Playthings

Author(s): Alex Pheby

Novel | Read our reviews! | Psychology | Galley Beggar Press

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.

_________________
THOMAS'S REVIEW:
Freud’s consideration of the case of the judge Paul Schreber, and his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), was instrumental in the formulation of the modern construct of paranoid schizophrenia, and Schreber’s experience, treatment and interpretation have been rigorously explored and debated by Deleuze, Guatarri, Canetti, Lacan, Calasso and others. Playthings, a novel by Alex Pheby, depicts, sometimes horrifically, sometimes with humour or beauty, sometimes ironically, Schreber’s descent into and experience of madness: his inability to achieve the culturally determined overarching perspective that enables us to function without being overwhelmed by minor details, observations and experiences (of course, none of us do this especially well; our ability to ‘function’ determines which side of the line of ‘madness’ we exist on); his inability to integrate his experiences into ‘useful’ concepts of time and causality; his inability to see others as persons or to interpret their intentions and actions in ways that fit with shared concepts of the patterns of intentions and actions, and his projection of suppressed psychological material onto such others (this dehumanisation of those seen as ‘other’ is a manifestation of the mechanisms by which socially inter-confirmed mass paranoia presented itself as fascism in Germany a few decades later). “It was nothing to him, because they were all nothing. Fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind.” As Pheby zooms in and away from Schreber’s experience, playing always with the perspective that lies at the core of his illness, leaving us uncertain which side of the line between madness and sanity we are experiencing or what constitutes ‘reality’, we as readers become aware of ourselves as the author’s plaything. The key mechanisms of schizophrenia are the key mechanisms of literature; it is only our ability to close the book that keeps us sane.


{THOMAS}

37.00 NZD

Stock: 1

Add to Cart


Add to Wishlist


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781910296479
  • : Galley Beggar Press
  • : Galley Beggar Press
  • : 0.318
  • : November 2015
  • : 193mm X 138mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Alex Pheby
  • : Paperback
  • : 823.92
  • : 252