Freud's Early Psychoanalysis, Witch Trials and the Inquisitorial Method

The Harsh Therapy

Kathleen Duffy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367369248
• eBook ISBN: 9781000732894
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Freud's Early Psychoanalysis, Witch Trials and the Inquisitorial Method: The Harsh Therapy, author Kathleen Duffy asks why Freud compared his 'hysterical' patients to the accused women in the witch trials, and his 'psychoanalytical' treatment to the inquisitorial method of their judges. He wrote in 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess: 'I ... understand the harsh therapy of the witches' judges'. This book proves that Freud's view of his method as inquisitorial was both serious and accurate.

In this multidisciplinary and in-depth examination, Duffy demonstrates that Freud carefully studied the witch trial literature to develop the supposed parallels between his patients and the witches and between his own psychoanalytic method and the judges' inquisitorial extraction of 'confessions', by torture if necessary. She examines in meticulous detail both the witch trial literature that Freud studied and his own case studies, papers, letters and other writings. She shows that the various stages of his developing early psychoanalytic method, from the 'Katharina' case of 1893, through the so-called seduction theory of 1896 and its retraction, to the 'Dora' case of 1900, were indeed in many respects inquisitorial and invalidated his patients' experience.

This book demonstrates with devastating effect the destructive consequences of Freud's nineteenth-century inquisitorial practice. This raises the question about the extent to which his mature practice and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy today, despite great achievements, remain at times inquisitorial and consequently untrustworthy. This book will therefore be invaluable not only to academics, practitioners and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, literature, history and cultural studies, but also to those seeking professional psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic help.

Part I

Introduction

This book is about Dr Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his understanding of ‘the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’. The subtitle of my book, ‘The Harsh Therapy’, is a direct quotation from Freud’s letter on 24 January 1897 to his friend, Dr Wilhelm Fliess: ‘I dream, therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that are carried on secretly and understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’. My task in this book is to try to make sense of that statement. There may be ambiguities in the statement but, at first glance, Freud, by using the word ‘therapy’, appears to be making a direct comparison between the procedures of the judges in the witch trials and his new method, psychoanalysis. He said that ‘Connecting links abound’. How this rational and compassionate physician and therapist can have entertained this comparison is puzzling. It appears to be a serious comparison because Freud made a deep study of the literature on the witch trials. I am not writing a complete history of witches, witchcraft and witch trials, because my book is not about witches per se. I am confining my study of the literature on witches to the books that we know Freud read and the books that were available to him that he most likely read, in order to make sense of his statement ‘I … understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’.

It is possible to see hints or implications of my work in a number of studies on Freud, such as Swales and Szasz, but no major detailed study has treated this subject thoroughly. My work posed particular difficulty because not all the primary texts on witch trials have been translated into English. I have been fortunate to have had access to primary sources written by judges who conducted the witch trials – for example, the recently translated English version of Bodin’s De la Demonomanie des Sorciérs (1580), the first major work on the witch trials since the Malleus Maleficarum appeared in 1486. This was Freud’s main source of information on the witch trials. He wrote to Fliess, ‘I have ordered the Malleus Maleficarum, and … I shall study it diligently’. I have also had access to the works of Judges Remy and Boguet, who conducted the witch trials in the sixteenth century. These judges have given firsthand accounts of the trials of witches that they conducted. The Malleus, written by inquisitors during the late medieval period, lay on the bench of every judge who conducted witch trials in the centuries following its publication. It was accepted by them as the ultimate authority on how to extract confessions from witches. Witch trials were conducted in the late medieval period and reached their peak during the early modern period. However, Freud, who was mainly interested in how confessions were extracted from witches, referred to the trials as medieval. I have used both terms ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ to cover the periods of the witch trials in Europe.

