Freud

In December 1880, a 21-year-old woman in Vienna developed paralysis in three limbs, hallucinations, speech disturbances, and a cough with no physical cause. Doctors examined her thoroughly. There was no tumor, no infection, no injury, no disease they could identify. Yet she couldn’t move her right arm or legs. She had violent convulsions. She saw terrifying hallucinations. And for weeks at a time, she could only speak in English—having completely forgotten her native German. ...

In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior judge in the German court system, published a 450-page memoir titled “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” The book described in meticulous, articulate detail how God was transforming him into a woman. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through divine rays that penetrated his body and rewrote his nervous system. The transformation, Schreber explained, was necessary because humanity had been destroyed. He needed to become female so he could be impregnated by God and repopulate the Earth with a new race of humans. ...