ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in detail what Freud calls ‘the very interesting witch trials’, and it addresses the question of the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges. It examines confessions of guilt extracted from witches, in which they report the devil sexually abusing them. This book presents firsthand accounts of the trials of witches conducted by the sixteenth-century judges Bodin and Boguet. Their works were being prepared for republication in the Bibliothèque Diabolique while Freud was studying under Charcot in Paris. Summers says that the judges’ contest with the evil one was hard and long. Freud saw himself in a similar contest in his work with patients. He says, ‘No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed’.
Judge Boguet sums up what Bodin and Remy also held about witches: the devil sometimes ‘reveals to them in their sleep what happens at the Sabbat so vividly that they think they have been there’. Did Freud’s delving into this literature on the witch trials influence his first shift in his seduction theory?
