Die "ganze Person" : Adam Bernds "Eigene Lebens=Beschreibung"

The essay examines the depiction of mind-body interactions and concomitant notions of wholeness in Adam Bernd’s Eigene Lebens=Beschreibung from 1738 as well as its sequels from 1742 and 1745. Rather than understanding Bernd’s painstaking protocol of physical ailments and associated mental afflictions as a mere precursor to the anthropological  –  and,  concurrently,  literary  –  ideal type of the “whole human” which comes to dominate discourses around 1800, the essay situates Bernd’s work within the various spiritual, social, and medical disciplinary regimes which register human life in the first half of the 18th century. Among the often contradictory conceptions of unity produced in each of these domains of knowledge, the juridical and philosophical concept of “personhood” is identified as both an organizational tool and the telos of Bernd’s project.