Zapruder n. 41 / Abstract Zoom

History of psychiatry, 2014

Contrary to the often-voiced opinion that the birth of modern psychiatry should be regarded as a victory of enlightened science and rationality over outdated religious beliefs and ecclesiastical authority, it is argued in this article that the emergence of medical and psychiatric approaches to pathology in modernity takes place in the context of intensified religious life and mutual rivalry between the various religious denominations. Notably the two main types of demonological possession appearing in the context of Protestant and Catholic religious life, theological reflections and pastoral practices play a major role in the conceptualizations of melancholy and hysteria. The heritage of this can be viewed in the works of psychiatrists such as Charcot and Kraepelin, and also in Freud's psychoanalysis.

Patriarchy dominates systems of knowledge across religion, popular culture and medicine, constructing gender and sexuality. It subordinates women through categories related to health and illness, goodness and evil. "Possessed women" condense the idea of order subversion through the disorder of the soul and the body. Men assume the position as the keepers of social order, reversing chaos to restore normalization in society which are related with female bodies and sexualization. The female body is a territory of male intervention in realms as diverse as religion, popular culture, arts and medicine. Changes in women's bodies during the course of their lives maintain the same objectification, molding their characteristics to the male gaze. Women remain constructed "in reference to" men in a patriarchal order. We propose here the concept of "women in motion", subverting female subordination and refuting the simplification of female experiences through dualist explanations of body and mind.

Speculum, 1998

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2002

This paper investigates the historiographical utility of psychoanalysis, focussing in particular on retrospective explanations of demonic possession and exorcism. It is argued that while 'fullblown' psychoanalytic explanations-those that impose Oedipus complexes, anal eroticism or other sophisticated theoretical structures on the historical actors-may be vulnerable to the charge of anachronism, a weaker form of retrospective psychoanalysis can be defended as a legitimate historical lens. The paper concludes, however, by urging historians to look at psychoanalysis as well as trying to look through it. Full-blown psychoanalysis is a bad historical lens but it may, in some cases, be an excellent explanatory template: a thorough understanding of how psychoanalytic therapy functions in the modern world is, for example, a good theoretical preparation for historians seeking to understand the sixteenth-century's demonological universe. 

The question I would like to ask today-but not necessarily answer-is this: was it ever the case that women, while possessed, performed what we might call acts of resistance, or challenging figures of authority or power (and if so, did those acts constitute some form of power or agency for women)? Or did demoniacs always maintain the established order and affirm the values of the culture in which they existed? There are several senses in which demonic possession raises questions about agency and power. Some of them that I will not discuss today include the collective nature of possession--that is, a very large cast of characters, including priests and witnesses enacted and participated in exorcisms, which can have the effect of obviating agency. i This relates to Levack's notion of the 'scripted' nature of exorcism: that because possession is a patterned or conventional form of behavior, one can't really speak of there being any agency in it at all. iiiii I ought to say at the outset that in raising the question of agency, I do not intend to reduce the phenomenon of exorcism, which seems at its heart a religious event, to something else. There are always elements of mystery and the divine in cases of demonic possession for which contemporary anthropological or social models simply don't fully account. But today I would like to look at what one might call the ancillary aspects of a religious phenomenon, namely its social dimensions.

Journal of Psychology and Mental Health Care, 2019

Starting from the classical definition of "demonic possession" as a psychophysical condition in which a person becomes a victim of a supernatural being, be it a spirit, a demon, an angel, a divine creature or a family ancestor, the analysis continues with the examination of theoretical and practical profiles of this particular event, with an emphasis on approaches that tend to explain it, according to the most significant guidelines: ethnopsychiatric, the socio-anthropological, the cultural, the religious, the esoteric, the psychoanalytic and the clinician, to then re-elaborate everything in an integrated key, according to the neurobiological model, also with the help of the sophisticated investigation techniques used in criminal law

Pazze di Lui – Mad for Him: Hagiographic Stereotypes, Mental Disturbances and Anthropological Implications of Female Saintliness in Italy and Abroad from the 13th to the 20th Century, Mattia Zangari (Ed.), Tübingen: Narr 2024 [= Orbis romanicus, hg. v. Bernhard Teuber und Andreas Dufter] , 2024

