Thinking with Demons
I had always been fascinated by demons ever since my dad said that Harry Potter was demonic. Demons, according to my Christian parents, were real to the point where my dad would occasionally have arguments with them. I think demons are real too, but of a psychical reality rather than a spiritual one. IMO Harry Potter is not demonic at all but rather grossly bourgeois: the story of a wealthy orphan who attends an elite private school in order to become a cop. Anyways, in as much as the demon is an autonomous figment of the imagination that never goes away, is found in nearly all cultures and across history, the demon becomes analyzable; this is as much as Freud says in Totem and Taboo (1913)—a book that is absolutely chock full of demons. “It is true that we have accepted the presence of demons” he admits. But accepted with this caveat: the demon is a projection.
Thinking with demons, then, is no early modern anachronism but an imaginative means by which we may examine a thought that appears to be outside of its thinker. Or the demonic urge that surprises its subject by appearing where it is least expected, in the innermost reaches of the psyche. This is the essential feature of the demon: interdimensional travel. The outside turning up on the inside—or vice versa.
In his Charcot obituary Freud makes the surprizing admission that the method of medieval exorcists is valid. In 1907, asked to put together a list of top ten books, Freud included Johann Weier’s psychiatric compendium of demonology De Praestigiis Daemonum (Of the Illusions of Demons), (1563)—naming it one of the “greatest achievements of science.” Johann Weier, often considered to be a founder of western psychiatry, opposed the witchhunts and sought to convert the common accusations of witchcraft, black magic, demonic possession, and pacts with the devil into the psychiatric categories that we recognize today: depression, hysteria, loneliness and substance abuse. Freud’s interest in early-modern demonology offers us a pretty good clue and vantage point for viewing his whole project and it is possible to think of psychoanalytic treatment as an inverted exorcism belonging to the tradition of demonology, where, as Freud makes clear in Totem and Taboo, the goal is to put the demons back into the human mind.
This is like if we reversed the old roman maxim that Marx was so fond of—"nothing human is alien to me”—to say instead: “everything alien is most human.”
Once upon a time I was in a dive bar in Green Point and the one TV was playing the movie The Exorcist. I had never seen this movie because I am too scared to watch it. But that night, in that crowded bar after 1AM, and with a death metal soundtrack, I was totally mesmerized by the visual power of this film. One did not need the sound; shot for shot the movie communicates domestic menace; it is clear that the house is the main character. The possessed child is expressing what the architecture represses: in Freud’s language, “daemonic sexuality.” This would be that indeterminate remainder (from the parent’s unconscious) that becomes in the child more demonic and more autonomous the more it is denied: the famous return of the repressed.
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