From Daniel Paul Schreber through the Dr. Phil Family: Modernity, Neurology and the Cult of the Case Study Superstar

Abstract

Alongside modernity, with its emphasis on the rational (Descartes), the secular (Weber) and the bureaucratic (Bell), a notorious antihero explodes into popularity, a creature I term the ‘case study celebrity’ — perhaps the strangest development within the history of neurology since Santiago Ramón y Cajal first stained the neuron using the Golgi process in order to perceive it as a totality in 1887. From ‘neuron’ to ‘nervous’ psyche, this neurological quantum finds its most Romantic form in the interpretations of coincident disciplines psychoanalysis and sexology, Victorian practices in which nervous disturbance deviates from scientific method in fostering a culture of the diseased and a poetics of the neural. These famous Others are truly Romantic in the sense of nineteenth-century British Romanticism, embodying a cerebral and corporeal alterity that runs counter to the reason-dominated subject of Enlightenment thinking. An exemplary individual whose fame derives from its moral and aesthetic distance from a shaky standard of bourgeois ‘salubriousness’ of the sort described by Sigmund Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents, the eminent freak — eminent because he or she is both case study protagonist and antihero of rationalism — haunts modern logic and rationality with the spectre of mental and bodily collapse.

The adventure of our childhood no longer finds expression in ‘le bon petit Henri’, but in the misfortunes of ‘little Hans’. The Romance of the Rose is written today by Mary Barnes; in the place of Lancelot, we have Judge Schreber.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975, 194