Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality 9 страница

Another detail in the painter’s relations to the Devil has once more a sexual reference. On the first occasion, as I have mentioned, he saw the Evil One in the shape of an honest citizen. But already on the second occasion the Devil was naked and misshapen, and had two pairs of female breasts. In none of his subsequent apparitions are the breasts absent, either as a single or a double pair. Only in one of them does the Devil exhibit, in addition to the breasts, a large penis ending in a snake. This stressing of the female sexual character by introducing large pendulous breasts (there is never any indication of the female genitals) is bound to appear to us as a striking contradiction of our hypothesis that the Devil had the meaning of a father-substitute for the painter. And, indeed, such a way of representing the Devil is in itself unusual. Where ‘devil’ is thought of in a generic sense, and devils appear in numbers, there is nothing strange about depicting female devils; but that the Devil, who is a great individuality, the Lord of Hell and the Adversary of God, should be represented otherwise than as a male, and, indeed, as a super-male, with horns, tail and a big penis-snake - this, I believe, is never found.

These two slight indications give us an idea of what the typical factor is which determines the negative side of the painter’s relation to his father. What he is rebelling against is his feminine attitude to him which culminates in a phantasy of bearing him a child (the nine years). We have an accurate knowledge of this resistance from our analyses, where it takes on very strange forms in the transference and gives us a great deal of trouble. With the painter’s mourning for his lost father, and the heightening of his longing for him, there also comes about in him a re-activation of his long-since repressed phantasy of pregnancy, and he is obliged to defend himself against it by a neurosis and by debasing his father.

But why should his father, after being reduced to the status of a Devil, bear this physical mark of a woman? The feature seems at first hard to interpret; but soon we find two explanations which compete with each other without being mutually exclusive. A boy’s feminine attitude to his father undergoes repression as soon as he understands that his rivalry with a woman for his father’s love has as a precondition the loss of his own male genitals - in other words, castration. Repudiation of the feminine attitude is thus the result of a revolt against castration. It regularly finds its strongest expression in the converse phantasy of castrating the father, of turning him into a woman. Thus the Devil’s breasts would correspond to a projection of the subject’s own femininity on to the father-substitute. The second explanation of these female additions to the Devil’s body no longer has a hostile meaning but an affectionate one. It sees in the adoption of this shape an indication that the child’s tender feelings towards his mother have been displaced on to his father; and this suggests that there has previously been a strong fixation on the mother, which, in its turn, is responsible for part of the child’s hostility towards his father. Large breasts are the positive sexual characteristics of the mother even at a time when the negative characteristic of the female - her lack of a penis - is as yet unknown to the child. ¹

¹ Cf. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910c).5

If our painter’s repugnance to accepting castration made it impossible for him to appease his longing for his father, it is perfectly understandable that he should have turned for help and salvation to the image of his mother. This is why he declared that only the Holy Mother of God of Mariazell could release him from his pact with the Devil and why he obtained his freedom once more on the day of the Mother’s Nativity (September 8). Whether the day on which the pact was made - September 24 - was not also determined in some similar way, we shall of course never know.

Among the observations made by psycho-analysis of the mental life of children there is scarcely one which sounds so repugnant and unbelievable to a normal adult as that of a boy’s feminine attitude to his father and the phantasy of pregnancy that arises from it. It is only since Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge presiding over a division of the Appeal Court of Saxony, published the history of his psychotic illness and his extensive recovery from it,¹ that we can discuss the subject without trepidation or apology. We learn from this invaluable book that, somewhere about the age of fifty, the Senatspräsident became firmly convinced that God - who, incidentally, exhibited distinct traits of his father, the worthy physician, Dr. Schreber - had decided to emasculate him, to use him as a woman, and to beget from him ‘a new race of men born from the spirit of Schreber’. (His own marriage was childless.) In his revolt against this intention of God’s, which seemed to him highly unjust and ‘contrary to the Order of Things’, he fell ill with symptoms of paranoia, which, however, underwent a process of involution in the course of years, leaving only a small residue behind. The gifted author of his own case history could not have guessed that in it he had uncovered a typical pathogenic factor.

