Daniel Paul Schreber was an eminent judge in 19^th century’s Leipzig. From his 51 years of age and onwards he passed 13 out of the 18 years to his death in psychiatric asylums. During his residence in one of them, in 1903, he wrote an autobiographical book under the title: “Memoirs of a neurasthenic” ["Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken"]. This book became the subject of numerous psychiatric and psychoanalytic studies, amongst others, due to the clarity of its writing, its descriptive accuracy and elegance and its disarming honesty.

In the chapter he wrote under the title “Personal experiences of the first and the initial stage of the second psychopathic condition” Schreber referred to what he was fantasizing while he was slowly rising from his sleep:

It was the thought that actually it would be very nice to be a woman experiencing a sexual intercourse.

Soon enough that thought wasn’t just a thought anymore. It rather followed the sense of “say it and it’s done”. Schreber begun experiencing what he calls Entmannung - which literally translates to “de-manning” - and repeatedly defines as transformation into female. He writes:

Here belong different kinds of changes to my genitals, which sometimes (indeed while in bed) appeared in the form of intense signs of an actual shrinking of the male genital, and more often (...) in the form of a softening of the genital to the extent of its absolute melting-down (...) finally a change to the total bodily size (diminution) (...) I had the feeling that my body had become smaller by 6-8 centimetres, thus approaching the bodily size of the female.

The transformation becomes progressively more and more frequent.

The psychic pleasure had become so intense that first in the arms and the hands, and then in the feet, breasts and the thighs, as well as in the rest of my body I had the sensation of a female body.

He experiences organs under his skin, especially in the chest,

and with a light pressure, indeed while I’m thinking of something female, I am able to create for myself a pleasurable sensation analogous to that of a female. By the way, this is not something I am doing out of voluptuousness, rather sometimes I am almost forced into it, when I want to literally put myself to sleep, or in order to protect myself from almost unbearable pain.

What is now the image of a man in Schreber’s eyes? What is that of a woman? Perhaps the most decisive difference between the two sexes lies in the fact that the female happiness appears to consist of an incessant sense of pleasure, while the man is characterised by the logic, which during the everyday conditions of “de-manning” becomes annihilated, get’s destroyed, and in parentheses he adds: stupefaction. In other places he talks about the male courage and female anxiety. The skin of the female has a special softness. Schreber gets especially involved with ideas concerning the relationship between the two sexes. He thus considers as female elements the bed, the little mirror and the rake, while male he considers the straw-bottomed armchair and the spade; in terms of games he considers chess as a male game, while the draughts as a female one.

For Schreber the images of man and woman are incompatible. It is for that reason that after the description of his first experience of “de-manning”, he goes on:

Considering my mentality, this idea was so alien to me, that if I was in complete wakefulness I would have rejected it with abhorrence… And in another place: There must be few people who have grown up with such strict, ethical values as I have, and who during their lives, especially when it comes to issues regarding the sexes, would have imposed such restraint upon themselves in line with such values and in such a degree that I can argue for myself.

Let me remind us of Schreber’s words regarding his first experience of “de-manning”: Considering my mentality, this idea was so alien to me... For his mentality the female, meaning the voluptuous, the soft, etc. is so alien – indeed an alien that has broke into his world. The breaking is not limited to the intrusion of the female, but rather it concerns the meeting with any kind of alien element. In the book he refers to a strange incident:

Numerous nights, during which I found it impossible to sleep, there was a sound in our bedroom, in the wall a kind of a creak that would repeat itself in bigger or smaller intervals and which, everytime I was about to fall asleep, it would awaken me again. Then of course we thought of a mouse, although it would have been rather impressive if a mouse had found its way in the first floor of a house built with absolutely concrete materials.

And from his first hospitalization (6 April 1885) we read in his file: He gets very upset with the slightest noise.

It might be that Schreber becomes upset with anything that would intrude into his home - and is not only the address of his house that it is considered home but everything that feels familiar to him, everything that is part of that home of his. In this belongs his male identity. Schreber’s home is not hospitable. Everything alien is contagious and is threatening to infect his very existence. At some point he expresses exactly that through reference to Hamlet’s well known phrase: There is something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark. From an existential perspective Schreber is literally rotting away through a forced living with the alien. Hamlet’s phrase could well have been the motto for his tormented life.

In response to this alien that intrudes into his life, Schreber summons up the weapon of knowledge: He seeks for an answer to the “why” of this intrusion. In his first experience of "de-manning", the phrase that begins with the words

Considering my mentality, this idea was so alien to me, that if I was in complete wakefulness I would have rejected it with abhorrence... goes on: since, after everything that I experienced in the meantime, I cannot in any way turn down the possibility that there were certain external influences that also played a role in the genesis of such an idea.

Explanation, in other words the transfer of experience away from the place of the pure incident and into the place of knowledge, is well under its way. Those external influences progressively become gigantic and differentiate within an extraordinary system of rays that penetrate him, of good and bad gods and doctors who direct those rays towards him. In that noise within the bedroom’s wall he recognizes beyond any doubt a divine miracle. This miracle, in the sense of the inexplicable, is also to be found in reference to explanation and knowledge.

Knowledge is that kind of relationship to things, which judges them, distinguishes them and links them to each other. Knowledge begins with “how” and “why?”. It aims at comprehension. Freud wrote a treatise on Schreber’s case. There he says:

The practical psychiatrist’s interest regarding such delirium wears out once he realises the working of such delirium and judges its affect on the patient’s life; his surprise, his puzzlement is not the outset of his understanding.