I have examined the evidence of what Freud actually did, in all his published cases of hysteria, and subsequent research done on the cases. I drew on autobiographical accounts of those who were in analysis with Freud. I examined the inquisitorial element common in both the witch trials and Freud’s cases and how both the judges and Freud justify and explain this inquisitorial approach to themselves. The attempt to relate and parallel the judges’ procedures in the witch trials with Freud’s procedures in treating his patients seemed to be a large undertaking. It seemed more rigorously scientific to make an initial presentation of the judges’ procedures by drawing not on theory or speculation but on the actual case histories of the witches from the trials conducted by Judges Bodin, Remy and Boguet. I relate Freud’s procedures to the judges’ procedures throughout Part One and Part Two of my book.

To present Freud’s procedures, I have again chosen examples drawn from his case histories of hysteria. These examples offer an opportunity for detailed treatment that no theory of his other works can offer. I highlight aspects of Freud’s procedural approach that have largely been ignored, namely his inquisitorial method of drawing confessions out of his patients. I also examine his correspondence with Fliess, in which he discusses his search for the aetiology of hysteria in psychological factors. Thus, my study is firmly grounded in the concrete evidence from case histories of both Freud’s patients and the judges’ alleged witches.

I examine the case histories that describe what Freud was doing during the eight-year period between autumn 1892 and autumn 1900. I have limited my research to those years because it was within that period that he made the statement that is under investigation in my book: ‘I … understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’. I looked at the case histories immediately before and immediately after that statement. His early case histories or his later successful cases are too far removed from that statement to throw any light on it. I am trying to make sense of what was in Freud’s mind when he wrote to Fliess that he understood the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges. Other authors, notably Roazen and Lohser & Newton, have presented the later years of Freud’s approach as told by the analysands. Even some of those analysands experienced the approach I am highlighting; for example, in the case of H.D. in Unorthodox Freud (1996) we read, ‘The probing quality of his questioning had felt like “drilling” to her’ (Lohser & Newton, 1996: 74).

In this book, I use the accepted term ‘seduction theory’ for Freud’s claim that the specific aetiology of hysteria is sexual molestation in childhood. This claim, which was first put forward in his three papers in 1896, is examined in Chapter 4. However, even though everyone calls it the seduction theory, Freud never called it that, as far as is known.

In the beginning of the early modern period, which overlaps with the end of the medieval period in Europe, witches were believed to be possessed by the devil. Freud had compared his theory of hysteria with ‘the medieval theory of possession held by the ecclesiastical courts’. He wrote to Fliess on 17 January 1897,

my brand-new prehistory of hysteria is already known and was published a hundred times over, though several centuries ago… . I always said that the medieval theory of possession held by the ecclesiastical courts was identical with our theory of a foreign body and the splitting of consciousness.

Freud is saying that the theory of the witches’ ‘possession’ by the devil is identical with his theory of hysteria. In Chapter 3, I examine what Freud means by ‘a foreign body and the splitting of consciousness’ in his cases of hysteria.

Freud asks, ‘why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and in a loathsome manner’? In Chapter 1, I examine the history of the devil and the meaning of ‘possession’. Freud’s correspondence with his Berlin friend Wilhelm Fliess, on 17 and 24 January 1897, indicates his familiarity with the theory of possession and witchcraft. On the subject of hysteria, he wrote to Fliess, ‘The idea of bringing in witches is gaining strength. I think it is also appropriate’. Reflecting on the witches he asks, ‘why are their confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment? Sometime soon I must delve into the literature on this subject’.

Do we know what literature on witches Freud had accessed or when he became interested in witches? Between October 1885 and February 1886, Freud studied under the French neurologist Charcot, in Paris. This was when Charcot sought to demonstrate how all the physical symptoms of hysteria were identical to the various symptoms attributed to witchcraft and possession by the devil in the early modern period. In Freud’s obituary to his great mentor, he noted that

Charcot … drew copiously upon the surviving reports of witch trials and of possession, in order to show that the manifestations of the neurosis [hysteria] were the same in those days as they are now. He treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology.

