Possession, Demoniacal And Other

by T K Oesterreich

  In the autumn of 1835 I was taken to the house of a well-to-do farmer of F., a man called G. of thirty-seven years of age. Until his thirtieth year this man had been, by common account, a worthy fellow, quiet and reasonable. In his vicinity there was a mayor who was greatly addicted to drink, extremely proud and quarrelsome. He had never been on good terms with F. He died when the latter reached the age of thirty.

  A year later F. was seized with frequent pains, with distensions of the abdomen, and distorsions of the facial muscles. But the most astonishing thing was that his character and mode of life were at the same time completely transformed. F. who had previously been very sober, began to drink enormously; from peaceable he became quarrelsome, and from modest extremely proud and arrogant, trying to give orders to everyone in the village, which drew down upon him heated quarrels and rebukes.

  All this caused his wife to fall into the most extreme poverty, especially when F., formerly such a hard worker, would no longer attend to his crops. Nevertheless this new state of affairs was not continuous; it often lasted for weeks and months, and in the intervals the old F., sober, modest and peaceable, reappeared until the bad character took the stage again.

  … This singular state grew more continuous and more marked during five years, and spelt destruction to the happiness of the household.

  In the sixth year F. one day without apparent reason spat in his wife’s face and suddenly spoke with a completely strange voice. “And do you know who did that?” “Unhappy wretch!” she replied, upon which the voice shouted: “Sow! don’t you know then that I have been in this ass for six years? I am the mayor S., and I will drive all you oxen in pairs!” Thereupon he was thrown to the ground by the most violent convulsions. From that day onwards the demoniac voice of the late mayor spoke by the man’s mouth, and it was recognized that the complete individuality of the former had for a long time past got the upper hand of his own.

  When the demon was at peace in him … the old F., amiable and gentle, reappeared and was greatly upset at having recently spoken and acted in so different a fashion. But while he was lamenting thus his eyes were often forcibly closed (the shutting of the eyes indicated the presence of the demon) and the other personality appeared with its curses on God, prayer and F. himself. This individuality came forward with particular rapidity when F. wished to engage in prayer, and rolled him upon the ground in convulsions.1

  These cases, which it would be easy to multiply, will perhaps be sufficient to prove that the possessed do not always or even generally preserve a clear consciousness of their fits. It is the “demon” alone which expresses itself by their mouth during the fits and the normal individuality has totally disappeared. This is in no way contradicted by the particularly remarkable fact already indicated, that the “possessing spirit” (we retain this terminology for the sake of brevity) is not without intellectual knowledge of that normal individuality. The new personality possesses—whether always in totality the documents do not allow us to judge conclusively, but it seems to be so—an “objective knowledge” of it, but in the way in which we know other people; its relationship is that of a quite distinct individual.

  Thus Gerber, who seems to have been a keen observer, relates of the fits of possession of the maid of Orlach:

  And in all this the girl herself is not forgotten: he (the possessing spirit) speaks of her, he knows quite well that she is alive, but he pretends that she is not there, that it is he who is there,2 and he pours out abuse and calumnies against the girl herself, whom he never calls anything except “the sow.”3

  Another observer says the same thing of the patient U.:

  In the demoniac state or at the onset of possession, the patient always speaks of herself in the third person and it is not then permissible to speak to her; anyone wishing to be understood must rather speak to the demon himself.1

  This purely logical consciousness which the possessed have of their normal individuality should not be in any way confused with personal consciousness.

  Are we confronted in these cases with two new subjects, two “egos”? If this hypothesis is accepted there are two possible interpretations: we must either believe in the physiologically or metaphysically conditioned appearance of a new subject bearing no relation to the first, the normal one, except that both certainly sprang from the same original physiologico-metaphysical source, or else in a real division of the first subject. In this hypothesis the fact that the subject of the division observed nothing would show no contradiction; it should rather be said that in the nature of things it cannot observe anything. The subject only registers the processes which properly belong to it, the states, the forms of activity and affectivity which are its own. If a state is no longer its own but belongs to a second subject, the first immediately ceases to observe it. If there is division of the subject we have therefore two series of psychic processes: the one belongs to the one subject and the other to the other. Neither of the two possesses an immediate knowledge of the other, nor does the subject observe anything of the processes of division. It is also true to say in this connection that only what it in some way perceives belongs to it. There is no immediate communication from subject to subject, but only and always imitation, imagination, intuition.

