences can be traced to a kind of linguistic amnesia.
Crispin Miller, moreover, attributes this linguistic turmoil to certain
cognitive and psychological factors, particularly to an “amnesiac”
state induced by either a congenital defect or youthful drug and
alcohol dependence, or both. He characterizes this amnesiac state quite
humorously:
When he tries for a grammatical
arrangement more complex than see-Dick run, Bush often breaks down in
mid-effort, having just . . . forgotten how he started out, and where
he ought to go: “I felt like their decision was not a fair decision at
the time, and I felt like they had rewritten a law and -- you know, so
therefore.” As it dictates the endless parataxis of his sentences, so
does the president’s amnesia often have him flailing in supreme
rhetorical confusion, blurting out disjointed bits of prose until some
propaganda tag line pops into his head, which then gives him something
clear to say, repeatedly (
Miller, 2002,
p.p. 260-261).
The parallel between Bush and Schreber, excluding the hallucinatory
character of Schreber’s language problems, seems clear. The lack of
clarity, of coherence in Bush’s expression is due to some mental
condition that arises as a result of the context in which he finds
himself. Left on his own and dependent on spontaneous expression, Bush
becomes tongue-tied, “blurting out” either incomplete sentences or
incoherent ones. The problem is resolved, according to Crispin Miller,
when Bush is able to recall a simple message -- that is, a piece of
propaganda -- which, one might assume, has been inculcated repeatedly
by various “handlers” over the course of his political career. The
problem of memory loss and its attendant verbal incoherence, then, like
in the case of President Schreber, is determined by recourse to those
outer voices that “enter” President Bush’s head. In certain instances
he can speak properly, save his discourse, and be fully understood only
when he is being spoken through.
Frank’s analysis of Bush expands the two president’s language
equivalence by indicating still other problems with “the voices.” In
fact, perhaps being a bit hyperbolic, Frank claims that Bush’s language
problems are symptomatic of “a patient in dire need of help.” (Frank, 2004, p. 121). Although acknowledging
the “amateur” nature of most
Freudian slip analyses of Bush’s gaffes, he considers them to be
salient indicators of his mental condition. Slips, malaprops, and
parataxes like “there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial
profiling, which is illiterate children,” “Is we learning?” “. . .he or
her will be able to pass a literacy test,” and “we should allow the
world’s worst leaders to hold America captive,” contain the seed of a
large part of Bush’s general pathology, that is, the constant
repression of thoughts that run contrary to what he believes to be his
public, and private, image. Destructive actions and thoughts are
covered over by what amounts to, in Frank’s opinion, an entirely false,
sometimes irrelevant, set of statements. Believing, quite irrationally,
that he cannot say anything that would undermine his image of
“compassion” and deep concern for the lot of the American people, he
will often make outrageous promises that he did not intend to keep. For
instance, in praising AmeriCorps, an extension of the well-liked Peace
Corps of the Kennedy years, he assured the American people that he
would fund the program at a 50 percent increase over the next year. In
the following year, he cut funding by 80 percent. It is not unusual of
course for a president to lie about program funding--or anything else,
for that matter -- but Frank views this as indicative of a much deeper
pathological language problem -- a problem that centers on being spoken
rather than speaking, on the suppression of one’s deeper feelings and
attitudes in favor of entirely recycled affable gibberish. Effectively,
this forceful repression culminates in confusion between the inner and
outer world, the world of “reality” and that of fantasy. Much like
President Schreber, President Bush is beset by a cacophony of voices,
all of which resonate within, but often assault him from without.
God’s Plan
I saw God’s omnipotence in its complete
purity.
--Daniel Paul Schreber
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master’s will.
--George W. Bush quoting from A Charge
to Keep
President Schreber’s confrontations with God were legend. Along with
the infamous Dr. Flechsig and von W’s evil soul, God was seen as one of
the principal causes of Schreber’s trials and tribulations. God tested
him by attacking his credibility as a human, his intellect, and, in the
end, by creating the greatest “struggle in mankind’s history”: the plan
to transform Schreber into a woman and impregnate him with divine rays
so as to create a new race of humans. On numerous occasions in his
Memoirs, Schreber relates the details of his intimate relationship and
conversations with the deity. What characterizes virtually all of these
encounters is the absolute faith and belief Schreber professes in God’s
plan for him. Even at the cost of his masculinity, his very sanity, the
wellbeing of his vital organs, he is willing to wrestle with God in
order to right the “Order of the World” and fulfill what he views as
his inevitable mission: the future salvation of mankind:
I come to the last point of my work. I consider it possible, even
likely, that the future development of my personal fate, the spread of
my religious ideas and the weight of proof of their truth will lead to
a fundamental revolution in mankind’s religious views unequaled in
history. . . Even though if many, particularly Christian dogmas
hitherto accepted as true, would have to be revised, the absolutely
certain knowledge that a living God exists and the soul lives on after
death could only come as a blessing to mankind: and so I close in the
hope that in this sense favorable stars will watch over the success of
my labor (Schreber, 1903/2002, pp.