¹ Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903. See my analysis of his case (1911c).6

This revolt against castration or a feminine attitude has been torn out of its organic context by Alfred Adler. He has linked it superficially or falsely with the longing for power, and has postulated it as an independent ‘masculine protest’. Since a neurosis can only arise from a conflict between two trends, it is as justifiable to see the cause of ‘every’ neurosis in the masculine protest as it is to see it in the feminine attitude against which the protest is being made. It is quite true that this masculine protest plays a regular part in the formation of character - in some types of people a very large part - and that we meet it in the analysis of neurotic men as a vigorous resistance. Psycho-analysis has attached due importance to the masculine protest in connection with the castration complex, without being able to accept its omnipotence or its omnipresence in neuroses. The most marked case of a masculine protest with all its manifest reactions and character-traits that I have met with in analysis was that of a patient who came to me for treatment on account of an obsessional neurosis in whose symptoms the unresolved conflict between a masculine and a feminine attitude (fear of castration and desire for castration) found clear expression. In addition, the patient had developed masochistic phantasies which were wholly derived from a wish to accept castration; and he had even gone beyond these phantasies to real satisfaction in perverse situations. The whole of his state rested - like Adler’s theory itself - on the repression and denial of early infantile fixations of love.

Senatspräsident Schreber found the way to recovery when he decided to give up his resistance to castration and to accommodate himself to the feminine role cast for him by God. After this, he became lucid and calm, was able to put through his own discharge from the asylum and led a normal life - with the one exception that he devoted some hours every day to the cultivation of his femaleness, of whose gradual advance towards the goal determined by God he remained convinced.

IV THE TWO BONDS

A remarkable detail in our painter’s story is the statement that he signed two different bonds with the Devil. The first, written in black ink, ran as follows:

‘I, Chr. H., subscribe myself to this Lord as his bounden son till the ninth year.’

The second, written in blood, ran:

‘Chr. H. I sign a bond with this Satan, to be his bounden son, and in the ninth year to belong to him body and soul.’

The originals of both are said to have been in the archives at Mariazell when the Trophaeum was compiled, and both bear the same date - 1669.

I have already made a number of references to the two bonds; and I now propose to deal with them in greater detail, although it is precisely here that the danger of overvaluing trifles seems especially great.

It is unusual for anyone to sign a bond with the Devil twice, in such a way that the first document is replaced by the second, but without losing its own validity. Perhaps this occurrence is less surprising to other people, who are more at home with demonological material. For my part, I could only look on it as a special peculiarity of our case, and my suspicions were aroused when I found that the reports were at variance precisely on this point. Examination of these discrepancies will afford us, unexpectedly, a deeper understanding of the case history.

The village priest of Pottenbrunn’s letter of introduction describes a very simple and clear situation. In it mention is only made of one bond, which was written in blood by the painter nine years before and which was due to expire in a few days’ time - on September 24. It must therefore have been drawn up on September 24, 1668; unfortunately this date, although it can be inferred with certainty, is not explicitly stated.8

The Abbot Franciscus’s deposition, which was dated, as we know, a few days later (September 12, 1677), already describes a more complicated state of affairs. It is plausible to assume that the painter had given more precise information in the interval. The deposition relates that the painter had signed two bonds: one in the year 1668 (a date which should also be the correct one according to the letter of introduction), written in black ink, and the other ‘sequenti anno 1669’, written in blood. The bond that he received back on the day of the Nativity of the Virgin was the one written in blood - viz. the later bond, which had been signed in 1669. This does not emerge from the Abbot’s deposition, for there it merely says later ‘schedam redderet’ and ‘schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset’ as if there could only be a single document in question. But it does follow from the subsequent course of the story, and also from the coloured title-page of the Tropheaum, where what is clearly a red script can be seen on the paper which the demon dragon is holding. The further course of the story is, as I have already related, that the painter returned to Mariazell in May, 1678, after he had experienced further temptations from the Evil One in Vienna; and that he begged that, through a further act of Grace on the part of the Holy Mother, the first document, written in ink, might also be given back to him. In what way this came about is not so fully described as on the first occasion. We are merely told: ‘quâ juxta votum redditâ’; and in another passage the compiler says that this particular bond was thrown to the painter by the Devil ‘crumpled up and torn into four pieces’ on May 9, 1678, at about nine o’clock in the evening.

Both bonds, however, bear the date of the same year - 1669.

This incompatibility is either of no significance or may put us on the following track.

If we take as a starting-point the Abbot’s account, as being the more detailed one, we are confronted with a number of difficulties. When Christoph Haizmann confessed to the village priest of Pottenbrunn that he was hard pressed by the Devil and that the time-limit would soon run out, he could only (in 1677) have been thinking of the bond which he had signed in 1668 - namely, the first one, written in black (which is referred to in the letter of introduction as the only one, but is described there being written in blood). But a few days later, at Mariazell, he was only concerned to get back the later bond, in blood, which was not nearly due to expire then (1669-77), and allowed the first one to become overdue. This latter was not reclaimed till 1678 - that is, when it had run into its tenth year. Furthermore, why are both the bonds dated in the same year (1669), when one of them is explicitly attributed to the following year (‘anno subsequenti’)?

