Freud - Complete Works (662 page)

  
¹
. . .
ipsumque Daemonem ad Aram Sac.
Cellae per fenestrellam in cornu Epistolae, Schedam sibi
porrigentem conspexisset, eo advolans e Religiosorum manibus, qui
eum tenebant, ipsam Schedam ad manum obtinuit
. . .
.’

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   He told the reverend Fathers that
his reason for returning was that he had to require the Devil to
give him back another, earlier bond, which had been written in
ink.¹ This time once more the Blessed Virgin and the pious
Fathers helped him to obtain the fulfilment of his request. As to
how this came about, however, the report is silent. It merely
states shortly:
quâ iuxta votum redditâ
- he
prayed once again and received the pact back. After this he felt
quite free and entered the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers.

   We have occasion yet again to
acknowledge that in spite of the obvious purpose of his efforts,
the compiler has not been tempted into departing from the veracity
required of a case history. For he does not conceal the outcome of
the enquiry that was made in 1714 from the Superior of the
Monastery of the Brothers Hospitallers concerning the
painter’s later history. The Reverend Pater Provincialis
reported that Brother Chrysostomus had again been repeatedly
tempted by the Evil Spirit, who tried to seduce him into making a
fresh pact (though this only happened ‘when he had drunk
somewhat too much wine’). But by the grace of God, it had
always been possible to repel these attempts. Brother Chrysostomus
had died of a hectic fever ‘peacefully and of good
comfort’ in the year 1700 in the Monastery of the Order, at
Neustatt on the Moldau.

  
¹
This bond had been signed in September,
1668, and by May, 1678, nine and a half years later, it would long
since have fallen due.

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4003

II

THE
MOTIVE FOR THE PACT WITH THE DEVIL

If we look at this bond with the Devil as if
it were the case history of a neurotic, our interest will turn in
the first instance to the question of its motivation, which is, of
course, intimately connected with its exciting cause. Why does
anyone sign a bond with the Devil? Faust, it is true, asked
contemptuously: ‘Was willst du armer Teufel geben?’ But
he was wrong. In return for an immortal soul, the Devil has many
things to offer which are highly prized by men: wealth, security
from danger, power over mankind and the forces of nature, even
magical arts, and, above all else, enjoyment - the enjoyment of
beautiful women. These services performed or undertakings made by
the Devil are usually mentioned specifically in the agreement made
with him.¹ What, then, was the motive which induced Christoph
Haizmann to make his pact?

   Curiously enough, it was none of
these very natural wishes. To put the matter beyond doubt, one has
only to read the short remarks attached by the painter to his
illustrations of the apparitions of the Devil. For example, the
caption to the third vision runs: ‘On the third occasion
within a year and a half, he appeared to me in this loathsome
shape, with a book in his hand which was full of magic and black
arts . . .’ But from the legend attached to a later
apparition we learn that the Devil reproached him violently for
having ‘burnt his beforementioned book’, and threatened
to tear him to pieces if he did not give it back.

  
¹
  Cf.
Faust
, Part I, Scene
4:

               
Ich will mich
hier
zu deinem Dienst verbinden,

               
Auf deinem Wink nicht rasten und nicht ruhn;

               
Wenn wir uns
drüuben
wieder finden,

               
So sollst du mir das Gleiche thun.

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4004

   At his fourth appearance the
Devil showed him a large yellow money-bag and a great ducat and
promised him to give him as many of these as he wanted at any time.
But the painter is able to boast that he ‘had taken nothing
whatever of the kind’.

   Another time the Devil asked him
to turn to enjoyment and entertainment, and the painter remarks
that ‘this indeed came to pass at his desire; but I did not
continue for more than three days and it was then brought to an
end’.

   Since he rejected magical arts,
money and pleasures when they were offered him by the Devil, and
still less made them conditions of the pact, it becomes really
imperative to know what the painter in fact wanted from the Devil
when he signed a bond with him.
Some
motive he must have had
for his dealings with the Devil.

   On this point, too, the
Trophaeum
provides us with reliable information. He had
become low-spirited, was unable or unwilling to work properly and
was worried about making a livelihood; that is to say, he was
suffering from melancholic depression, with an inhibition in his
work and (justified) fears about his future. We can see that what
we are dealing with really is a case history. We learn, too, the
exciting cause of the illness, which the painter himself, in the
caption to one of his pictures of the Devil, actually calls a
melancholia (‘that I should seek diversion and banish
melancholy’). The first of our three sources of information,
the village priest’s letter of introduction, speaks, it is
true, only of the state of depression (‘
dum artis suae
progressum emolumentumque secuturum pusillanimis
perpenderet
’), but the second source, the Abbot
Franciscus’s report, tells us the cause of this despondency
or depression as well. He says: ‘
acceptâ
aliquâ pusillanimitate ex morte parentis
’; and in
the compiler’s preface the same words are used, though in a
reversed order: (‘
ex morte parentis acceptâ
aliquâ pusillanimitate
’). His father, then, had
died and he had in consequence fallen into a state of melancholia;
whereupon the Devil had approached him and asked him why he was so
downcast and sad, and had promised ‘to help him in every way
and to give him support’. ¹

  
¹
The first picture on the title-page and its
caption represent the Devil in the form of an ‘honest
citizen’.

