'A primitive kind of superstition' : the idea of the paranoid style in art, psychiatry, and politics

Abstract

Commenting on Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Ner vous Illness, Sigmund Freud observed that in publicizing the religious and apocalyptic visions he had experienced during his psychiatric ordeal, Schreber was acting “much as we are told that the prophets were.” This extraordinary statement— which found confirmation in Schreber’s claim that his only goal in publishing his book was to “further knowledge of truth in a vital field, that of religion”— draws our attention to the ambivalent role modern psychiatry assigned religious experiences. If the apocalyptic experience was a mental state common to the paranoid and the prophet, the psy chol ogy of religion and psychopathology were not simply comparable phenomena but were potentially one and the same.