The Unconscious as Politics of the Other: Schreber and Racism

Abstract

In this paper we conducted a bibliographic research and a case study, where we explored a specific unit of analysis of the "Schreber case" with the aim of demonstrating one of the definitions of unconscious proposed by Jacques Lacan: the unconscious as the politics of the Other. Based on the idea that family is an institution that transmits beliefs and myths, and based on historical references about nazism, we demonstrate that Schreber's delirium contains racist values in the form of antisemitism, whose origin goes back to Bismarck's politics. In this sense, we confirm Santner's thesis that Schreber's paranoid solution is not only a message for the individual himself, but for German society, whose characteristics reproduce the Aryan Myth and the forthcoming ideas of the Third Reich. The mechanisms of symbolic transmission are explained by two theories. The first is drawn from Freud's biological reductionism of Haeckel's theory of recapitulation. The second originates from Jacques Lacan's absorption of concepts from linguistics, by which we describe the mechanisms of symbolic transmission.