Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality 8 страница

So far the narrative of Leopoldus Braun, the village priest of Pottenbrunn, dated September 1, 1677.

¹ No mention is anywhere made of the painter’s age. The context suggests that he was a man of between thirty and forty, probably nearer the lower figure. He died, as we shall see, in 1700.

² We will merely note in passing the possibility that this interrogation inspired in the sufferer - ‘suggested’ to him - the phantasy of his pact with the Devil.

³ Quorum et finis 24 mensis hujus futurus appropinquat.9 We can now proceed with the analysis of the manuscript. It consists of three parts:

(1) A coloured title-page representing the scene of the signing of the pact and the scene of the redemption in the chapel of Mariazell. On the next sheet are eight pictures, also coloured, representing the subsequent appearances of the Devil, with a short legend in German attached to each. These pictures are not the originals; they are copies - faithful copies, we are solemnly assured - of the original paintings by Christoph Haizmann.

(2) The actual Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense (in Latin), the work of a clerical compiler who signs himself at the foot ‘P.A.E.’ and appends to these initials four lines of verse containing his biography. The Trophaeum ends with a deposition by the Abbot Kilian of St. Lambert, dated September 12, 1729, which is in a different handwriting from that of the compiler. It testifies to the exact correspondence of the manuscript and the pictures with the originals preserved in the archives. There is no mention of the year in which the Trophaeum was compiled. We are free to assume that it was done in the same year in which the Abbot Kilian made his deposition - that is, in 1729; or, since the last date mentioned in the text is 1714 -, we may put the compiler’s work somewhere between the years 1714 and 1729. The miracle which was to be preserved from oblivion by this manuscript occurred in 1677 - that is to say, between thirty-seven and fifty-two years earlier.

(3) The painter’s diary, written in German and covering the period from his redemption in the chapel till January 13 of the following year, 1678. It is inserted in the text of the Trophaeum near the end.0

The core of the actual Trophaeum consists of two pieces of writing: the letter of introduction, mentioned above, from the village priest, Leopold Braun of Pottenbrunn, dated September 1, 1677, and the report by the Abbot Franciscus of Mariazell and St. Lambert, describing the miraculous cure. This is dated September 12, 1677, that is to say, only a few days later. The activity of the editor or compiler, P.A.E., has provided a preface which as it were fuses the contents of these two documents; he has also added some connecting passages of little importance, and, at the end, an account of the subsequent vicissitudes of the painter, based on enquiries made in the year 1714.¹

The painter’s previous history is thus told three times over in the Trophaeum: (1) in the village priest of Pottenbrunn’s letter of introduction, (2) in the formal report by the Abbot Franciscus and (3) in the editor’s preface. A comparison of these three sources discloses certain discrepancies which it will be not unimportant for us to follow up.

I can now continue with the painter’s story. After he had undergone a prolonged period of penance and prayer at Mariazell, the Devil appeared to him in the sacred Chapel at midnight, on September 8, the Nativity of the Virgin, in the form of a winged dragon, and gave him back the pact, which was written in blood. We shall learn later, to our surprise, that two bonds with the Devil appear in Christoph Haizmann’s story - an earlier one, written in black ink, and a later one, written in blood. The one referred to in the description of the scene of exorcism, as can also he seen from the picture on the title-page, is the one written in blood - that is, the later one.

¹ This would seem to suggest that the Trophaeum, too, dates from 1714.1

At this point a doubt as to the credibility of the clerical reporters may well arise in our minds and warn us not to waste our labours on a product of monastic superstition. We are told that several clerics, mentioned by name, assisted at the exorcism and were present in the Chapel when the Devil appeared. If it had been asserted that they, too, saw the Devil appear in the form of a dragon and offer the painter the paper written in red (

Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset), we should be faced by several unpleasant possibilities, among which that of a collective hallucination would be the mildest. But the Abbot Franciscus’s testimony dispels this doubt. Far from asserting that the assisting clerics saw the Devil too, he only states in straightforward and sober words that the painter suddenly tore himself away from the Fathers who were holding him, rushed into the corner of the Chapel where he saw the apparition, and then returned with the paper in his hand.¹

The miracle was great, and the victory of the Holy Mother over Satan without question; but unfortunately the cure was not a lasting one. It is once more to the credit of the clergy that they have not concealed this. After a short time the painter left Mariazell in the best of health and went to Vienna, where he lived with a married sister. On October 11 fresh attacks began, some of them very severe, and these are reported in the diary until January 13. They consisted in visions and ‘absences’, in which he saw and experienced every kind of thing, in convulsive seizures accompanied by the most painful sensations, on one occasion in paralysis of the legs, and so on. This time, however, it was not the Devil who tormented him; it was by sacred figures that he was vexed - by Christ and by the Blessed Virgin herself. It is remarkable that he suffered no less through these heavenly manifestations and the punishments they inflicted on him than he had formerly through his traffic with the Devil. In his diary, indeed, he included these fresh experiences too as manifestations of the Devil; and when, in May, 1678, he returned to Mariazell, he complained of maligini Spiritûs manifestationes.