  By the unaided use of intelligence, by the understanding alone, we can conceive no idea of the manner in which such a division is accomplished. This is because with us the unity of the subject is an ultimate one beyond and behind which we cannot penetrate. Our imagination is limited to subjects which exist continuously; we cannot form the remotest idea of how the division of a subject is effected, except by transferring to it, although it is psychic, the general concept of division borrowed from objects in space. All resources fail us here; we cannot observe this process, nor can we from other experimentally acquired ideas concerning the realm of psychic phenomena deduce any kind of conclusion on the subject of the experience, any more than we possess a priori any categories, any primordial forms of thought which would permit of it. In whatever way we try to approach the subject, we find ourselves bounded by our horizon which knows in the first place one subject before the process of division, and two subjects afterwards. The phenomenon of splitting-off of the second from the first is inscrutable to us. It would even in reality be doubly incomprehensible, in the first place because it entirely escapes our knowledge, and in the second, because so far as we know the first subject would have nothing to do with it. Psychologically-empirically regarded, this is never the case: the subject always remains what it is. And even if a change took place in its states and affections it would always remain this same subject which can never be mistaken, whereas in the division of a corporate cell the mother-cell after the division generally no longer exists as such: it has become divided. We here touch deliberately upon a point where the hypothesis of division comes into contradiction with logic.

  If the subject is something absolute, not only from the point of view of functions or composition, but as constituting a unity in itself and for itself, its division is in every way impossible, particularly if it must be effected without change.

  It would be possible to refuse an absolute value to this line of argument because it derives arbitrarily from unities of a functional or compositional nature. These are not in fact susceptible of division unless the first is divided and therefore fundamentally eliminated. But is the same thing true of the division of real unities?

  It seems to me that this objection cannot be accepted. It is inherent in the very idea of division that the thing which divides thereby suffers prejudice. Its unity does not brook disturbance; otherwise its very being ceases to exist; it does not remain to the full extent what it was before.

  Whatever attitude we may adopt concerning the possibility of division in the subject, it must nevertheless be asseverated that in the present state of our knowledge it is completely undemonstrable, and personally I cannot see the general lines on which demonstration could be tackled.

  If the metaphysic
al division of the ego or the appearance of a new subject in the organism is admitted, we come back, this time, moreover, with our eyes open, to the old theory of possession which postulated the existence of two different egos in the organism; always, however, with this difference, that the old theory talked of “spirits” which enter into the body, while the new believes either in a metaphysical division of the primary subject or in the “endogenous” appearance of a new subject. In other words, it supposes that there is an absolutely new subject, having until that moment no existence in the world, but which nevertheless does not “incarnate itself,” in the old sense of the word, in the body.

  We must, moreover, bear in mind that the new subject would bring with it a quantity of “innate” ideas: not everything that it says will be founded upon its own experience; it would know innumerable things without having experienced them, and would be master of speech and a number of other complex capacities without any apprenticeship.

  As regards psychology without a subject1 and its interpretation of disturbances of personality, I shall not criticize it again here, but refer the reader to the thorough examination to which I have subjected it in my Phänomenologie des Ich.

  After what has been said the only adequate explanation of possession is that postulating a simple alteration in the functions of the ordinary subject. The subject presents no division, nor does any new ego appear in the organism: these hypotheses are entirely superfluous and are beset with the gravest difficulties. It is one single and identical subject which finds itself now in the normal, now in the abnormal state. The individuality, the personality, is only a state of the subject, it is a system of determined functional and affective dispositions.2 They may change in certain pathological conditions and thus constitute a “second” personality, but apart from this the subject remains the same; nothing is changed except its states, the manner in which its functions are operating, and its dispositions. If the subject no longer considers himself the same, if he believes, especially from the numerical point of view, that he is another subject and not that he is in another state, this is false and should be considered as a passing delusion.

  The truth of this assertion becomes fully evident if we consider cases where no radical transformation of the personality takes place in a single operation, but the alteration in the psychic system unfolds slowly and as it were before our eyes.

  A state such as those which have been described, in which the normal individuality is temporarily replaced by another and which leaves no memory on return to the normal, must be called, according to present terminology, one of somnambulism. Typical possession is nevertheless distinguished from ordinary somnambulistic states by its intense motor and emotional excitement, so much so that we might hesitate to take it for a form of somnambulism but for the fact that possession is so nearly related to the ordinary form of these states that it is impossible to avoid classing them together. There are other reasons in support of this, to which we shall return later. Whatever the reader may think on this question of terminology, the most important thing is to see clearly that we are dealing with a state in which the subject possesses a single personality and a defined character, even if this is not the erstwhile one. The subject retains the memory of these past states, but he can no longer be conscious that this other personality has normally been his. He considers himself as the new person, the “demon,” and envisages his former being as quite strange, as if it were another’s: in this respect there is complete analogy with the ordinary somnambulistic variations in personality. As applied to this form of possession, which seems to have been very frequent, in fact, more so than any other, the statement that possession is a state in which side by side with the first personality a second has made its way into the consciousness is also very inaccurate. Much more simply, it is the first personality which has been replaced by a second.

  The accepted term for this state is “somnambuliform possession,” or more simply “demoniacal somnambulism.”

  2. THE LUCID FORM OF POSSESSION

  Side by side with the somnambulistic form of possession there exists another yet more interesting. It is distinguished by the fact that the patient does not lose consciousness of his usual personality, but retains it. In the midst of the terrible spectacle which he presents in the fit, he remains fully conscious of what is happening; he is the passive spectator of what takes place within him.