Perhaps it is not by mere coincidence that we ask “Why?” when we come face to face with the alien- the unfamiliar, the unexpected, the hostile, and the unacceptable. We will ask someone “Why did you do this?” with regards to an act that is unacceptable to us, not familiar, that has no place in our home. Perhaps science’s almost universal dominance in the world today denotes that the world has become uncanny - alien that is, and that things, the way they are, appear threatening.

He who is entrapped in his need for knowledge is at the same time intolerant towards anything that appears to be cognitively deprived: the approximate, the doubt, the retraction, the dilemma, the dead end, the mistake. Everything must have an answer, always and right away. Something that lacks an explanation it’s an alien that intrudes into his home and sucks his oxygen and blood.

In knowledge the world is presented from the outset, this time through models, scenarios, simulations, interpretations. The established Latin term for the procedure of the world’s representation through the terms of knowledge is "repraesentatio", literally meaning re-presentation. Schreber’s delirium with the rays, with the “female nerves” that have flooded his body, with the gods and humans that direct them, concerns a re-presentation of his experiences through knowledge. To re-present our experiences through the realm of knowledge is something that we do anyway and always even outside the boundaries of strict science, when we talk for example about “DNA” and about the “unconscious”, about the “adrenaline” that sometimes rises, about the “chemistry” between two people, about the “positive/negative” energy of places and people and about so much more of that kind. The same occurs even when for example Freud, instead of “dream” he talks of “the process of dreaming” and through interpretation he re-enacts the “latent dream”.

The cognitive re-presentation of things, humans and of our own selves is a Pyrrhic victory. Wittgenstein suggests that the only thing offered via an explanation is our peace of mind. I would argue that through the explanation we are seeking, we are actually looking forward to the chimera of such peace of mind. And this is because the explanation is quiet only for a while. Soon enough an explanation for the explanation will be asked for, and so on and so forth, all the more persistently, all the more rigidly. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in the 8^th Elegy of Duino: “It overcomes us. We arrange it. It collapses. We re-arrange it and we collapse ourselves.”

Knowledge is quiet while offering a sense of dominance on things. To understand also means to seize. What we tend to forget though is that the master, in his power, is at the same time weak. He finds himself under the constant threat of the, to rephrase Alexander Papadiamanti’s words: “upper and lower bottom of all things intelligible” and he must reinforce his fortress of knowledge at all times. Alas, a fortress is always and at the same time a prison and a chamber.

In this dialectic game, when one remains only on one side, he would then be either the master of the universe, or he will be getting weaker and weaker becoming unfounded, ending up floundering about from one side to the other.

Usually though we tend to keep double books: next to the virtual reality of knowledge there is also, more or less, the going along with the way of the things themselves. When for example I diagnose my patient with fast breathing, tachycardia, sweating, dry mouth, I will refer to him being anxious. Here the diagnosis of anxiety results directly from within the book of knowledge. It’s an explanatory word. In the other book, I see anxiety, upon the individual. Now, the word anxiety becomes a naming word. We usually move along while holding both books, of knowledge and reality. Another, purposively over the top example: I might want to ensure whether I desire a woman by testing my testosterone levels and to affirm that she desires me back by examining her oestrogen levels. But somewhere somehow I will also feel, or even tell her that “I desire you”, and I will see the desire on her.

The more we persist on the book of knowledge, the more we become trapped in a small, weak and finally scared ego. Perhaps knowledge, when it is naked, extreme, meaning autistic knowledge, it results in a paranoid delirium.

Reality of course cannot be completely lost. At least it is denoted as the sense that “there is something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark”. This is the source of all of Schreber’s unbearable suffering, of the recurrent suicide attempts. From here stems also the perception according to which the news, the burning news are the alien, the unacceptable, the problem and which wants life to be a struggle, pain and suffering.

Aristotle writes that it is a lack of education not to know which things need proof and which do not. A certain education is needed before giving up the obsession with the book of knowledge. In other words what we need is more freedom in our relationship with knowledge. This kind of freedom is only possible within a hospitable world that is amenable to the alien, a world where the difference between the familiar and the alien is not so rigid, so absolute. In that case the fortress of knowledge would become obsolete, since all doors and windows would be open for everything that is in it.

Then everything could be here, in friendship to one another, e.g., like Dionysis Savvopoulos says in an old song of his:

the killer with his victim in his arms, the secretary with the trump, and the virgin with the Satan.

Or again Odysseus Elytis to Picasso:

They constantly build black stones all around us- yet you are laughing/ Black walls around us- but you all at once/ You open upon them a myriad of doors and windows/.../So that nothing can fight anything else/ So that no one can fight another/ So that no enemy exists/ So that the lion and the lamp walk side by side.

Or a haiku from Bashô:

We were all sleeping under the same roof: / prostitutes and the flowers of the crops / the moon and I.

Psychotherapy could also have the mission of familiarizing oneself with this friendly, hospitable world.

Summary

It is a lack of education not to know which things need proof and which do not [...]

Aristotle

The phenomenon of paranoia will be approached from the view of a being-with that has become shrinked and focused almost completely on the field of knowledge.

The paranoid has an answer for everything. There is intolerance towards ignorance and any mistake, towards doubt, the approximate, the dead end.

The paranoid relationship to the world becomes a delirium there where the control of reality becomes sacrificed in favour of the answer.

Having Aristotle’s phrase as our basis we will finally discuss the how and when knowledge is summon up as a defence against a world that appears as a sweeping threat.