The "Psychotic" German Judge Who Changed Freud's Practice
Paul Schreber’s memoirs deserve a close read, by patients and by psychiatrists.
Posted May 29, 2026 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Paul Schreber—who would probably be voted the most popular psychiatric patient of all time, if such a category existed—was a German judge who died in 1911. That was eight years after he fired his lawyer, represented himself, and won his own release from a lifetime commitment to an asylum called Sonnenstein. Schreber wrote a memoir, translated into English as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which includes the stunning documents he filed with the Dresden court.
Schreber, who would legally outwit his own psychiatrist, was paradoxically beloved by psychiatric thinkers. Sigmund Freud adored his “wonderful Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital.” Others who admired the judge and wrote about him include Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Dozens of books about Schreber exist, including fictionalizations and analyses of Schreber as a lawyer. A film and stage plays about him also exist.
Schreber’s so prominent in the world of psychiatric theory that for years I asked every psychiatrist I met, including socially, what they thought of his book. The question led to many dinner party fails—to date, not a single doctor I’ve asked knew Schreber even existed, which made sense when I learned how psychiatrists are educated . They receive a medical degree and do years of psychiatric residency, a residency that can look different ways but is often short on psychiatric theory.
In other words, those who diagnose madness often spend little time thinking about what it means to be mad. For someone like Schreber, the question went to the heart of who he was. His Memoirs, which I wrote about in my book The Devil's Castle, meditate on spirituality , the nature of neurodiversity , and the nature of reality.
Schreber had visions of the divine, including seeing the world laid out from God’s perspective, which he called the “God-be-together-view.” He sometimes experienced divine assault in the form of nerve rays, and he lived saturated with miracles, some as small as spilled cocoa or a shaving cut.
Schreber experienced “the most sublime ideas about God and the Order of the World,” and his time at Sonnenstein asylum included the miracle of his acquiring a feminine identity .
“If psychiatry is not flatly to deny everything supernatural and thus tumble with both feet into the camp of naked materialism ,” Schreber wrote, “it will have to recognize the possibility that occasionally the phenomena under discussion may be connected with real happenings.”
These visions made up Schreber’s “phenomena,” and the court agreed and released him from the asylum. Five judges read Schreber’s book and praised the “seriousness and striving after truth that fill every chapter.” Schreber embodied what philosopher Wouter Kusters describes as the shared concerns of psychosis and philosophy , including a drive toward infinity and freedom. I call Schreber history’s greatest advocate for the neurodiverse.
Schreber understood that his behavior, which included periods of stillness and sometimes bellowing, differed from that of most people. He called this behavior the “pathological shell” that concealed his “true spiritual life.” He described his mental problems as consisting of troubled nerves—hence the “nervous illness” of the English title—but added in his book that “A person with sound nerves is, so to speak, mentally blind.”
Schreber believed that what we call neurodiverse states bring with them unique insight. Despite his institutionalization, Schreber researched his condition, reading the works of his soon-to-be-fan Jung as well as modern psychiatry’s “father,” the problematic Emil Kraepelin .
Schreber mocked Kraepelin’s observation that many people who hear voices experience them as more real than actual voices—they are real, he writes, simply a different flavor of real.
Like those of fellow German Dorothea Buck , Schreber’s visions could prove prophetic. When he arrived at Sonnenstein, which became a killing center under the Nazi regime, Schreber smelled “the reek of corpses.” His voices whispered its real name: the “Devil’s Castle” (hence my book title). This is the profound kind of “real” with which Schreber mocked Kraepelin.
In 2008, psychiatrist Kate Robertson wrote in the British Medical Journal that Schreber’s appeal and the court’s decision “more than anything else restore my faith in the possibility of a humane psychiatry.” I love this comment and notice that Robertson doesn’t choose a word stronger than “possibility.” Schreber’s filings changed German law. He still has a lot to say about meaning-making in neurodiverse thought.
It’s ironic that, for the most part, the people who haven’t gotten the memo on the importance of Schreber are those who would still be tasked with his care. Freud wrote to Jung that studying Schreber’s book changed his clinical practice for the better.
Had Freud gotten his wish, and Schreber in his lifetime served as an asylum head and professor, Schreber’s beliefs about the value of his own thought might have entered the psychiatric system. I wonder how differently we might handle our Schrebers. Perhaps we’d see more miracle than sickness.
And to go with my recommendation that everyone connected to psychiatry read Paul Schreber’s Memoirs, I add a list of recommended reading given to me by Mad in America ’s Robert Whitaker, with my descriptions:
Cracked: The Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry: An expose of how psychiatry became history’s fastest growing medical field, with ample coverage of the pharmaceutical industry and problems with the DSM by James Davies.
DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible: The troubled history of the book that governs psychiatric diagnostics and reimbursement, considering it as a social, financial, and historical document by Allan Horwitz.
Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness: A history of American psychiatry and its foibles, from asylums to pharmaceuticals by Andrew Scull.
May Cause Side Effects: A Memoir : A harrowing story of antidepressant withdrawal and life restored by Brooke Siem.
Unshrunk : A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance: One woman’s experiences in the psychiatric system, from over-medicated teenager to liberated adult who “dares to question the fundamental assumptions of psychiatric treatment” by Laura Delano.
And I strongly recommend Dorothea Buck’s On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery .
Kusters, Wouter. A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking , translated by Nancy Forest-Flier. MIT Press, 2020.
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Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, and her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others. She is a writer and speaker who lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
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