Possession, Demoniacal And Other

by T K Oesterreich

  The possessed did not merely feel the action of the devil within themselves, they saw and heard him. Achille did the same.…

  These signs (the stigmata) and especially the last (insensibility) also existed in the case of the unfortunate Achille. True, his insensibility was not continuous, but when he twisted his arms in convulsive movements, they could be pricked and pinched without his observing it.… When I tried to comfort the poor man and calm him a little I was extremely ill received: all my efforts were useless. I vainly sought to gain an ascendancy over Achille, to force him to obey me; as a last resource I tried whether it was not possible to send him to sleep in order to have more power over him in a hypnotic state; all in vain, I was unable by any means to suggest or hypnotize him; he answered me with insults and blasphemies, and the devil, speaking by his mouth, mocked my impotence.…

  At my special request the almoner of the Saltpêtrière was good enough to see the patient, and also tried to console him and teach him to distinguish true religion from these diabolic superstitions; he had no success and told me that the poor man was mad and rather needed the help of medicine than of religion. I had to try again.

  I then observed that the patient made many movements unconsciously and that, absorbed in his hallucinations and ravings, he was extremely absent-minded. It was easy to take advantage of his absence of mind to produce in his limbs movements which he executed unwittingly. We all know those absent-minded people who look everywhere for the umbrella which they are meanwhile holding without knowing it. I was able to slip a pencil into the fingers of his right hand and Achille gripped and held it without noticing anything. I gently directed the hand which held the pencil and made him write a few strokes, a few letters, and the hand, carried away by a movement which the patient, absorbed in his ravings, did not realize, continued to repeat these letters and even to sign Achille’s Christian name without him noticing it. It is generally known that such movements, accomplished in this manner without the knowledge of the person who seems to produce them, may be designated as automatic, and they were extremely numerous and varied in the case of this patient.

  Having noted this point I tried to produce these movements by mere command. Instead of speaking direct to the patient, who, as I well knew, would have replied with insults, I let him rave and rant as he pleased, while standing behind him I quietly ordered him to make certain movements. These were not executed, but to my great surprise the hand which held the pencil began to write rapidly on the paper in front of it and I read this little sentence which the patient had written without his knowledge, just as a few moments before he had unconsciously signed his name. The hand had written: “I won’t.” That seemed a reply to my order. I must evidently go on. “And why won’t you?” said I quietly to him in the same tone; the hand replied immediately by writing: “Because I am stronger than you.” “Who are you then?” “I am the devil.” “Ah, very good, very good! Now we can talk!”

  It is not everyone who has had the chance of talking to a devil; I had to make the most of it. To force the devil to obey me I attacked him through the sentiment which has always been the darling sin of devils—vanity. “I don’t believe in your power,” said I, “nor shall I do so unless you give me a proof.” “What proof?” replied the devil, using as always to reply to me the hand of Achille who suspected nothing. “Raise this poor man’s left arm without him knowing it.” Immediately Achille’s left arm was raised.

  I then turned towards Achille, shook him to attract his attention, and pointed out to him that his left arm was raised. He was greatly surprised and had some difficulty in lowering it. “The demon has played me another trick,” said he. That was true, but this time he had played the prank on my instructions. By the same procedure I made the devil execute a host of different actions, and he always obeyed implicitly. He made Achille dance, put out his tongue, kiss a piece of paper, etc. I even told the devil, while Achille’s mind was elsewhere, to show his victim some roses and prick his finger, whereupon Achille exclaimed because he saw before him a beautiful bunch of roses and cried out because he had had his fingers pricked.…

  Thanks to the foregoing method I was able to go further and do what the exorcists never thought of doing. I asked the demon as a final proof of his power to have the goodness to send Achille to sleep in an armchair, and that completely, so that he should be unable to resist. I had already tried, but in vain, to hypnotize this patient by addressing him directly, and all efforts had been useless; but this time taking advantage of his absence of mind and speaking to the devil, I succeeded very easily. Achille tried in vain to struggle against the sleep which overcame him, he fell heavily backwards and sank into a deep sleep.

  The devil did not know into what a trap I had lured him: poor Achille, whom he had sent to sleep for me, was now in my power. Very gently I induced him to answer me without waking, and I thus learnt a whole series of events unknown to everyone else, which Achille when awake in no way realized, and which threw an entirely new light on his malady.…

  In spite of the sleep in which Achille was apparently plunged he heard our questions and was able to reply: it was a somnambulistic state. This somnambulism, which had come on during our conversation with the devil and in consequence of a suggestion made to this latter, is not at all surprising. During the course of his malady Achille had several times shown analogous conditions; by night and even by day he fell into strange states during which he seemed raving, and woke later retaining not the slightest memory of what he had done during these periods.

