VI. The Story of a Pact with Satan

Let us summarize a paper by Sigmund Freud, A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century. Freud's material consisted of a packet of documents discovered by the director of the Imperial Library of Vienna containing (1) an account of the case by a member of the monastic order which had treated it, (2) a diary written by the patient, and (3) a series of illustrations of the devil as seen by the patient, who had been a professional painter. Nine years previous to his treatment, the painter had signed a pact with the devil:

I, Christoph Haitzmann, sign a deed and pledge myself to be unto this Lord even as a son of his body for nine years.(18)
When the nine years expired the patient had such violent convulsions and hysterical attacks that he was brought to the monastery to be cured. Freud wonders what the cause of the pact was in the first place:
Now since he refuses magical powers, money and pleasure when the Devil offers them, and still less makes them a condition of the Bond, it becomes really imperative to know what the painter desired of the Devil when he entered into the Pact.. .

On this point, too, the Trophaeum provides us with reliable information. He had become depressed, was unable or unwilling to paint properly and was anxious about his livelihood, that is to say, he suffered from melancholic depression with incapacity for work. ...The report of the Abbot Franciscus, indicated the cause of the despondency or depression: it runs thus: "accepta aliqua pusillanimitate ex morte parentis." That is to say, his father had died and he had consequently fallen into a state of melancholia, whereupon the Devil had appeared before him, inquired the cause of his dejection and grief, and had promised "to help him in every way and give him aid."(19)
When the man's father died, he conjured up a substitute, but instead of making him a good man, he projected onto him all the death wishes against the original father. Apart from the evidence above we have the remarkable series of illustrations by the painter, most of which show the devils with horns or wings, etc. But the first appearance of the devil is different: the devil assumes the form of an honest-looking burgher who could pass for anyone's father.

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18.Freud, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, p. 446.
19. Ibid., p. 444.

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