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It is true that it is by no means easy to demonstrate the traces of this satanic view of the father in the mental life of the individual. When a boy draws grotesque faces and caricatures, we may no doubt be able to show that he is jeering at his father in them; and when a person of either sex is afraid of robbers and burglars at night, it is not hard to recognize these as split off portions of the father.¹ The animals, too, which appear in children’s animal phobias are most often father-substitutes, as were the totem animals of primaeval times. But that the Devil is a duplicate of the father and can act as a substitute for him has not been shown so clearly elsewhere as in the demonological neurosis of this seventeenth-century painter. That is why, at the beginning of this paper, I foretold that a demonological case history of this kind would yield in the form of pure metal material which, in the neuroses of a later epoch (no longer superstitious but hypochondriacal instead) has to be laboriously extracted by analytic work from the ore of free associations and symptoms.² A deeper penetration into the analysis of our painter’s illness will probably bring stronger conviction. It is no unusual thing for a man to acquire a melancholic depression and an inhibition in his work as a result of his father’s death. When this happens, we conclude that the man had been attached to his father with an especially strong love, and we remember how often a severe melancholia appears as a neurotic form of mourning.

¹ In the familiar fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, the Father Wolf appears as a burglar.

² The fact that in our analyses we so seldom succeed in finding the Devil as a father-substitute may be an indication that for those who come to us for analysis this figure from mediaeval mythology has long since played out its part. For the pious Christian of earlier centuries belief in the Devil was no less a duty than belief in God. In point of fact, he needed the Devil in order to be able to keep hold of God. The later decrease in faith has, for various reasons, first and foremost affected the figure of the Devil.

If we are bold enough to apply this idea of the Devil as a father substitute to cultural history, we may also be able to see the witch-trials of the Middle Ages in a new light.