¹... ipsumque Daemonem ad Aram Sac. Cellae per fenestrellam in cornu Epistolae, Schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset, eo advolans e Religiosorum manibus, qui eum tenebant, ipsam Schedam ad manum obtinuit....’2

He told the reverend Fathers that his reason for returning was that he had to require the Devil to give him back another, earlier bond, which had been written in ink.¹ This time once more the Blessed Virgin and the pious Fathers helped him to obtain the fulfilment of his request. As to how this came about, however, the report is silent. It merely states shortly: quâ iuxta votum redditâ - he prayed once again and received the pact back. After this he felt quite free and entered the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers.

We have occasion yet again to acknowledge that in spite of the obvious purpose of his efforts, the compiler has not been tempted into departing from the veracity required of a case history. For he does not conceal the outcome of the enquiry that was made in 1714 from the Superior of the Monastery of the Brothers Hospitallers concerning the painter’s later history. The Reverend Pater Provincialis reported that Brother Chrysostomus had again been repeatedly tempted by the Evil Spirit, who tried to seduce him into making a fresh pact (though this only happened ‘when he had drunk somewhat too much wine’). But by the grace of God, it had always been possible to repel these attempts. Brother Chrysostomus had died of a hectic fever ‘peacefully and of good comfort’ in the year 1700 in the Monastery of the Order, at Neustatt on the Moldau.

¹ This bond had been signed in September, 1668, and by May, 1678, nine and a half years later, it would long since have fallen due.3

II THE MOTIVE FOR THE PACT WITH THE DEVIL

If we look at this bond with the Devil as if it were the case history of a neurotic, our interest will turn in the first instance to the question of its motivation, which is, of course, intimately connected with its exciting cause. Why does anyone sign a bond with the Devil? Faust, it is true, asked contemptuously: ‘Was willst du armer Teufel geben?’ But he was wrong. In return for an immortal soul, the Devil has many things to offer which are highly prized by men: wealth, security from danger, power over mankind and the forces of nature, even magical arts, and, above all else, enjoyment - the enjoyment of beautiful women. These services performed or undertakings made by the Devil are usually mentioned specifically in the agreement made with him.¹ What, then, was the motive which induced Christoph Haizmann to make his pact?

Curiously enough, it was none of these very natural wishes. To put the matter beyond doubt, one has only to read the short remarks attached by the painter to his illustrations of the apparitions of the Devil. For example, the caption to the third vision runs: ‘On the third occasion within a year and a half, he appeared to me in this loathsome shape, with a book in his hand which was full of magic and black arts...’ But from the legend attached to a later apparition we learn that the Devil reproached him violently for having ‘burnt his beforementioned book’, and threatened to tear him to pieces if he did not give it back.

¹ Cf. Faust, Part I, Scene 4:

Ich will mich hier zu deinem Dienst verbinden,

Auf deinem Wink nicht rasten und nicht ruhn;

Wenn wir uns drüuben wieder finden,

So sollst du mir das Gleiche thun.4

At his fourth appearance the Devil showed him a large yellow money-bag and a great ducat and promised him to give him as many of these as he wanted at any time. But the painter is able to boast that he ‘had taken nothing whatever of the kind’.

Another time the Devil asked him to turn to enjoyment and entertainment, and the painter remarks that ‘this indeed came to pass at his desire; but I did not continue for more than three days and it was then brought to an end’.

Since he rejected magical arts, money and pleasures when they were offered him by the Devil, and still less made them conditions of the pact, it becomes really imperative to know what the painter in fact wanted from the Devil when he signed a bond with him. Some motive he must have had for his dealings with the Devil.