  … Achille … once put to sleep, was able to tell us a mass of details which previously he had not known or had known without understanding. In this state of somnambulism he related his illness to us in a manner completely different from heretofore. What he told us is very simple and can be summed up in a word: for the last six months he had had in his mind a long train of imaginings which unfolded more or less unconsciously by day as well as by night. After the manner of absent-minded people he used to tell himself a story, a long and lamentable story. But this reverie had assumed quite special characteristics in his weak mind and had had terrible consequences. In a word, his whole sickness was nothing but a dream.

  The beginning of the malady had been a grave misdeed which he had committed in the spring during his little journey. For a short time he had been too forgetful of his home and wife.… The memory of his wrong-doing had tormented him on his return and produced the depression and absence of mind which I have described. He was above all things anxious to hide his misadventure from his wife and this thought drove him to watch his lightest word. He believed at the end of a few days that he had forgotten his uneasiness, but it still persisted and it was this which hampered him when he wished to talk. There are weak-minded people who can do nothing by halves and constantly fall into curious exaggerations. I once knew a young woman who, wishing similarly to hide a fault, began to dissemble her thoughts and actions. But instead of dissembling on the one matter she was carried away to the point of hiding and garbling everything, and began to lie continually from morning until night, even about the most insignificant things. In a sort of fit she let slip the confession of her fault, obtained pardon for it and completely ceased to lie. In the case of Achille it was the same thought of something to hide which produced this time not lying but complete mutism. It is already evident that the first stages of the malady are explained by the persistence of remorse and the phantasy which it occasioned.

  Already the anxieties, the day and night dreams, were growing more complicated. Achille overwhelmed himself with reproaches and expected to fall victim to all sorts of sufferings which would be no more than legitimate punishments. He dreamed of every possible physical disorder and all the most alarming sicknesses. It is these dreams of sickness which, half-ignored, produced the fatigue, thirst, breathlessness and other sufferings which the doctors and the patient had taken successively for diabetes and heart trouble.…

  Achille was always dreaming. Who has
not had similar dreams and wept over his sad fate while watching his own funeral? These dreams are frequent with hysterical people who are often heard softly to murmur poetic lamentations such as: “Here are flowers … white flowers, they are going to make wreaths to lay on my little eoffin,” etc. Achille, sick and suggestible, went further; in spite of himself he realized the dreams and acted them. Thus we see him say farewell to his wife and child and lie down motionless. This more or less complete lethargy which lasted for two days was only an episode, a chapter in the long dream.

  When a man has dreamed that he is dead, what more can he dream? What will be the end of the story which Achille has told himself for the last six months? The end is very simple, it will be hell. While he was motionless and as if dead, Achille, whom nothing now came to disturb, dreamed more than ever. He dreamt that, his death being an accomplished fact, the devil rose out of the pit and came to take him. The patient, who during somnambulism related his dreams to us, remembered perfectly the precise moment during which this deplorable event took place. It was towards eleven o’clock in the morning, a dog was barking in the courtyard at the time, disturbed no doubt by the stench of hell; flames filled the room, innumerable imps struck the poor wretch with whips and amused themselves by driving nails into his eyes, while through the lacerations in his body Satan took possession of his head and heart.

  It was too much for this weak mind; the normal personality with its memories, organization and character which had until then subsisted somehow, side by side with the invading dream, went under completely. The dream, until then subconscious, found no further resistance, grew and filled the whole mind. It developed sufficiently to form complete hallucinations and manifest itself by words and actions. Achille had a demoniacal laugh, uttered blasphemies, heard and saw devils, and was in a complete state of delirium.

  It is interesting to see how this delirium was constituted and how all the symptoms which it presents may be explained as consequences of the dream, as manifestations of psychological automatism and division of personality. The delirium is not solely the expression of the dream, which would constitute simple somnambulism with strictly consistent actions manifesting no disorder; it is formed by the mingling of the dream and the thought of the previous day, by the action and reaction of the one upon the other. Achille’s mouth utters blasphemies, that is the dream itself; but Achille hears them, is indignant, attributes them to a devil lodged within him, this is the action of the normal consciousness and its interpretation. The devil then speaks to Achille and overwhelms him with threats, the patient’s interpretation has enhanced the dream and sharpened its outlines.

  If we wished to cure our unhappy Achille, it was completely useless to talk to him of hell, demons and death. Although he spoke of them incessantly, they were secondary things, psychologically accessory. Although the patient appeared possessed, his malady was not possession but the emotion of remorse. This was true of many possessed persons, the devil being for them merely the incarnation of their regrets, remorse, terrors and vices. It was Achille’s remorse and the very memory of his wrong-doing which we had to make him forget. This is far from being an easy matter—forgetting is more difficult than is generally supposed.