The compiler must have noticed these difficulties, for he made an attempt to remove them. In his preface he adopted the Abbot’s version, but he modified it in one particular. The painter, he says, signed a bond with the Devil in 1669 in ink, but afterwards (‘deinde vero’) in blood. He thus overrode the express statement of both reports that one bond was signed in 1668, and he ignored the Abbot’s remark in his deposition to the effect that there was a difference in the year-number between the two bonds. This he did in order to keep in harmony with the dating of the two documents that were given back by the Devil.

In the Abbot’s deposition a passage appears in brackets after the words ‘sequenti vero anno 1669’. It runs: ‘sumitur hic alter annus pro nondum completo, uti saepe in loquendo fieri solet, nam eundem annum indicant syngraphae, quarum atramento scripta ante praesentem attestationem nondum habita fuit.’ This passage is clearly an interpolation by the compiler; for the Abbot, who had only seen one bond, could not have stated that both bore the same date. The placing of the passage in brackets, moreover, must have been intended to show that it was an addition to the text of the deposition. It represents another attempt on the compiler’s part to reconcile the incompatible evidence. He agrees that the first bond was signed in 1668; but he thinks that, since the year was already far advanced (it was September), the painter had post-dated it by a year so that both bonds were able to show the same year. His invoking the fact that people often do the same sort of thing in conversation seems to me to stamp his whole attempt at an explanation as no more than a feeble evasion.

I cannot tell whether my presentation of the case has made any impression on the reader and whether it has put him in a position to take an interest in these minute details. I myself have found it impossible to arrive with any certainty at the true state of affairs; but, in studying this confused business, I hit upon a notion which has the advantage of giving the most natural picture of the course of events, even though once more the written evidence does not entirely fit in with it.

My view is that when the painter first came to Mariazell he spoke only of one bond, written in the regular way in blood, which was about to fall due and which had therefore been signed in September, 1668 - all exactly as described in the village priest’s letter of introduction. In Mariazell, too, he presented this bond in blood as the one which the Demon had given back to him under compulsion from the Holy Mother. We know what happened subsequently. The painter left the shrine soon afterwards and went to Vienna, where he felt free till the middle of October. Then, however, he began once more to be subjected to sufferings and apparitions, in which he saw the work of the Evil Spirit. He again felt in need of redemption, but was faced with the difficulty of explaining why the exorcism in the holy Chapel had not brought him a lasting deliverance. He would certainly not have been welcome at Mariazell if he had returned there uncured and relapsed. In this quandary, he invented an earlier, first bond, which, however, was to be written in ink, so that its supersession in favour of a later bond, written in blood, should seem more plausible. Having returned to Mariazell, he had this alleged first bond given back to him too. After this he was left in peace by the Evil One; but at the same time he did something else, which will show us what lay in the background of his neurosis.

The drawings he made were undoubtedly executed during his second stay at Mariazell: the title-page, which is a single composition, contains a representation of both the bond scenes. The attempt to make his new story tally with his earlier one may well have caused him embarrassment. It was unfortunate for him that his additional invention could only be of an earlier bond and not of a later one. Thus he could not avoid the awkward result that he had redeemed one - the blood bond - too soon (in the eighth year), and the other - the black bond - too late (in the tenth year). And he betrayed the double editing of the story by making a mistake in the dating of the bonds and attributing the earlier one as well as the later to the year 1669. This mistake has the significance of a piece of unintentional honesty: it enables us to guess that the supposedly earlier bond was fabricated at the later date. The compiler, who certainly did not begin revising the material before 1714, and perhaps not till 1729, had to do his best to resolve its not inconsiderable contradictions. Finding that both the bonds before him were dated 1669, he had recourse to the evasion which he interpolated in the Abbot’s deposition.

It is easy to see where the weak spot lies in this otherwise attractive reconstruction. Reference is already made to the existence of two bonds, one in black and one in blood, in the Abbot’s deposition. I therefore have the choice between accusing the compiler of having also made an alteration in the deposition, an alteration closely related to his interpolation, or confessing that I am unable to unravel the tangle.¹

¹ The compiler, it seems to me, was between two fires. On the one hand, he found, in the village priest’s letter of introduction as well as in the Abbot’s deposition, the statement that the bond (or at any rate the first bond) had been signed in 1668; on the other hand, both bonds, which had been preserved in the archives, bore the date 1669. As he had two bonds before him, it seemed certain to him that two bonds had been signed. If, as I believe, the Abbot’s deposition mentioned only one bond, he was obliged to insert in the deposition a reference to the other and then remove the contradiction by the hypothesis of the post-dating. The textual alteration which he made occurs immediately before the interpolation, which can only have been written by him. He was obliged to link the interpolation to the alteration with the words ‘sequenti vero anno 1669’, since the painter had expressly written in his (very much damaged) caption to the title-page:

‘A year after He

... terrible threatenings in

... shape No. 2, was forced

... to sign a bond in blood.’