On this point, too, the Trophaeum provides us with reliable information. He had become low-spirited, was unable or unwilling to work properly and was worried about making a livelihood; that is to say, he was suffering from melancholic depression, with an inhibition in his work and (justified) fears about his future. We can see that what we are dealing with really is a case history. We learn, too, the exciting cause of the illness, which the painter himself, in the caption to one of his pictures of the Devil, actually calls a melancholia (‘that I should seek diversion and banish melancholy’). The first of our three sources of information, the village priest’s letter of introduction, speaks, it is true, only of the state of depression (‘dum artis suae progressum emolumentumque secuturum pusillanimis perpenderet’), but the second source, the Abbot Franciscus’s report, tells us the cause of this despondency or depression as well. He says: ‘acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate ex morte parentis’; and in the compiler’s preface the same words are used, though in a reversed order: (‘ex morte parentis acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate’). His father, then, had died and he had in consequence fallen into a state of melancholia; whereupon the Devil had approached him and asked him why he was so downcast and sad, and had promised ‘to help him in every way and to give him support’. ¹

¹ The first picture on the title-page and its caption represent the Devil in the form of an ‘honest citizen’.5

Here was a person, therefore, who signed a bond with the Devil in order to be freed from a state of depression. Undoubtedly an excellent motive, as anyone will agree who can have an understanding sense of the torments of such a state and who knows as well how little medicine can do to alleviate this ailment. Yet no one who has followed the story so far as this would be able to guess what the wording of this bond (or rather, of these two bonds)¹ with the Devil actually was.

These bonds bring us two great surprises. In the first place, they mention no undertaking given by the Devil in return for whose fulfilment the painter pledges his eternal bliss, but only a demand made by the Devil which the painter must satisfy. It strikes us as quite illogical and absurd that this man should give up his soul, not for something he is to get from the Devil but for something he is to do for him. But the undertaking given by the painter seems even stranger.

The first ‘syngrapha’, written in ink, runs as follows: ‘Ich Christoph Haizmann undterschreibe mich disen Herrn sein leibeigener Sohn auff 9. Jahr. 1669 Jahr.’ The second, written in blood, runs:-

‘Anno 1669.

‘Christoph Haizmann. Ich verschreibe mich disen Satan ich sein leibeigner Sohn zu sein, und in 9. Jahr ihm mein Leib und Seel zuzugeheren.’

¹ Since there were two of them - the first written in ink, and the second written about a year later in blood - both said still to be in the treasury of Mariazell and to be transcribed in the Trophaeum.

All our astonishment vanishes, however, if we read the text of the bonds in the sense that what is represented in them as a demand made by the Devil is, on the contrary, a service performed by him - that is to say, it is a demand made by the painter. The incomprehensible pact would in that case have a straightforward meaning and could be paraphrased thus. The Devil undertakes to replace the painter’s lost father for nine years. At the end of that time the painter becomes the property, body and soul, of the Devil, as was the usual custom in such bargains. The train of thought which motivated the painter in making the pact seems to have been this: his father’s death had made him lose his spirits and his capacity to work; if he could only obtain a father-substitute he might hope to regain what he had lost.

A man who has fallen into a melancholia on account of his father’s death must really have been fond of him. But, if so, it is very strange that such a man should have hit upon the idea of taking the Devil as a substitute for the father whom he loved.7

III THE DEVIL AS A FATHER-SUBSTITUTE

I fear that sober critics will not be prepared to admit that this fresh interpretation has made the meaning of this pact with the Devil clear. They will have two objections to make to it.

In the first place they will say that it is not necessary to regard the bond as a contract in which the undertakings of both parties have been set out. On the contrary, they will argue, it contains only the painter’s undertaking; the Devil’s is omitted from the text, and is, as it were, sousentendu: the painter gives two undertakings - firstly to be the Devil’s son for nine years, and secondly to belong to him entirely after death. In this way one of the premisses on which our conclusion is built would be disposed of.

The second objection will be that we are not justified in attaching any special importance to the expression ‘the Devil’s bounden son’; that this is no more than a common figure of speech, which anyone could interpret in the same way as the reverend Fathers may have done. For in their Latin translation they did not mention the relationship of son promised in the bonds, but merely say that the painter ‘mancipavit’ himself - made himself a bondslave - to the Evil One and had undertaken to lead a sinful life and to deny God and the Holy Trinity. Why depart from this obvious and natural view of the matter?¹ The position would simply be that a man, in the torment and perplexity of a melancholic depression, signs a bond with the Devil, to whom he ascribes the greatest therapeutic power. That the depression was occasioned by his father’s death would then be irrelevant; the occasion might quite as well have been something else.

¹ In point of fact, when we come to consider later at what time and for whom these bonds were drawn up, we shall realize that their text had to be expressed in unobtrusive and generally comprehensible terms. It is enough for us, however, that it contains an ambiguity which we can take as the starting-point of our discussion.8

All this sounds convincing and reasonable. Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that it makes hair-splitting complications in the simplest things and sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details, such as occur every where, and making them the basis of the most far-reaching and strangest conclusions. It would be useless for us to point out that this rejection of our interpretation would do away with many striking analogies and break a number of subtle connections which we are able to demonstrate in this case. Our opponents will say that those analogies and connections do not in fact exist, but have been imported into the case by us with quite uncalled-for ingenuity.