(Freud, 1893: 20)

In the year of Charcot’s death, 1893, Freud and his colleague Breuer first published their joint theory of hysteria. Freud also noted in the obituary how their new theory of hysteria ‘would only have been a matter of exchanging the religious terminology of that dark and superstitious age for the scientific language of today’ (Freud, 1893: 20).

Freud had claimed that his new theory of hysteria was identical to ‘the medieval theory of possession held by the ecclesiastical courts’ (17 January 1897). Freud was the first to note the psychological relevance of the material in the case histories of the witches written by the judges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was presumably Charcot who interested Freud in the witches. During Freud’s stay in Paris from 3 October 1885 to 28 February 1886, he was exposed to a vast body of literature on the demonic possession of witches. Charcot had sponsored the republication of a number of books on demonology and witchcraft in a special series, the Bibliothèque Diabolique. In the series was De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) by Jan Wier, which was translated into English for the first time in 1991. Other titles in the series included The Sabbat of Witches, The Possession of Françoise Fontaine, The Possession of Jeanne Fery, The Possession of Jeanne of the Angels and The Criminal Trial of the Last Witch, which took place in Geneva on 6 April 1652. Discours des Sorciers (1590) by Henri Boguet and De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580) by Jean Bodin were prepared for publication in the series, but as far as is known, they were not published in that series. These valuable primary sources were, however, published and it seems likely that Freud had access to them in Paris or, at least, was aware of them. Some of these works on witch trials are examined in Chapter 2 of this work. (Note on Wier: my spelling of Wier throughout this book, except within quotation marks, is the Dutch spelling because Wier was Dutch.)

Freud had in his library the History of the Witch Trials by Soldan that has copious references to the sixteenth-century works of Judges Bodin, Remy and Boguet. Freud writes, in his letter of the 24 January 1897, ‘The story of the devil … now gaining significance for me’. In the same letter, he also writes, ‘If only I knew why the devil’s semen is always described as “cold” in the witches’ confessions’. As if to find an answer, Freud continues, ‘I have ordered the Malleus Maleficarum, and … I shall study it diligently’. Freud had written to Fliess that he must delve into the literature to find answers to his many questions on why the devil, who took possession of the witches, abused them sexually, and why their confessions under torture were so like the communications made by his patients under treatment. In Chapter 1 we examine the history of the devil and of witches in the medieval and early modern literature.

In 1907, when Freud was asked by the Viennese publisher Hugo Heller to name ‘ten good books’, he named Wier’s magnum opus on the belief in witches as one of the ‘ten most significant books’ (Freud, 1906f: 245). If Freud turned to Wier, as his letter to Heller indicates, to find answers to his questions on witches, we can also expect that he turned to the works of Judges Bodin and Boguet, who wrote detailed histories of the witch trials that they conducted. In Chapter 2 I have outlined the procedures used by these judges. Freud says that his time spent in Paris under Charcot was critical to the development of psychoanalysis. He hints that the seeds of the new science were sown in Paris (Freud, 1914d: 13, 1925d: 13) As well as the direct influence of Charcot, it is arguable that Freud is also referring to the body of literature on the demonic possession of witches and ‘the very interesting witch trials’ that were being republished at that time under the sponsorship of the School of Charcot.

It was believed that the devil placed an invisible mark on the witch as a sign of ownership when the witch committed herself to the devil (Bodin, 1580: 112–113). In an obscure passage in his letter to Fliess on 17 January 1897, Freud refers to the inquisitors pricking the witch ‘with needles to discover the devil’s stigmata, and in a similar situation, the victims [his patients] think of the same old cruel story in fictionalized form’. Freud is here making a direct comparison between what the inquisitors were doing with the witches and what he was doing with his patients. He parallels this with the seduction stories of his patients and refers to Emma Eckstein’s memory of a scene ‘where the diabolus sticks needles into her fingers and then places a candy on each drop of blood’. Freud says, ‘not only the victims but also the executioners recalled in this their earliest youth’. To clarify the meaning of this obscure passage, I have related it to a passage in ‘Infantile Sexuality’ and to a famous scene in Screen Memories (Freud, 1899a). This examination takes place in Chapter 5. The parallels between the judges’ and inquisitors’ procedures, examined in Chapter 2, and Freud’s procedures become obvious. The judges or inquisitors press for evidence of the devil’s invisible mark on the witch, which is a sign of shameful relations with the devil; Freud also presses for evidence that is believed to be hidden and repressed by the victim-patient.

