III. A Theoretical Statement

What is the origin of demons? Freud tackles this problem in Totem and Taboo, considering only those demons derived from the spirits of the departed.

We now know how to explain the supposed demonism of recently departed souls and the necessity of being protected against their hostility through taboo rules. .. hostility, which is painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of primitive man: [different from the neurotic] the defense against it is accomplished by displacement upon the object of the hostility, namely the dead. We call this defense process, frequent both in normal and diseased life, a projection, The survivors will deny that they have ever entertained hostile impulses toward the beloved dead; but now the soul of the deceased entertains them and will try to give vent to them. .(22)
Freud's remarks here are so pertinent to our topic that we will let him re­peat himself in different words:
This unknown hostility, of which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from our own person and attributed to the other. Not we, the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on the contrary, we mourn for him; but now curiously enough, he has become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression, but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction from without.(23)
Thus far Freud has considered only those demons derived from deceased men, a subject which he worked with in Totem and Taboo. But in another paper much closer to our subject matter he speaks of demoniacal possession in general:
Cases of demoniacal possession correspond to the neuroses of the present day; in order to understand these latter we have once more had recourse to the conception of psychic forces, What in those days were thought to be evil spirits to us are base and evil wishes, the derivatives of impulses which have been rejected and repressed. In one respect only do we not subscribe to the explanation of these phenomena current in mediaeval times; we have abandoned the projection of them into the outer world, attributing their origin instead to the inner life of the patient in whom they manifest themselves.(24)
Let us conclude our theoretical statements with remarks by two of the leading psychoanalysts since Freud. Unlike Freud, they are child analysts, and through daily therapeutic contact with children, they know better than anyone else the human origins of evil and the means of coping with it.
E. H. Erikson: the mechanisms of projection and introjection, ..remain some of our deepest and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty, In projection we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we endow significant people with the evil which actually is in us.(25)

Anna Freud: the use of the mechanism of projection is quite natural to the ego of little children throughout the earliest period of infancy. They employ it as a means of repudiating their own activities and wishes when these become dangerous and of laying the responsibility for them at the door of some external agent.(26)
Before continuing the textual criticism let us ask what impulses might be so evil that one would wish to deny them by projecting them onto evil spirits. Hostility, murder, slander? These are obvious, and Satan is obviously the embodiment of them. But how about those forms of badness which are exhibited by children and, despite their having been repressed, remain in the adult's unconscious mind? What does mother do if baby screams too loud and long? What if baby will not hold still when his diaper is changed? What if baby wishes to put his hand into the pretty flames of the fireplace? And how about little boys who refuse to take baths?

But why be so selective? Why not choose a dozen other types of badness which would have much less to do with the biblical evil spirits? This important question will be reconsidered after we have approached demonology from several more angles.

The reader is aware that human behavior is being greatly simplified in these considerations of the projection of evil. People do not spend all of their time projecting evil in the same way that they eat food regularly. But such constant preoccupation with evil is not at all necessary to our thesis, If everyone, at one time or another, projects such impulses as we are considering here, then this is sufficient cause not only to give evil spirits the traits which they possess, but also to insure our unconscious recognition of their significance. Such projection as we are considering takes place mostly in childhood and in extremely unstable adult mental states. The former insures that all of us will recognize an evil spirit when we see one; the latter we may wish to apply to the case of Jesus.

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22.Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Random House, 1938), p. 854.
23. Ibid., p. 856.
24. Sigmund Freud, A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century, Collected Papers, Hogarth Press, Vol. IV, p. 437.
25. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Norton, 1950), p. 221.
26, Anna Freud, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (New York, 1946), pp. 132-33.

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