THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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What he is rebelling against is his feminine attitude to him which culminates
in a phantasy of bearing him a child (the nine years) .... With the painter's
mourning for his lost father, and the heightening of his longing for him, there
also comes about in him the re-activation ofhis long-since repressed phantasy
of pregnancy, and he is obliged to defend himself against it by a neurosis and
by debasing his father (1923, p. 90).
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Because bearing his father's child implies the necessity ofbecoming a woman, this in turn
awakens his castration anxiety, which he unconsciously seeks to allay by castrating his
father, thereby turning him into a woman, manifest symbolically by the puzzling detail of
the Devil's breasts. The Devil's breasts thus correspond to a "projection of the subject's
own femininity on to the father-substitute" (1923, p. 90). Freud then goes on to propose
an alternative explanation for the Devil's breasts, the displacement of Haizmann's
affectionate feelings for his mother on to his father:
This suggests that there has previously been a strong fixation on the mother,
which, in its turn, is responsible for part of the child's hostility towards his
father. Large breasts are the positive sexual characteristics ofthe mother even
at a time when the negative characteristic of the female - her lack of a penis ­
is as yet unknown to the child (1923, p. 91).
Haizmann's neurotic fear of castration meant that it was impossible for him to satisfy his
longing for his father, and so he turned for help and salvation to the image of his mother.
For this reason, only the Holy Mother of God could release him from his pact with the
Devil.
Freud concedes that it is difficult to find proof, outside of this case study, for his
contention that the Devil is a "duplicate of the father and can act as a substitute for him"
(1923, p. 87). That Freud had to base his analysis on an obscure 17th Century document,
rather than on case material from his own patients, reveals that his speculations about
demonic possession are not supported by his own empirical data. He does not see this,
however, as a weakness in psychoanalytic theory. In a footnote, he accounts for the lack