ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a peculiar career of a Jewish woman in a 19th century Eastern European hasidic community, which was ended by an episode of dybbuk-possession. The case was selected for presentation because, unlike most other reports of this Jewish variant of spirit possession, it contains significant information concerning the social matrix in which it evolved, as well as the biographies of its main protagonists. The chapter provides an attempt to render the possession episode intelligible in terms of the psychodynamic and sociocultural factors underlying it. Dybbuk-possession is depicted through the case reports as a crystallized syndrome, the behavior patterns of which remained relatively stable across time and space. Eidel's dybbuk was depicted as the end-product of a strong masculine complex in a woman who was raised by her father as a male child and who subsequently pursued a male vocation, taking her father as a role-model.