The painter’s blunder in writing his Syngraphae - a blunder which I have been obliged to assume in my attempted explanation - appears to me to be no less interesting than are the actual bonds.2

The reader will long ago have judged this whole discussion superfluous and the details concerned in it too unimportant. But the matter gains a new interest if it is pursued in a certain direction.

I have just expressed the view that, when the painter was disagreeably surprised by the course taken by his illness, he invented an earlier bond (the one in ink) in order to be able to maintain his position with the reverend Fathers at Mariazell. Now I am writing for readers who, although they believe in psycho-analysis, do not believe in the Devil; and they might object that it was absurd for me to bring such an accusation against the poor wretch - hunc miserum, as he is called in the letter of introduction. For, they will say, the bond in blood was just as much a product of his phantasy as the allegedly earlier one in ink. In reality, no Devil appeared to him at all, and the whole business of pacts with the Devil only existed in his imagination. I quite realize this: the poor man cannot be denied the right to supplement his original phantasy with a new one, if altered circumstances seem to require it.

But here, too, the matter goes further. After all, the two bonds were not phantasies like the visions of the Devil. They were documents, preserved, according to the assurances of the copyist and the deposition of the later Abbot Kilian, in the archives of Mariazell, for all to see and touch. We are therefore in a dilemma. Either we must assume that both the papers which were supposed to have been given back to the painter through divine Grace were written by him at the time when he needed them; or else, despite all the solemn assurances, the confirmatory evidence of witnesses, signed and sealed, and so on, we shall be obliged to deny the credibility of the reverend Fathers of Mariazell and St. Lambert. I must admit that I am unwilling to cast doubts on the Fathers. I am inclined to think, it is true, that the compiler, in the interests of consistency, has falsified some things in the deposition made by the first Abbot; but a ‘secondary revision’ such as this does not go much beyond what is carried out even by modern lay historians, and at all events it was done in good faith. In another respect, the reverend Fathers have established a good claim to our confidence. As I have said already there was nothing to prevent them from suppressing the accounts of the incompleteness of the cure and the continuance of the temptations. And even the description of the scene of exorcism in the Chapel, which one might have viewed with some apprehension, is soberly written and inspires belief. So there is nothing for it but to lay the blame on the painter. No doubt he had the red bond with him when he went to penitential prayer in the Chapel, and he produced it afterwards as he came back to his spiritual assistants from his meeting with the Demon. Nor need it have been the same paper which was later preserved in the archives, and, according to our construction, it may have borne the date 1668 (nine years before the exorcism).

V

THE FURTHER COURSE OF THE NEUROSIS

But if this is so, we should be dealing not with a neurosis but with a deception, and the painter would be a malingerer and forger instead of a sick man suffering from possession. But the transitional stages between neurosis and malingering are, as we know, very fluid. Nor do I see any difficulty in supposing that the painter wrote this paper and the later one, and took them with him, in a peculiar state, similar to the one in which he had his visions. Indeed there was no other course open to him if he wished to carry into effect his phantasy of his pact with the Devil and of his redemption.

On the other hand, the diary written in Vienna, which he gave to the clerics on his second visit to Mariazell, bears the stamp of veracity. It undoubtedly affords us a deep insight into the motivation - or let us rather say, the exploitation - of the neurosis.

The entries extend from the time of the successful exorcism till January 13 of the following year, 1678.

Until October 11 he felt very well in Vienna, where he lived with a married sister; but after that he had fresh attacks, with visions, convulsions, loss of consciousness and painful sensations, and these finally led to his return to Mariazell in May, 1678.

The story of his fresh illness falls into three phases. First, temptation appeared in the form of a finely dressed cavalier, who tried to persuade him to throw away the document attesting his admission to the Brotherhood of the Holy Rosary. He resisted this temptation, whereupon the same thing happened next day; only this time the scene was laid in a magnificently decorated hall in which grand gentlemen were dancing with beautiful ladies. The same cavalier who had tempted him before made a proposal to him connected with painting¹ and promised to give him a handsome sum of money in return. After he had made this vision disappear by prayer, it was repeated once more a few days later, in a still more pressing form. This time the cavalier sent one of the most beautiful of the ladies who sat at the banqueting table to him to persuade him to join their company, and he had difficulty in defending himself from the temptress. Most terrifying of all, moreover, was the vision which occurred soon after this. He saw a still more magnificent hall, in which there was a ‘throne built up of gold pieces’. Cavaliers were standing about awaiting the arrival of their King. The same person who had so often made proposals to him now approached him and summoned him to ascend the throne, for they ‘wanted to have him for their King and to honour him for ever’. This extravagant phantasy concluded the first, perfectly transparent, phase of the story of his temptation.