258-259).
There is, of course, a therapeutic element in Schreber’s mission for
God and humanity. Clearly, he was concerned to cure himself of what has
been interpreted as his psychosis. If he were able to establish the
truth of his mission, the facticity of his transformation and visions,
he could justify and, perhaps, rectify, his long incarceration and
oftentimes cruel and unusual treatment. But beyond his lay analysis
lies a fundamental confusion -- the reduction of his own personal,
psychological struggle to God’s divine plan, which results in
resignation to sheer predestination, to an absolute fatalism. Nothing
that Schreber does or is done to him is the result of his own agency;
his every movement, every idea that enters his mind, every action is
strictly controlled by divine miracle, in accordance with God’s plan
for him and the universe. “Everything that happens,[says Schreber], is
in relation to me. I became for God the
human being, or the one human
being to whom, everything that happens must be related.” (Canetti, 1984, p.
462). There is, in a certain sense, no real past or future for
Schreber. He is dragged along by a design from which he cannot deviate,
and in which he cannot participate actively. The struggle with God is
inevitable, and he is thus rendered silent and motionless in his
obedience to His plan. As a leaf blowing in God’s divine wind, he
cannot exercise any free will, and is therefore, in his own view, not
responsible for any of his actions. God and the miracles have an
inescapable presence at every moment of his life: “To me therefore it
is an unshakeable truth, that
God reveals Himself anew daily
and hourly
through the talking of voices and the miracles.” (Schreber, 1903/2002,
p. 304).
According to Singer, and much like President Schreber, President Bush
believes in “a divine plan that supercedes all human plans.” Liberty,
Bush asserts, is “the plan of Heaven for humanity.” (Singer 2004, p. 91).
This deep religious commitment, Singer suggests, interferes with the
kinds of objectivity necessary for a leader to rationally plan and run
a pluralistic society. In fact, Bush had become so dependent on God’s
momentous plan for humanity, he admits openly that he is faithfully
following the actual commands, the “voices” of God when he makes
certain policy choices, including the war in Iraq, which, apparently,
was initially called for by God himself. “My relationship with God
through Christ has given me meaning and direction. My faith has made a
big difference in my personal life and my public life as well.”
(Aikman, 2004, p. 206). So much so that
Israel’s Haaretz News quoted
him as saying, “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them,
and then he instructed me to strike at Sadaam, which I did.” (Frank, 2004, p. 72). It would thus appear
that President Bush largely
obscures not only the line between church and state, but also between
the autonomy and rationality required to enact various secular social,
economic, political, and foreign policies and the blind faith necessary
to uncritically follow a higher plan for both him and humanity in
general.
Frank also notes this unqualified surrender to God’s plan as a key
component of Bush’s mental illness. He first cites the fact that
Bush turned to God and religion as a means of saving himself from his
addictions to alcohol and drugs. This, Frank concedes, is not an
unusual incentive to turn to religion; but in Bush’s case there is more
than just seeking relief from physical addictions. Bush also uses
religion to compensate for the same pain that drove him to drink in the
first place. Indeed, Frank asserts, the endorphin high reached in
condition of religious ecstasy -- as is also the case with vigorous
exercise -- mimic the state induced by excessive alcohol and drug use,
thus minimizing and counteracting deeper psychological problems. In
Frank’s estimation, “Bush’s faith serves not only to rectify the
wreckage left in the wake of his drinking, but also to numb the pain he
drank over.” (p. 58). Commitment to God, Christ and religion in general
is, then, not only the route to personal salvation, but also, and
perhaps more so, a reflection of Bush’s ultimate struggle to
correct the 'Order of the World', albeit his own inner world.
Inner or outer world, the question of megalomania and its relation to
religious ecstasy still haunts President Bush, as it does President
Schreber. For both, God has directed them to a certain inevitable and
unavoidable path, one that involves a nearly complete surrender to a
supernatural power. For Bush, the war in Iraq is a holy war, waged in
the name of the Christian God; it pits good against evil, and
effects a necessary step in Bush’s mission to save humanity from that
very evil. Schreber sees the entire future of mankind resting on the
failure or success of his mission, a quest to reveal the very secrets
of life and death, of the afterlife and the assurance of 'a living God
on earth'. In this respect, the two Presidents share quite similar, and
patently irrational, objectives. The main difference, however, is the
relative impact of their mutual obsession on humanity and on the future
of the planet.