This book compiles the works conducted by several scholars, both men and women, who attended the conference Mad for Him. Female Sanctity and Mental Illness between the Middle Ages and the Modern Ages, which was held at Ca' Foscari University of Venice in November 2021. On said occasion, the author asked the speakers to reflect on the sensitive relationship between female sanctity and mental illness. Specifically, they were asked to investigate whether the famous paroxysms experienced by the mystique women could be compared to events that nowadays, through the lens of the medical code, are normally considered pathological. The critical perspectives provided were extremely inspiring, as historians, philologists, art historians and anthropologists, as well as psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and theologists, participated. The structural framework given to the various studies cited is especially noteworthy, as the interpretative approach to the texts allowed a comprehensive examination of the matter at the core of the topic, without losing sight of the focus. The reflections, all characterized by a different heuristic praxis, highlighted not only the possibly pathological aspects of the mystical language, but also the shaping power of the assumptions underlying hagiographic presuppositions attributable to madness and, likewise, the anthropological applications inherent to sensibility marked by spatiotemporal lapses attributable to the protagonists of the holy madness. This introductory essay aims to outline a speech illustrating how specific well-known mental disturbances, such as hysteria, delirium and dermographism, are evident and may also be documented in contexts associated with female sanctity. The analysis shall include a brief introduction of the bibliography, centered on the matter of sancta insania, followed by a presentation of the clinical cases. 8 Mattia Zangari Guillaume Hahn: "Les phénomènes hystériques et les révélations de sainte Therese", Révue des questions scientifiques XIII (1883), 5-123.

Screen, 1986

Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2014

The phenomenon of possession has a long, complicated history and a dark, unsavory side. Nevertheless, it has persisted in one form or another until present times. The books under review afford two perspectives on demonic possession: psychiatric and historical. Both authors are informed in their respective fields. They are critical writers and agree on a basic factual underpinning of the controversial phenomena. The grounds for this concord lie in the recurrence of the phenomena and the cumulatively large number of recorded witnesses. Both are aware of the academic prejudice toward the alleged realities of possession. Historian Brian Levack is interested in the historical and performance dimension of the untoward effects, and plays down their ontological strangeness and implications. The Swiss psychiatrist Hans Naegeli is more concerned with these implications, for example, for psychiatry, noting the unhelpfulness of standard materialist outlooks. The books are mainly complementary a...

Federici’s analysis of the European witch-craze in the C16th-C17th, by honing in on specific practices in relation to the (particularly female) body punished by the state as part of “primitive accumulation” - the violent transition from a mode of Feudalism to that of early Capitalism – criticises Foucault’s discussion of the change from sovereignty to biopower over the same era for its ungendered approach. However, there remains enough of a parallel - detailing alterations during the same eras in control over the same areas - to the extent that a dialogue may quite easily be formed to establish the persecution and execution of midwives, sex workers, and other women whose bodies and knowledge of bodies were sites of production as the transition to biopower, and the shift from a society of individual bodies to a population mass. Whilst Federici essentially accuses Foucault of allowing the reasons behind the transition to biopower to remain more-or-less shrouded in mystery, on account of his lack of interest in the witch-hunts, Federici’s Marxist-Feminist approach allows for patriarchal capitalism to be the cause in and of itself. This essay suggests patriarchal capitalism may in fact itself be a symptom. Thus, a third dimension may be required – one routinely engaged in the investigation of symptoms for causes: psychoanalysis. The resemblance of this mass to the Lacanian concept of the Gestalt in addition to the influence of the establishment of privatisation via enclosures / borders allows for the abjection of accused witches to the stake and gallows (as well as criminals to Australia, slaves to the Americas etc) renders this phenomenon not merely an opportunity for comparison, but instead of actual Kristevan psychoanalysis. The mass-population-society built on capital operates as the Gestalt of one hive-mind, with the inherited neuroses of any subject aiming towards the idealised imago, thus abjecting bodies the way an individual abjects materials. Rather than society necessarily behaving as a “big Other,” it may therefore be useful to understand it rather as a “big Self.” Neurotic and paranoid, the system of Capital’s sense of inevitability and immutability may be caused by its parallel to the ideological constitution of one’s subjectivity. Therefore, if we are to break from the system of Capital, it may first be necessary to readdress bodies and concepts rendered abject by our own psyche, and strive to undo our very formation of self.