Paranoid Poetics: Byron, Schreber, Freud

Although Sigmund Freud has been and remains an unsettlingly suggestive guide to English romantic poetry, he said little about actual English works from the Romantic period—with one exception. In his "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" (1911), his analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, he discusses in some detail Byron's closet drama Manfred. In this essay, I will examine why Freud's most extended discussion of an English romantic text appears in his most detailed, subtle treatment of the origins of male homosexual desire. Freud was a longtime admirer of Byron. His letter to Theodor Reik of November 18, 1929, is revealing. He asks Reik about the source of an English quotation that he remembers but cannot place: Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron form Freud's trinity of the English poets that he admits to knowing well. He would have read Byron in his five-volume 1842 Tauchnitz edition of Byron's works, now in the London Freud Museum. This was, for the 1840s, a relatively complete edition of Byron, though a somewhat bare one: it included none of Byron's notes and none of the biographical information that often accompanied other editions. Its sole embellishment was a plate at the beginning of each volume. Yet Freud seems to have known it well. In 1883, writing to his fiancée Martha Bernays, he quoted the four lines from Burns that Byron used as an epigraph to The Bride of Abydos, and noted that Byron had cited them.The Bride of Abydos is the first poem in volume three of the Tauchnitz edition, so the quotation from Burns is the first item that a reader encounters. This physical placement may have helped Freud to remember it. Other passages in Freud's letters indicate his further interest in Byron. In 1894, he promised to send his sister-in-law Minna a copy of Byron's works; during his travels in Italy in 1896, he stayed at the Hotel Byron in Ravenna and noted to Martha that Byron had lived in the town for two years. When he visited the National Portrait Gallery in London, he made sure to see Byron's famous portrait in Albanian garb and commented drily, "Byron obviously took care dressing himself up." While Byron certainly does not bulk as large in Freud's work as major German writers, there is considerable evidence that Freud knew Byron well. Given Freud's interest in Byron, the fact that Schreber mentioned Byron in his Memoirs may have been a small factor in encouraging Freud to write about Schreber's case, since he went out of his way to discuss Schreber's very brief mention of Byron. Indeed, Freud had more to say about Byron than he could quite fit in his analysis, and it is unfortunate that he never wrote more on Byron. Yet in this one essay, he showed himself a careful reader of Byron and of Manfred in particular. Schreber and Freud joined a long line of distinguished German fans of Manfred, including Goethe, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Friedrich Nietzsche. As Cedric Hentschel has shown, nineteenth-century German Byronic literature manifests "an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of Manfred," and Freud may have known that he was commenting on a Byronic text to which German writers for almost a century had had a special relationship. For all Freud's Byronic enthusiasm, however, Manfred, at least as used by Schreber, turns out to be unexpectedly baffling. We might expect that Manfred would fit easily into Freud's system, especially in light of the fine Freudian analyses that later critics have given …