Freud - Complete Works (664 page)

   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
(1910
c
).

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   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
(1911
c
).

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   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.

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4017

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.

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   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
’)?

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4019

   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.

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4020

   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.