Desire for a Dead Planet
I know the human being and fish can
coexist peacefully
-- George W. Bush
There was talk of the “clocks of the world” running out.
-- Daniel Paul Schreber
Both Canetti and Michel de Certeau argue that President Schreber was
obsessed by putrefaction, by rot. Canetti (2004), as we have seen, ties
this
embrace of decrepitude into Schreber’s paranoiac fantasies. Believing
that his body was the sole repository for all “tested souls,” Schreber
spent months lying perfectly still, corpse like, in his bed at the
asylum: “I felt this immobility incumbent upon me both in the interests
of self-preservation and towards God. . .” (p. 442) Canetti interprets
this
bizarre act as one of self-petrifaction. Schreber, he argues, feared
moving because he would “spill” the essences of the “tested souls,”
which were continuously deposited within his body. If we assume the
“tested souls” represent a divine penetration of his body, and the work
of God’s omnipotence, the act of retaining these “souls” within his
body becomes a demonstration of his sheer power, reflecting, once
again, his central delusion of omnipotence. Schreber would sacrifice
everything, including his most basic faculty of movement, and become a
living corpse so as to fulfill the divine plan preset by God. Of
course, as a corpse Schreber might well rot away, but the rotting is a
noble act -- comparable to the public glorification of the Pharaoh’s
mummy, according to Canetti -- done in view of a greater end, that is,
mankind’s salvation. Moreover, the rotting of his body and the eventual
annihilation of earthly life is an important phase in his delusional
system: he must exist in a world denuded of others. Rot, death and
total annihilation are, strangely enough, the only states in which
Schreber can feel entirely secure. His need for a dead and rotting
planet, as Canetti views it, is thus tied to his profound insecurity
and to his paranoiac fear of others, of a seemingly endless
proliferation of imagined enemies.
De Certeau has a somewhat different interpretation of this strange
obsession. He views rotting as a form of ritual purification, rooted in
an originary binary between purity and putrefaction. Schreber, as we
have seen, is compelled to attain a state of absolute omnipotence by
virtue of God’s revelation of ultimate bliss. But this state can only
be attained in a non-verbal manner, which necessitates a ritual
sacrifice: rotting. “The decay of the subject, dictated by a voice, is
a precondition for the theatrical institution of ‘omnipotence in all
its purity.’” (1987, p. 90) So
Schreber’s penchant for rotting
and putrefaction is yet another path to his long-sought salvation. If
everything around him were soiled and defaced, he could achieve a
certain purity that necessarily emerged as a result of God’s plan, that
is, the eventual bliss promised Schreber following his divine seduction
and impregnation. In a certain sense, the planet must rot away and be
defaced as a literal event symbolizing Schreber’s ultimate bliss:
“Trying to trace the origin of this idea one must assume some
misunderstanding of the symbolic meaning of the act of defecation,
namely, that he who entered into a special relationship to the divine
rays as I have is to a certain extent entitled to sh. .t on all the
world” (Schreber 1903/2000, p. 205).
The comparison between President Schreber and President Bush regarding
a dead planet does not, once again, involve a literal equivalence. But
there is clearly a parallel concerning Bush administration polices on
military action and on the environment. To begin with, the 'taking out'
of the so-called enemies of freedom, Bush’s ontotheology of militarism,
has and will have devastating effects on much of the planet and its
occupants. What is most significant in comparing the two presidents is
the obsessive desire of Bush and his military planners to totally
obliterate the will, the property, and the very existences of his
presumed enemies. The terms 'shock and awe' characterize perfectly this
obsession, and the military concept described by these terms served as
the original plan of attack in Iraq. Devised by a team of military
theorists at the U.S. War College, the plan was intended to completely
devastate, both physically and psychologically, the presumed enemy.
Within hours, the enemy would be so demoralized, so severely wounded in
both body and mind, that unconditional surrender would be the only
option. The effectiveness of the plan depended on the use of extreme
force, including carpet bombing, missiles, and the use of so-called
“anti-personnel” weapons. Harlan Ulman, one of the planners of the
tactic, predicted that within two to five days the Iraqi people would
be “physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausted.” (Ulman and
Wade 1996, p. 12)
And this
utter demoralization of the Iraqi people would begin not in matter of
months, as was the case in Hiroshima, but in only “a few minutes.” (p.
