Playthings

A hallucinatory, fragmentary, and tragic fictional telling of one of the most fa- mous psychotherapy cases in history, A lex Pheby's Playthings offers a visceral and darkly comic portrait of paranoid schizophrenia. Based on the true story of nineteenth-century German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, Playthings artfully shows the disorienting human tragedy of Schreber's psychosis, in vertiginous prose that blurs the lines between madness and sanity. Paul Schreber is a man who wants to go home - but can't. He is a man stymied by an illness he doesn't understand - and sometimes doesn't even know he has. He has to deal with past traumas, a disintegrating family, his own fantasies of persecution - as well as the very real forces marshalled against him. As Playthings delves deeper into Schreber's disturbed mind, the book also unearths the roots of the great ills in the 20th century, the psychological structure of fascism, the cancer of anti-Semitism, and the abuse of institutional power Paul Schreber is a man who wants to go home - but can't. He is a man crippled by an illness he doesn't understand - and sometimes doesn't even know he has. He's no condition to face the worst - but the worst keeps on happening to him. His family is disintegrating, past traumas are coming back to haunt him - and so are those troubling, seemingly laid-to-rest fears of persecution... A portrayal of one of Daniel Paul Schreber's bouts of mental illness, his frustrations, his traumatic memories, and delusions and hopes. An Hallucinatory Journey Through The Mind Of A Man Afflicted By Madness And Tormented By Tragedy.