ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 shows Freud’s interest in the medieval belief in possession: the ‘possession’ of the witches by the devil and his abusing them sexually. Freud asks, ‘why are their confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment’? Heller takes the view that some of the witches were forced to confess the accusations brought against them. Freud’s view is that the witches’ fantasies were not created under torture but merely squeezed out by it. Not only is Freud comparing the confessions of the witches and his patients; he is also comparing his procedures in psychoanalysis with the judges’ procedures in the witch trials.
In the sixteenth century, witches were blamed for infecting men with syphilis. One of Freud’s patients, Dora, accused her father of passing on his venereal disease to her through her mother, but Freud turned the tables on Dora by claiming to draw hidden ‘secrets’ out of her.
The construction of woman as evil, as witch, seldom questioned its misogynist assumptions. The inquisitors who wrote the Malleus in 1486, the first handbook for the punishment of witches, claim that witches were copulating with devils at Sabbats. But Freud ‘explained’ the ‘night flying’ of witches: ‘the broomstick they ride is probably the great Lord Penis’.
