ABSTRACT
This book endeavours to make sense of Freud’s statement: ‘I … understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’. It gives a detailed account of the witch trials and the literature that Freud read on the witch trials. Significant features in common emerge between the judges’ inquisitorial procedures and the partially inquisitorial procedure used by Freud with his patients between 1892 and 1900. It shows a close structural parallel in the processes used by Freud and the inquisitors.
To what extent are some psychoanalysts and psychotherapists still operating a partially inquisitorial procedure in their work? Freud claimed that his treatment, no matter how painful, was undertaken to overcome resistance in order to cure the patient. In this, he was identifying his psychoanalysis with the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges, who claimed that their harsh therapy was needed to overcome the demons in order to save the soul of the witch. The forced nature of both of their procedures for squeezing out confessions was indeed harsh therapy.
This book is presented as one perspective on what Freud and the inquisitors and judges actually did.