I will not preface my reply with the words, ‘to be honest’ or ‘to be candid’, for one must always be able to be these things without any special preliminaries. I will instead say quite simply that I know very well that no reader who does not already believe in the justifiability of the psycho-analytic mode of thought will acquire that belief from the case of the seventeenth-century painter, Christoph Haizmann. Nor is it my intention to make use of this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On the contrary, I presuppose its validity and am employing it to throw light on the painter’s demonological illness. My justification for doing so lies in the success of our investigations into the nature of the neuroses in general. We may say in all modesty that to-day even the more obtuse among our colleagues and contemporaries are beginning to realize that no understanding of neurotic states can be reached without the help of psycho-analysis.‘These shafts can conquer Troy, these shafts alone’

as Odysseus confesses in the Philoctetes of Sophocles.

If we are right in regarding our painter’s bond with the Devil as a neurotic phantasy, there is no need for any further apology for considering it psycho-analytically. Even small indications have a meaning and importance, and quite specially when they are related to the conditions under which a neurosis originates. To be sure, it is as possible to overvalue as to undervalue them, and it is a matter of judgement how far one should go in exploiting them. But anyone who does not believe in psycho-analysis - or, for the matter of that, even in the Devil - must be left to make what he can of the painter’s case, whether he is able to furnish an explanation of his own or whether he sees nothing in it that needs explaining.

We therefore come back to our hypothesis that the Devil with whom the painter signed the bond was a direct substitute for his father. And this is borne out by the shape in which the Devil first appeared to him - as an honest elderly citizen with a brown beard, dressed in a red cloak and leaning with his right hand on a stick, with a black dog beside him¹ (cf. the first picture). Later on his appearance grows more and more terrifying - more mythological, one might say. He is equipped with horns, eagle’s claws and bat’s wings. Finally he appears in the chapel as a flying dragon. We shall have to come back later to a particular detail of his bodily shape.

It does indeed sound strange that the Devil should be chosen as a substitute for a loved father. But this is only so at first sight, for we know a good many things which lessen our surprise. To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual’s idea of God. We also know, from the secret life of the individual which analysis uncovers, that his relation to his father was perhaps ambivalent from the outset, or, at any rate, soon became so. That is to say, it contained two sets of emotional impulses that were opposed to each other: it contained not only impulses of an affectionate and submissive nature, but also hostile and defiant ones. It is our view that the same ambivalence governs the relations of mankind to its Deity. The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.²

¹ In Goethe, a black dog like this turns into the Devil himself.

² Cf. Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and Reik (1919).0

Concerning the Evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of God and yet is very close to him in his nature. His history has not been so well studied as that of God; not all religions have adopted the Evil Spirit, the opponent of God, and his prototype in the life of the individual has so far remained obscure. One thing, however, is certain: gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them. When one people has been conquered by another, their fallen gods not seldom turn into demons in the eyes of the conquerors. The evil demon of the Christian faith - the Devil of the Middle Ages - was, according to Christian mythology, himself a fallen angel and of a godlike nature. It does not need much analytic perspicacity to guess that God and the Devil were originally identical - were a single figure which was later split into two figures with opposite attributes.¹ In the earliest ages of religion God himself still possessed all the terrifying features which were afterwards combined to form a counterpart of him.

We have here an example of the process, with which we are familiar, by which an idea that has a contradictory - an ambivalent - content becomes divided into two sharply contrasted opposites. The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for his father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to his father, too, which is one of hating and fearing him and of making complaints against him, should have come to expression in the creation of Satan. Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype of both God and the Devil. But we should expect religions to bear ineffaceable marks of the fact that the primitive primal father was a being of unlimited evil - a being less like God than the Devil.

¹ Cf. Reik, 1923, Chapter VII.1

It is true that it is by no means easy to demonstrate the traces of this satanic view of the father in the mental life of the individual. When a boy draws grotesque faces and caricatures, we may no doubt be able to show that he is jeering at his father in them; and when a person of either sex is afraid of robbers and burglars at night, it is not hard to recognize these as split off portions of the father.¹ The animals, too, which appear in children’s animal phobias are most often father-substitutes, as were the totem animals of primaeval times. But that the Devil is a duplicate of the father and can act as a substitute for him has not been shown so clearly elsewhere as in the demonological neurosis of this seventeenth-century painter. That is why, at the beginning of this paper, I foretold that a demonological case history of this kind would yield in the form of pure metal material which, in the neuroses of a later epoch (no longer superstitious but hypochondriacal instead) has to be laboriously extracted by analytic work from the ore of free associations and symptoms.² A deeper penetration into the analysis of our painter’s illness will probably bring stronger conviction. It is no unusual thing for a man to acquire a melancholic depression and an inhibition in his work as a result of his father’s death. When this happens, we conclude that the man had been attached to his father with an especially strong love, and we remember how often a severe melancholia appears as a neurotic form of mourning.

