Freud - Complete Works (663 page)

   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.

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   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).

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   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.

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   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.

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   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.

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   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.

   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.

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