My postdoctoral book project, Adapting Schreber: From Memoir to Multimedia and Beyond, is currently under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press for publication in 2026. The book builds upon a chapter I developed for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality (2026) and is the first comprehensive survey of multimedia adaptations of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), spanning literature, film, stage, radio, installation, and other hybrid forms.
Since its publication, Schreber’s memoir has been a focal point for everyone from psychoanalysts to sculpturists. Following Elias Canetti, medical historian Sander Gilman calls Schreber “the most famous psychiatric subject.” Yet despite this status, there has been no detailed account of his wide-ranging influence on popular media cultures.
Building on themes from my doctoral research, Adapting Schreber assembles an archive of roughly twenty-five artistic adaptations of the memoir since 1972 and develops an original theory of adaptation that I call “madaptation.” By attending to these productions, the book theorizes the medium-specific techniques by which artists encode Schreber’s madness, with particular attention to the representation of auditory hallucinations (i.e., voice hearing). Methodologically, I approach these topics through the frameworks of critical disability studies, mad studies, and gender studies.
This comparative study puts Schreber through a medial prism, tracing how each adaptation refracts his memoir in distinct ways. The book begins within Schreber’s media-historical context, situating Memoirs within the communications theories of Schreber’s time, as well as contemporaneous understandings of voice hearing.
The book assumes a hybrid structure, organized around media and chronology, with adaptations spanning from 1962 to 2025:
These five parts contain mini-chapters focused on individual case studies. One of the book’s central narrative arcs concerns the “proximity effect” of immersive productions in contrast to more documentary approaches, both of which address Schreber as a kind of limit case in staging fantasies of intersubjectivity, seeking to inhabit his mind vicariously through sound and image.
Most existing works on Schreber focus exclusively on the Memoirs or on Schreber himself. Others explore distinct subfields, such as legal theory, as in Peter Goodrich and Katrin Trüstedt’s Laws of Transgression: The Return of Judge Schreber (2022). There are also a handful of novelizations, most notably Alex Pheby’s Playthings (2015). Although the secondary literature is extensive, it remains scattered. Indeed, Schreber often appears only briefly in a wide array of texts, such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2008). Moreover, many of these readings continue the legacy of symptomatic interpretation — echoing early engagements by Freud, Jung, Lacan, Deleuze, and others. My book both consolidates this dispersed scholarship and opens a new line of inquiry focused on Schreber through the lens of media studies and adaptation theory.
The project pursues three main research questions — namely: What drives the continuous reinterpretation of Schreber? What are Schreber’s cultural uses? And what are the representational stakes of these adaptations?
As conversations around mental health and trans rights increasingly dominate contemporary political discourse —and as the number of Schrebers continues to multiply — this project offers a timely critical intervention, shedding light on the unexamined assumptions, aesthetic frameworks, and persistent stigmas that shape our understandings of madness and transness.
