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All this sounds convincing and reasonable. Psycho-analysis has once more to meet the reproach that it makes hair-splitting complications in the simplest things and sees mysteries and problems where none exist, and that it does this by laying undue stress on insignificant and irrelevant details, such as occur every where, and making them the basis of the most far-reaching and strangest conclusions. It would be useless for us to point out that this rejection of our interpretation would do away with many striking analogies and break a number of subtle connections which we are able to demonstrate in this case. Our opponents will say that those analogies and connections do not in fact exist, but have been imported into the case by us with quite uncalled-for ingenuity.

I will not preface my reply with the words, ‘to be honest’ or ‘to be candid , for one must always be able to be these things without any special preliminaries. I will instead say quite simply that I know very well that no reader who does not already believe in the justifiability of the psycho-analytic mode of thought will acquire that belief from the case of the seventeenth-century painter, Christoph Haizmann. Nor is it my intention to make use of this case as evidence of the validity of psycho-analysis. On the contrary, I presuppose its validity and am employing it to throw light on the painter’s demonological illness. My justification for doing so lies in the success of our investigations into the nature of the neuroses in general. We may say in all modesty that to-day even the more obtuse among our colleagues and contemporaries are beginning to realize that no understanding of neurotic states can be reached without the help of psycho-analysis.

‘These shafts can conquer Troy, these shafts alone’

as Odysseus confesses in the Philoctetes of Sophocles.

If we are right in regarding our painter’s bond with the Devil as a neurotic phantasy, there is no need for any further apology for considering it psycho-analytically. Even small indications have a meaning and importance, and quite specially when they are related to the conditions under which a neurosis originates. To be sure, it is as possible to overvalue as to undervalue them, and it is a matter of judgement how far one should go in exploiting them. But anyone who does not believe in psycho-analysis - or, for the matter of that, even in the Devil - must be left to make what he can of the painter’s case, whether he is able to furnish an explanation of his own or whether he sees nothing in it that needs explaining.