Jean Lhermitte - True or False Possession: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the Demented

Jean Lhermitte

True or False Possession?

How to Distinguish
the Demonic from the Demented

Edited by Aaron Kheriaty

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

True or False Possession? , an English translation by P. J. Hepburne-Scott of Vrais et faux possds (F. Brouty, J. Fayard, et Cie, 1956), was originally published in 1963 by Hawthorn Books, New York, as Volume 43 of the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism , edited by Henri Daniel-Rops. This 2013 edition by Sophia Institute Press includes minor editorial revisions and a new preface.

Copyright 2013 Sophia Institute Press

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Nihil obstat : Joannes M. T. Barton, S.T.D., L.S.S., Censor Deputatus
Imprimatur : E. Morrogh Bernard, Vicarius Generalis,
Westmonasterii, December 13, 1962

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lhermitte, Jean, 1877-1959.

[Vrais et faux possedes. English]

True or false possession? : How to distinguish the demonic from the demented / Jean Lhermitte ; edited by Aaron Kheriaty.

pages cm

True and False Possession, an English translation by P. J. Hepburned Scott of Vrais et faux possedes (F. Brouty, J. Fayard, et Cie, 1956), was originally published in 1963 by Hawthorn Books, New York, as Volume 43 of the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, edited by Henri Daniel-Rops.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-933184-89-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
eBook ISBN 978-1-622821-72-3 1. Demoniac possession.
I. Kheriaty, Aaron. II. Title.

BF1555.L553 2013

133.4'26 dc23

2013018313

Contents

Preface

by Aaron Kheriaty, MD

The question about the devil was put to me directly by a patient who had come to see me for treatment of depression and recovery from a serious drug addiction. As a physician, he had gained access to the intravenous anesthetic drug propofol and had self-administered it in order to escape from refractory insomnia and unrelenting depression. Without carefully titrated dosing, gleaned from his medical knowledge, this patient would surely have overdosed long ago. Indeed, it was something of a miracle that he was still alive.

During an interview, he suddenly interrupted the narrative of his psychiatric history, paused, and looked me directly in the eye. With a sober seriousness, and without a trace of hysterics or dramatization, he asked simply, Do you believe in the Devil?

I stared back. Yes. I do.

Me too, he said.

Then after a pause, I inquired: Why do you ask?

When I was injecting the propofol I felt something... enter into me. It was not the drug, but something else. The drug was just the gateway. It was... something... foreign.

At no point in his treatment did I suspect this patient to be possessed, in the strict sense of the term. Yet, neither did I doubt the reality of a malevolent influence on him that exceeded in power and scope the physiological effects of the anesthetic he was abusing. He later related to me how this evil spirit would mock and taunt him as he slipped deeper into the hell of drug addiction.

Most of my colleagues in psychiatry probably would have regarded this exchange between doctor and patient as rather puzzling, even ludicrous. They would likewise regard a book like the one you hold here as an oddity. A work purporting to distinguish between cases of true and false possession will seem to many a throwback to a bygone age of religious superstition. Yet a modern psychiatrist cannot help but be impressed by the authors perspicuous medical and psychological analysis of each case he examines in these pages. This is not the work of a premodern credulous dupe, but the work of a skilled and experienced neurologist, who knows his trade and sees his way clearly into the tangled workings of the human mind and heart.

The author, a physician and not a theologian, skillfully navigates the Scylla of credulity and the Charybdis of relentless skepticism. Inclined by training and clinical experience to search first for naturalistic medical or psychiatric explanations for the phenomena in question, he nevertheless leaves open the possibility of explanations that go beyond what science or medicine can assess, as well as the possibility that any given manifestation may have elements of both the natural and preternatural. Originally published over fifty years ago, the authors medical judgments and observations still hold true. While some clinical terminology may have changed in the interim, little could be brought to bear from modern neurology or psychiatry that would contradict his findings or conclusions. The clinical histories, fascinating in their own right aside from the authors clinical assessment, are presented with sober clarity and reserve.

Believers have sometimes made the mistake of finding supernatural possession where there was only a pathological personality, given to the grossest hysterics and deceptions. This book provides fascinating accounts of false-possession cases, for example, those of Marie-Thrse Noblet and Sr. Jeanne of the Angels. Here the author astutely notes that the repeated misapplication of the Rite of Exorcism may have exacerbated the behavioral disorder, in this case, hysterical (what we now call conversion) symptoms that were encouraged by the excessive attention received from the exorcist and by the public or overly dramatized way in which the exorcist misapplied the rite, in defiance of the prescriptions of the Roman Ritual. The curious onlookers fell prey to the colorful and dramatic, while the sick individual was motivated by receiving such attention. The author observes: Well known, too, were all the criteria which the Church holds to be decisive of genuine possession, but they were scarcely heeded in such cases. The cautionary note here comes not from a belief that the rite or the prayers themselves would be harmful, but rather from a desire to avoid an overly theatrical application of a sacramental in situations where the hysterical person was taking on the sick role precisely in order to draw attention to herself. The author discerns that it was the excessive attention, not the prayers of the rite itself, that could have exacerbated the behavioral symptoms.

In a similar vein, the author then recounts well-documented historical cases of mass hysteria and pseudoseizures, which often become contagious among those living in close quarters through suggestion and mimesis. Such phenomena could be accounted for by psychological observations known as early as the sixteenth century and given more definitive form in the work of the great French neurologist Charcot in the nineteenth century. Today, one could add a wider knowledge of culture-bound syndromes worldwide, with characteristically wild behavioral, dissociative, and somatic manifestations such as the clinical syndrome Amok found among the Malaysians. In such cases, as the author concludes, the influence of the demon is to be sought in vain. Yet he also notes correctly that hysteria is not playacting and that those who manifested this behavioral disorder were not consciously feigning their symptoms or deliberately trying to deceive: Hysterical patients, like all other sick people, deserve our understanding and our charity.