This association is well captured in a passage from the Witch’s Kitchen scene In Faust, quoted by Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter discussing masturbation: “You are on familiar terms with the devil, and yet you shrink back from the flame.”122 These words are addressed by Mephistopheles to Faust, who is taken aback by a potion that emits a flame. A moment later, Faust drinks the potion to seal his Walpurgisnacht pact.
Freud’s Pact: Part TwoWe return now to Freud’s pact as understood by Bakan: namely, that for Freud the Devil was a kind of metaphor derived from his experience of the powerful sexual and aggressive forces in the unconscious. Bakan argues that Freud perceived the impulses from the unconscious (or the id) as a kind of Hell, which his own self-analysis allowed him to be the first to explore.123 Thus, Bakan explains the “pact” with the Devil as a kind of psychological strategy, by which Freud decided to suspend his superego—his moral or higher judgmental capacities—in order to explore the lower, hellish world of the unconscious. This explanation, of course, means that Freud had no pact with the Devil as a supernatural figure or even as a personal figure in any psychologically real sense, but instead that he reached a special kind of internal agreement: He had to be willing to go to Hell, to delve into psychological “Hell,” in order to understand his own instinctual passions. (It should be pointed out that neither Aeneas nor Dante, whose voyages to the nether regions Freud referred to, was obliged to enter into such a pact in order to descend into Hell.) Before returning to Bakan and the issue of a pact, let us take up Freud’s psychological explanation of the Devil, given in his 1923 paper A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the Seventeenth Century. There Freud explicitly claimed: What in those days were thought to be evil spirits to us are base and evil wishes, the derivatives of impulses which have been rejected and repressed. In one respect only do we not subscribe to the explanation of these phenomena current in medieval times; we have abandoned the projection of them into the outer world, attributing their origin instead to the inner life of the patient….124 The paper itself was a detailed discussion of a case history from the 17th century in Austria, in which it was reported that a painter, one Christoph Haitzmann, had twice made a pact with the Devil and had been redeemed through the Virgin Mary. A noteworthy thing about Freud’s treatment of the case was the set of reasons why the artist made the pact, reasons to which Freud gave considerable prominence. The man was motivated to sign up with the Devil not for money, power, or women, but rather |