¹ In the familiar fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, the Father Wolf appears as a burglar.

² The fact that in our analyses we so seldom succeed in finding the Devil as a father-substitute may be an indication that for those who come to us for analysis this figure from mediaeval mythology has long since played out its part. For the pious Christian of earlier centuries belief in the Devil was no less a duty than belief in God. In point of fact, he needed the Devil in order to be able to keep hold of God. The later decrease in faith has, for various reasons, first and foremost affected the figure of the Devil.

If we are bold enough to apply this idea of the Devil as a father substitute to cultural history, we may also be able to see the witch-trials of the Middle Ages in a new light.2

In this we are undoubtedly right. But we are not right if we conclude further that this relation has been merely one of love. On the contrary, his mourning over the loss of his father is the more likely to turn into melancholia, the more his attitude to him bore the stamp of ambivalence. This emphasis on ambivalence, however, prepares us for the possibility of the father being subjected to a debasement, as we see happening in the painter’s demonological neurosis. If we were able to learn as much about Christoph Haizmann as about a patient undergoing an analysis with us, it would be an easy matter to elicit this ambivalence, to get him to remember when and under what provocations he was given cause to fear and hate his father; and, above all, to discover what were the accidental factors that were added to the typical motives for a hatred of the father which are necessarily inherent in the natural relationship of son to father. Perhaps we might then find a special explanation for the painter’s inhibition in work. It is possible that his father had opposed his wish to become a painter. If that was so, his inability to practise his art after his father’s death would on the one hand be an expression of the familiar phenomenon of ‘deferred obedience’; and, on the other hand, by making him incapable of earning a livelihood, it would be bound to increase his longing for his father as a protector from the cares of life. In its aspect as deferred obedience it would also be an expression of remorse and a successful self-punishment.

Since, however, we cannot carry out an analysis of this sort with Christoph Haizmann, who died in the year 1700, we must content ourselves with bringing out those features of his case history which may point to the typical exciting causes of a negative attitude to the father. There are only a few such features, nor are they very striking, but they are of great interest.

Let us first consider the part played by the number nine. The pact with the Evil One was for nine years. On this point the unquestionably trustworthy report by the village priest of Pottenbrunn is quite clear: pro novem annis Syngraphen scriptam tradidit. This letter of introduction, dated September 1, 1677, is also able to inform us that the appointed time was about to expire in a few days: quorum et finis 24 mensis hujus futurus appropinquat. The pact would therefore have been signed on September 24, 1668.¹ In the same report, indeed, yet another use is made of the number nine. The painter claims to have withstood the temptations of the Evil One nine times - ‘nonies’ - before he yielded to him. This detail is no longer mentioned in the later reports. In the Abbot’s deposition the phrase ‘pos annos novem’ is used, and the compiler repeats ‘ad novem annos’ in his summary - a proof that this number was not regarded as indifferent.

¹ The contradictory fact that both the pacts as transcribed bear the date 1669 will be considered later.3

The number nine is well known to us from neurotic phantasies. It is the number of the months of pregnancy, and wherever it appears it directs our attention to a phantasy of pregnancy. In our painter’s case, to be sure, the number refers to years, not months; and it will be objected that nine is a significant number in other ways as well. But who knows whether it may not in general owe a good deal of its sanctity to the part it plays in pregnancy? Nor need we be disconcerted by the change from nine months to nine years. We know from dreams what liberties ‘unconscious mental activity’ takes with numbers. If, for instance, the number five occurs in a dream, this can invariably be traced back to a five that is important in waking life; but whereas in waking life the five was a five years’ difference in age or a company of five people, it appeared in the dream as five bank-notes or five fruits. That is to say, the number is kept, but its denominator is changed according to the requirements of condensation and displacement. Nine years in a dream could thus easily correspond to nine months in real life. The dream-work plays about with the numbers of waking life in another way, too, for it shows a sovereign disregard for noughts and does not treat them as numbers at all. Five dollars in a dream can stand for fifty or five hundred or five thousand dollars in reality.

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