459)
Obviously, in retrospect, the plan did not work out as planned. But the
very act indicates not only an unjustified and illegal use of force
against civilian populations, but also the use of awesome military
power to sustain a leader’s delusional fantasy. The use of brute force
without reason or direction, or its use to obtain some abstract goal,
represents an age-old desire to control the world that exists around
the leader by destroying it. As Canetti argues, an unpopulated world is
the secret goal of every megalomaniac, since ultimate control rests on
absolute exclusion of others. Schreber saw the world’s human population
“swept away,” leaving only “fleeting improvised figures.” Bush relies
on “shock and awe” to destroy the wills and lives of his and America’s
enemies, to turn them into a rotting mass of lifeless huddled bodies.
Schreber’s view of the environment around him became manifest in
visions of terrible natural disasters destroying the earth and even
some celestial bodies. One of his primary, more regional fears was that
the city of Leipzig had been totally destroyed along with all of its
inhabitants. This vision came to him as part of a hallucinatory
elevator ride into the bowels of the earth, where everything became
“progressively darker and blacker.” This shocking prevision, in turn,
led him to speculate on the reasons that the destruction of humanity
might have occurred: “Schreber pictured various different ways in which
the destruction of mankind might have come about. He thought of a
decrease in the light of the sun, due to its moving further from the
earth and a consequent general glaciation.” (Canetti,
1984, p. 442).
This vision of a ruined planet is likewise manifest in the Bush
administration policies toward the environment. If we simply
replace the idea of the sun distancing itself from the earth and the
consequent glaciation with its opposite, global warming, this parallel
becomes clear. From the beginning of his term in 2000, Bush and his
administration have argued vehemently against the 'theory' of global
warming. To be sure, there is a strong political and economic motive
behind Bush’s attacks on global warming and his environmental policies
in general. His administration has simply nurtured the needs of energy
companies, factory industries, timber and mining companies, and so
on. If one thinks further on the issue, however, it seems not
only irresponsible but also quite irrational to seriously compromise
the world’s sole atmospheric environment to benefit a minute fraction
of the world’s population. Moreover, this tendency is quite in
accordance with both Frank’s and Crispin Miller’s assertions regarding
Bush’s megalomania and paranoia. Generally speaking, the paranoiac
personality has little regard for his surroundings. Indeed, the
environment encircling this type is always threatening, much like his
conjured phantasmatic enemies. But there always exists recourse to the
utter destruction of these imagined enemies. Just as Schreber envisions
and fully believes he can systematically destroy all life on earth to
save himself, so too does Bush fully believe that his actions regarding
the destruction of the environment will fulfill his own delusional
mission to save himself by saving the world. Against all reason, all
scientific analysis, he must be right. After all, his very existence
depends on the death of the planet. For paranoiacs there are no
limitations, no accountability . . . just survival.
Although there are clearly similarities between the two presidents,
both in actions and words, the comparison pales in view of their
relative impact on the populations and environment of their respective
contexts. President Schreber injured no one, with the possible
exception of himself. His struggles went on almost entirely in his
head, and his final goal of liberation from the institution in which he
was, at least in his view, unfairly incarcerated, was indeed
accomplished. He petitioned the courts for his release from
Sonnenstein, and won the case in 1903, returning to live in a state of
relative sanity with his family. On the other hand, President Bush’s
delusions of grandeur have brought torture, suffering and death to
hundreds of thousands of innocent people. And even more dangerously,
his secret desire to destroy the planet has perhaps sealed all of our
dooms. Environmental disasters like global warming are not easily
reversible -- if at all. In the end, the question of political
power
and its attendant megalomania and paranoia is not easily answerable.
But one might benefit by pondering R.D Laing’s (1969) salient question about
context: Who is more insane: the person who fantasizes dropping
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima or the person who did?
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Piven, F.F. (2004). The War at Home: Domestic Costs of Bush’s
Militarism. New York: New Press.
Schreber, D.P. (2000). Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New
York: New York
Review Books. (Originally published as Denkwudigkeiten eines
Nervenkranken in 1903).
Singer, P. (2004). The President of Good and Evil. New
York: Plume.
Biographical
Note:
Mark S. Roberts has written extensively in the fields of philosophical
psychology, continental philosophy, media studies, aesthetics and
psychoanalysis. He has edited seven books on various topics, ranging
from Jean-Francois Lyotard's essays to post-9/11 phobias, and has
translated works by Lyotard, Dufrenne, Kristeva and many others. His
most recent books are Phobias: The Post-9/11 Syndrome (SUNY Press,
forthcoming) and The Mark of the Beast: Animality and Human Oppression
(Purdue Univ. Press, 2008).