  In my work on the history of a fixed idea I have shown how this result might be approximately obtained by the process of “dissociation of ideas,” and that of “substitution.” An idea or memory may be considered as a system of images which can be destroyed by separating its constituents, altering them individually and substituting in the whole certain partial images for those previously existent. I cannot here repeat the examination of these processes, I merely recall that they were applied afresh to the fixed idea of this interesting patient. The memory of his transgression was transformed in all sorts of ways thanks to suggested hallucinations. Finally Achille’s wife, evoked by a hallucination at the proper moment, came to grant complete pardon to her spouse, who was deserving rather of pity than of blame.

  These modifications only took place during somnambulism, but they had a very remarkable reaction on the man’s consciousness after awakening. He felt relieved, delivered from that inner power which deprived him of the full control of his sensations and ideas. The sensibility of the whole body was restored, he recovered the full use of his memory, and far more important, began to take an objective view of his ravings. At the end of only a few days he had made sufficient progress to laugh at his devil and himself explained his madness by saying that he had read too many story-books. At this period a curious fact must be noted: the delirium still persisted during the night. When asleep, Achille groaned and dreamt of the torments of hell: the devils made him climb a ladder which mounted indefinitely and at the top of which was placed a glass of water, or else still amused themselves by driving nails into his eyes. The delirium also existed in the subconscious writing where the devil boasted that he would soon reclaim his victim. These facts still show us therefore the last traces of the delirium which might persist without our knowledge. This should be carefully noted, for a patient abandoned at this point would before long fall back into the same divagations.

  Thanks to analogous measures the last dreams were transformed and soon disappeared completely.… The patient no longer had the same complete forgetfulness after somnambulism nor was he now so deeply anæsthetic during the subconscious writing. In a word, after the disappearance of the fixed idea the unity of the mind was being reconstituted.

  Achille was soon completely cured.… It is pleasant to add that since his return to his little village the patient has often sent me news of himself and that for the last three years he has preserved the most perfect physical and moral health.…

  This case shows how useful it may be to analyze the ideas of possession and to throw a patient suffering from compulsions into complete somnambulism because of the enhanced suggestibility of this state. In addition the case shows what importance emotional excitement may have in giving rise to possession; in some people it enhances susceptibility to autosuggestion to an extraordinary degree. But to cite a preceding affective experience is not, in spite of the view maintained by many psychoanalysts, to give an “explanation” of possession.

  Truth to tell, exorcism has not always been successful. “In such desperate cases,” says Kerner,1 “we vainly wish ourselves as mighty as the disciples of Jesus.” It seems that exorcism failed conspicuously to help when possession had developed not in an hysterical temperament but on neurasthenic and psychasthenic ground such as results from ascetic mortifications. Thus the possession of Surin resisted all exorcism. It disappeared gradually in consequence of a spontaneous transformation of the psychic state, but not as a result of suggestion or autosuggestion.

  Whereas in spite of all his torments Surin escaped with his life, two other exorcists concerned in the struggle with the epidemic of Loudun, Lactance and Tranquille, succumbed to possession. This death is one of the most frightful which can be imagined, the patient being sick in mind while fully conscious, and a prey to excitement so violent that finally the organism breaks down under it. I know only this one case, of which we possess a detailed account.

  In the following year, 1638, the famous Father Tranquille died. He was a Capuchin preacher, the most illustrious of all the exorcists then remaining. In his last hours he uttered frightful cries which were heard by all the neighbours of the Capuchin convent, and the report soon spreading to the town there were a great number of people who made their way towards the convent and the adjacent streets in order to hear these cries and see for themselves if the rumours were true. No one went there but was convinced, and still to-day there should be no one who is not convinced of the truth of this thing, seeing the circumstantial account of the death which has been given to the public by a Capuchin and of which the following is an extract:

  Father Tranquille was a native of Saint Rémi in Anjou. He was the most famous preacher of his time. Obedience summoned him to the exorcisms of Loudun. The devils, fearing this enemy, came f
orth to meet him in order to frighten him if it were possible, and caused him to feel on the road such debility in the legs that he thought to have stopped and remained where he was. For four years he was employed as an exorcist, during which time God purified him by tribulation like gold in the furnace. He thought at first that he would expel the demons promptly, trusting in the authority which the Church has received from Our Lord. But having learned his mistake by experience he resolved to have patience and await the will of God. Fearing that his talents were a snare and would be an occasion for pride to him, he desired to abstain from preaching and gave himself entirely to exorcism. The devils, seeing his humility, were so enraged thereby that they resolved to take up their abode in his body. All Hell assembled for this purpose and nevertheless was unable to achieve it, either by obsession or full possession, God not having permitted it. It is true that the demons made sport in his inner and outer senses; they threw him to the ground, cried out and swore by his mouth; they made him put out his tongue, hissing like a serpent; they bound his head about, constricted his heart and made him endure a thousand other ills; but in the midst of all these ills his spirit escaped and was at one with God, and with the help of his companion he always promptly routed the demon who tormented him and who in turn cried out by his mouth: “Ah, how I suffer!” The other monks and exorcists pitied Father Tranquille in his sufferings, but he rejoiced in them marvellously.…