¹ This passage is unintelligible to me.4

There was bound to be a revulsion against this. An ascetic reaction reared its head. On October 20 a great light appeared, and a voice came from it, making itself known as Christ, and commanded him to forswear this wicked world and serve God in the wilderness for six years. The painter clearly suffered more from these holy apparitions than from the earlier demoniacal ones; it was only after two and a half hours that he awoke from this attack. In the next attack the holy figure surrounded by light was much more unfriendly. He issued threats against him for not having obeyed the divine behest and led him down into Hell so that he might be terrified by the fate of the damned. Evidently, however, this failed in its effect, for the apparitions of the figure surrounded by light, which purported to be Christ, were repeated several more times. Each time the painter underwent an absence and an ecstasy lasting for hours. In the grandest of these ecstasies the figure surrounded by light took him first into a town in whose streets people were perpetrating all the acts of darkness; and then, in contrast, took him to a lovely meadow in which anchorites were leading a godly life and were receiving tangible evidence of God’s grace and care. There then appeared, instead of Christ, the Holy Mother herself, who, reminding him of what she had already done on his behalf, called on him to obey the command of her dear Son. ‘Since he could not truly resolve so to do’, Christ appeared to him again the next day and upbraided him soundly with threats and promises. At last he gave way and made up his mind to leave the world and to do what was required of him. With this decision, the second phase ended. The painter states that from this time onwards he had no more visions and no more temptations.

Nevertheless, his resolution cannot have been firm enough or he must have delayed its execution too long; for while he was in the midst of his devotions, on December 26, in St. Stephen’s, catching sight of a strapping young woman accompanied by a smartly dressed gentleman, he could not fend off the thought that he might himself be in this gentleman’s place. This called for punishment, and that very evening it over took him like a thunderbolt. He saw himself in bright flames and sank down in a swoon. Attempts were made to rouse him but he rolled about in the room till blood flowed from his mouth and nose. He felt that he was surrounded by heat and noisome smells, and he heard a voice say that he had been condemned to this state as a punishment for his vain and idle thoughts. Later he was scourged with ropes by Evil Spirits, and was told that he would be tormented like this every day until he had decided to enter the Order of Anchorites. These experiences continued up to the last entry in his diary (January 13).

We see how our unfortunate painter’s phantasies of temptation were succeeded by ascetic ones and finally by phantasies of punishment. The end of his tale of suffering we know already. In May he went to Mariazell, told his story of an earlier bond written in black ink, to which he explicitly attributed his continued torment by the Devil, received this bond back, too, and was cured.

During his second stay there he painted the pictures which are copied in the Trophaeum. Then he took a step which was in keeping with the demands of the ascetic phase of his diary. He did not, it is true, go into the wilderness to become an anchorite, but he joined the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers: religiosus factus est.

Reading the diary, we gain insight into another part of the story. It will be remembered that the painter signed a bond with the Devil because after his father’s death, feeling depressed and unable to work, he was worried about making a livelihood. These factors of depression, inhibition in his work and mourning for his father are somehow connected with one another, whether in a simple or a complicated way. Perhaps the reason why the apparitions of the Devil were so over-generously furnished with breasts was that the Evil One was meant to become his foster father. This hope was not fulfilled, and the painter continued to be in a bad state. He could not work properly, or he was out of luck and could not find enough employment. The village priest’s letter of introduction speaks of him as ‘hunc miserum omni auxilio destitutum’. He was thus not only in moral straits but was suffering material want. In the account of his later visions, we find remarks here and there indicating - as do the contents of the scenes described - that even after the successful first exorcism, nothing had been changed in his situation. We come to know him as a man who fails in everything and who is therefore trusted by no one. In his first vision the cavalier asked him ‘what he is going to do, since he has no one to stand by him’. The first series of visions in Vienna tallied completely with the wishful phantasies of a poor man, who had come down in the world and who hungered for enjoyment: magnificent halls, high living, a silver dinner-service and beautiful women. Here we find what was missing in his relations with the Devil made good. At that time he had been in a melancholia which made him unable to enjoy anything and obliged him to reject the most attractive offers. After the exorcism the melancholia seems to have been overcome and all his worldly-minded desires had once more become active.

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