Ghosts and Demons
The psychoanalyst will be the first to admit that ghosts and demons are real. Always keeping in mind of course that this haunted reality is not so much physical as psychical; less an independent reality than one totally dependent on weird human mind stuff. The true ectoplasm is the sticky and aethereal substance of our own psyche. These local psychic entities, whether poltergeist, demon, faery or UFO (whether appearing in movie-form or real life) are imaginal aids to the ghostly structure of psyche that would otherwise elude awareness. The substance of mind goes on walkabout—stepping from a dream to make silent entreaties (what happened to me one time), opening creaking doors, illuminating forest-glades and so on—and reveals, in the process, the shape of the mind. The mental action of projection is how the ghost or demon appears. Projection, generally, is not pathological, but is rather a facility of mind, like perception, or memory, where what we perceive is, in a literal sense, the projected contents of our own interior world (an interior world that is rather more exterior than we like to admit—and vice versa).
The figure of the ghost would then be a shard of an internal and heretofore unconscious conflict, activated by a cadaver, and that is projected into the real world as an apparition. By contrast, the figure of the demon pops into existence as a compulsion to repeat or an excessive idea or feeling that is so strange—so exogenous—as to feel like it comes from outside of you, sent either from the highest of Greek gods, sublime necessity, the goddess Ananke (Ανάγϰη) as in the case of the daemon; or sent from the far side of hell as in the case of the evil Christian demon; but that has been sent, in fact, from the near side of our own psyche. While we find it curious that people in Christian lands are not usually possessed by angels, the phenomena of being “slain in the spirit,” or “speaking in tongues” is a version of the Greek figure of the daemon, the gift of thumos, or enthusiasm (a super-ordinary passion bequeathed by a god).
Psycho-analysis, being of a more gothic outlook, and concerned as it is with etiology, is less interested in daemonic “gifts,” and instead may be regarded, from an historical perspective, as an inverted form of early modern demonology. We will speculate that both the ghost and the demon is a fantasmatic representative of the basic unthinkability of psychic life itself, either when this life departs the body at the moment of death, or when it enters the body in the form of the compulsive repetition, or unbearable urge.