Chapter 5 of the work examines Freud’s developing understanding of the stories he is drawing out of his patients. He reflects: are they trying to deny the reality of seduction by inventing stories to cover up for the crimes of their seducers, or are they inventing stories of seductions to cover up their own memories of their own infantile perverse activities? Chapter 2 shows that similar questions were in the minds of the judges regarding the witches: did they ‘invent’ the stories of the Sabbats seductions by the devil, or were the sexual orgies at the Sabbats real happenings? Freud is asking, are the witches inventing these stories of seductions by the devil to cover up for real seductions committed against them, or are they fantasising scenes of seduction by the devil to cover up their own infantile perversions?

Continuing to make connections between witchcraft and hysteria, Freud writes, ‘in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we have before us a remnant of a primeval sexual cult, which once was – perhaps still is – a religion in the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte)’. In Chapter 1, I examine the different understandings of the pagan worship of Moloch and Astatre and the arguments for and against the view that these so-called witches were members of a primeval devil religion. This helps us on the way to understanding the meaning of Freud’s statement ‘I dream, therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that are carried on secretly and understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges. Connecting links abound’ (24 January 1897).

In the beginning of the early modern period, which overlaps with the end of the medieval period in Europe, belief in witches and possession by the devil increased. Freud ordered a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) in order to search for answers to an age-old problem. The Malleus was used by every judge who conducted the trials of witches in the centuries after its publication. It acquired especial weight and dignity from the authoritative bull of Pope Innocent VIII (1484), which delegated authority to the authors to act as inquisitors of all those witches who ‘have abandoned themselves to devils’. This main accusation made against witches was related to the other accusation: by their spells, they ‘hinder men from performing the sexual act’ (Kramer & Sprenger, 1486: xx).

The authors of the Malleus, Kramer & Sprenger, state that their ‘principal subject’ is the carnal act that incubi devils perform with witches who submit themselves willingly to these abominations (Kramer & Sprenger, 1486: 111). Regarding this principal accusation made by the inquisitors against so-called witches, they ask, ‘How can these devils perform the human act of copulation, and how do witches bind themselves to and copulate with these devils?’ (Kramer & Sprenger, 1486: 21). These inquisitors compare this problem to a similar situation in the Book of Genesis 6: 1–4, and they base their whole claim about witches on their misinterpretation of this biblical pericope. An in-depth exegesis of Genesis 6: 1–4 exposes a major fault in the foundational claim made by the inquisitors about witches. The literary form of this pericope is myth, and if the mythic is read literally, its true meaning is lost. The Yahwist writer uses this myth to demonstrate the evil of breaching the boundary of human existence through intercourse with supernatural beings. Demythologising this story leads to what Tillich refers to as the ‘pathology of literalism’ (Dourley, 1981: 31). The authors of the Malleus literalised this myth and so lost its true meaning. For a résumé of my exegesis of Gen. 6: 1–4 and for a detailed exploration of the arguments in the Malleus, I refer the reader to Freud and Wier: Transitional Figures? (Duffy, 1996: 6–17).

The authors of the Malleus (1486) describe seven ways that witches have of doing harm to men, including making the male organ disappear and causing impotence in men. These inquisitors claim that witches and the devil always work together (Kramer & Sprenger, 1486: 18). Impotence is recognised toda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I
• Part II
• Appendix 1: Charcot demonstrates the physical symptoms of hysteria in one of his patients
• Appendix 2: Bibliothèque Diabolique publications
• Appendix 3: Baldung-Grien ‘The Bewitched Groom’ 1544
• Bibliography
• Index