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essential ingredient of such a pact. Although most witches (like hysterics) are women, some are men, and one important such male, possessed by the Devil, is noted in this book: He is the Anti-Christ.101
Now it is clear that Freud saw hysterical patients as people who in earlier centuries would have been described as witches. We should also note that Freud often thought of himself as an hysteric—as one with hysterical symptoms. Hence, Freud as a male hysteric would have been in his own eyes like a male witch. This understanding of hysterical symptoms as similar to what once was called “possession,” Freud proposed as early as 1886 and 1888, when he published his earliest papers commenting on the subject of hysteria.102 Let us return to the January 24 letter. Freud discussed witchcraft with respect to a patient, Herr E., who as a child had had a nurse or nanny whom he deeply loved (a patient not unlike Freud himself, as is so often the case). In his fantasies, this woman’s money was always turning to excrement. Apparently E. saw his nurse as a witch; this was what his associations of her money with excrement implied. Freud reported in the letter that he had just read (in the medieval accounts of these phenomena) that it is when the Devil gives money to his victims that they become witches.103 Later, Freud reported that he was “beginning to dream of an extremely primitive devil religion.”104 The whole issue of the similarity between the stories of alleged witches and his hysterical patients had greatly captured his imagination.105 The theme of the Devil next appeared with a Freiberg association in a letter of October 27, 1897, when Freud quoted Faust again: “And the shades of loved ones appear, and with them, like an old, half-forgotten myth, first love and friendship”106 (a reference to Freud’s just-emerging memories of his Freiberg childhood?). Next came many of the letters speaking so powerfully of Freud’s longing for Rome, especially for Rome with Fliess at Easter. In one of these letters, Freud quoted from Faust yet again: “The best that you know you cannot tell to the boys”107—a statement made by the Devil to Faust, implying the constant need for censorship, since most people are not sophisticated enough to understand. This line was one of Freud’s favorites, and he quoted it often in his letters. It implies that Freud was aware that many of his central motivations and associations were artfully concealed, not only from the public but perhaps from “the boys” (his friends, perhaps even Fliess) as well. In this context, it is worth noting that Freud evaluated Goethe, his favorite writer, as “a great revealer” but also “in spite of the wealth of autobiographical hints, a careful concealer.”108 Several letters later in the correspondence, in April 1898, Freud was recounting a visit to Italy (the letter included the description quoted in |