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4005

   Here was a person, therefore, who
signed a bond with the Devil in order to be freed from a state of
depression. Undoubtedly an excellent motive, as anyone will agree
who can have an understanding sense of the torments of such a state
and who knows as well how little medicine can do to alleviate this
ailment. Yet no one who has followed the story so far as this would
be able to guess what the wording of this bond (or rather, of these
two bonds)¹ with the Devil actually was.

   These bonds bring us two great
surprises. In the first place, they mention no
undertaking
given by the Devil in return for whose fulfilment the painter
pledges his eternal bliss, but only a
demand
made by the
Devil which the painter must satisfy. It strikes us as quite
illogical and absurd that this man should give up his soul, not for
something he is to
get
from the Devil but for something he
is to
do
for him. But the undertaking given by the
painter
seems even stranger.

   The first
‘syngrapha’, written in ink, runs as follows:
‘Ich Christoph Haizmann undterschreibe mich disen Herrn sein
leibeigener Sohn auff 9. Jahr. 1669 Jahr.’ The second,
written in blood, runs:-

           
‘Anno 1669.

   ‘Christoph Haizmann. Ich
verschreibe mich disen Satan ich sein leibeigner Sohn zu sein, und
in 9. Jahr ihm mein Leib und Seel zuzugeheren.’

  
¹
Since there were two of them - the first
written in ink, and the second written about a year later in blood
- both said still to be in the treasury of Mariazell and to be
transcribed in the
Trophaeum
.

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4006

   All our astonishment vanishes,
however, if we read the text of the bonds in the sense that what is
represented in them as a demand made by the Devil is, on the
contrary, a service performed by him - that is to say, it is a
demand made by the
painter
. The incomprehensible pact would
in that case have a straightforward meaning and could be
paraphrased thus. The Devil undertakes to replace the
painter’s lost father for nine years. At the end of that time
the painter becomes the property, body and soul, of the Devil, as
was the usual custom in such bargains. The train of thought which
motivated the painter in making the pact seems to have been this:
his father’s death had made him lose his spirits and his
capacity to work; if he could only obtain a father-substitute he
might hope to regain what he had lost.

   A man who has fallen into a
melancholia on account of his father’s death must really have
been fond of him. But, if so, it is very strange that such a man
should have hit upon the idea of taking the Devil as a substitute
for the father whom he loved.

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4007

III

THE
DEVIL AS A FATHER-SUBSTITUTE

I fear that sober critics will not be prepared
to admit that this fresh interpretation has made the meaning of
this pact with the Devil clear. They will have two objections to
make to it.

   In the first place they will say
that it is not necessary to regard the bond as a contract in which
the undertakings of both parties have been set out. On the
contrary, they will argue, it contains only the painter’s
undertaking; the Devil’s is omitted from the text, and is, as
it were,
sousentendu
: the painter gives
two
undertakings - firstly to be the Devil’s son for nine years,
and secondly to belong to him entirely after death. In this way one
of the premisses on which our conclusion is built would be disposed
of.

   The second objection will be that
we are not justified in attaching any special importance to the
expression ‘the Devil’s bounden son’; that this
is no more than a common figure of speech, which anyone could
interpret in the same way as the reverend Fathers may have done.
For in their Latin translation they did not mention the
relationship of son promised in the bonds, but merely say that the
painter ‘
mancipavit
’ himself - made himself a
bondslave - to the Evil One and had undertaken to lead a sinful
life and to deny God and the Holy Trinity. Why depart from this
obvious and natural view of the matter?¹ The position would
simply be that a man, in the torment and perplexity of a
melancholic depression, signs a bond with the Devil, to whom he
ascribes the greatest therapeutic power. That the depression was
occasioned by his father’s death would then be irrelevant;
the occasion might quite as well have been something else.

  
¹
In point of fact, when we come to consider
later at what time and for whom these bonds were drawn up, we shall
realize that their text had to be expressed in unobtrusive and
generally comprehensible terms. It is enough for us, however, that
it contains an ambiguity which we can take as the starting-point of
our discussion.

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4008

   All this sounds convincing and
reasonable. Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that
it makes hair-splitting complications in the simplest things and
sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this
by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details,
such as occur every where, and making them the basis of the most
far-reaching and strangest conclusions. It would be useless for us
to point out that this rejection of our interpretation would do
away with many striking analogies and break a number of subtle
connections which we are able to demonstrate in this case. Our
opponents will say that those analogies and connections do not in
fact exist, but have been imported into the case by us with quite
uncalled-for ingenuity.

   I will not preface my reply with
the words, ‘to be honest’ or ‘to be
candid’, for one must always be able to be these things
without any special preliminaries. I will instead say quite simply
that I know very well that no reader who does not already believe
in the justifiability of the psycho-analytic mode of thought will
acquire that belief from the case of the seventeenth-century
painter, Christoph Haizmann. Nor is it my intention to make use of
this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On the
contrary, I presuppose its validity and am employing it to throw
light on the painter’s demonological illness. My
justification for doing so lies in the success of our
investigations into the nature of the neuroses in general. We may
say in all modesty that to-day even the more obtuse among our
colleagues and contemporaries are beginning to realize that no
understanding of neurotic states can be reached without the help of
psycho-analysis.

‘These shafts can conquer Troy, these
shafts alone’

as Odysseus confesses in the
Philoctetes
of Sophocles.