  Careful observers have noted this fact for a long time past. Thus the distinction between the somnambulistic and non-somnambulistic forms of possession is clearly indicated—not, of course, under those names, but in a manner corresponding to the fact—in the early Christian writer John Cassian (c. 350-c. 435). In his Collationes patrum, one of the two personages of the dialogue expresses himself thus:

  What you say happens to the possessed when they are in the grip of the unclean spirit, namely, saying or doing what they would not or being constrained to do such things as they know not, is not contrary to our aforementioned teaching. For it is very sure that they do not all bear this invasion by spirits in the same way. Some are so excited that they take no account of what they do or say; but others know it and remember it afterwards.1

  The following is related of the epidemic of possession at Kintorp (sixteenth century):

  A little before their fits and during the same, they breathed from their mouths a stinking breath which sometimes continued for several hours. In their malady none ceased to have a sane understanding, to hear and recognize those around them, although by reason of the convulsion of the tongue and the parts used for breathing they could not speak during the attack.2

  Kerner also was not unaware that there were cases of this kind. He writes:

  Some of these patients, when the demon manifests himself and begins to speak in them, close their eyes and lose consciousness as in magnetic sleep; the demon then often speaks through their mouths without them knowing it. With others the eyes remain open and the consciousness lucid, but the patient cannot resist, even with his full strength of mind, the voice which speaks in him; he hears it express itself like a quite other and strange individuality lodged within him and outside his control.3

  As it is of great importance to know the manner in which these possessed persons feel their state, I shall, in view of the rarity of precise accounts, quote freely.

  The first case is that of a Spanish abbess who was involved in an epidemic of possession at Madrid (1628–31).

  The request of Doña Teresa breathed candour and humility. Having related the misfortunes which had befallen three of her companions, she added:

  When I began to find myself in this state I felt within me movements so extraordinary that I judged the cause could not be natural. I recited several orisons asking God to deliver me from such terrible pain. Seeing that my state did not change, I several times begged the prior to exorcise me; as he was not willing to do so and sought to turn me from it, telling me that all I related was only the outcome of my imagination, I did all that in me lay to believe it, but the pain drove me to feel the contrary. At length on the day of Our Lady the prior took a stole, and after having offered up several prayers, asked God to reveal to me whether the demon was in my body by unmasking him, or else to take away these sufferings and this pain which I felt inwardly. Long after he had begun the exorcisms and while I was feeling happy to find myself free, for I no longer felt anything, I suddenly fell into a sort of swooning and delirium, doing and saying things of which the idea had never occurred to me in my life. I began to feel this state when I had placed on my head the wood, which seemed as heavy as a tower. This continued in the same way during three months and I rarely felt myself in my normal and natural state. Nature had given me so tranquil a character that even in childhood I was quite unlike my age and loved neither the games, liveliness nor movement habitual to it. Accordingly it could not but be regarded as a supernatural thing that having reached the age of twenty-six years and become a nun and even an abbess, I committed follies of which I
had never before been capable.…

  It sometimes happened that the demon Peregrino (that is, the sister possessed by this devil, who played the part of superior to the devils) was in the second-floor dormitory when I was in the parlour, and he would say: “Is Doña Teresa with the visitors? I will soon make her come.…” I did not hear these words, but felt inwardly an inexpressible uneasiness, and rapidly took leave of the persons who had come to see me, doing this without previous deliberation. I then felt the presence of the demon who was in my body; I began without thinking to run, muttering, “Lord Peregrino calls me”; so I came where the demon was, and before arriving there was already speaking of whatever thing they had under discussion and of which I had had no previous knowledge.…

  Some people said that we feigned to be in that state through vanity, and I especially to gain the affection of my nuns and other serious persons; but in order to be convinced that it was not this sentiment which actuated us it suffices to know that out of our full number of thirty nuns there were twenty-five who were in this state, and that of the five others three were my best friends. As for outside persons, we were in a state more likely to inspire them with fear than to make us beloved and sought after.1

  In very severe cases of possession the consciousness may also remain perfectly clear, as is shown by the following instances:

  … Finally it often threw him (speaking of an old man) to the ground with all its strength, even while he was praying. These fits often decreased for a period of six months, and then again grew worse. In the years which followed …, the convulsions often flung him out of bed at night. The strangest thing was that he was then constrained to insult and abuse wife and children; without being able to give any reason he could no longer endure these latter.

  The death of his wife, whom moreover he dearly loved, brought no change to this state any more than did a second marriage which he contracted in spite of these fits. He was advised, although a Lutheran, to apply to the Catholic priests. In presence of such of these as were able to work on him his head turned convulsively and he uttered involuntary roarings, but without articulate words. With others, however, the malady did not make itself felt, but when he went away from them it raged anew with all the more violence.…