SARA WILLIAMS
Though made forty years ago, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1971) remains a shocking film, as scenes of Regan's bodily contortions and convulsions, explicit acts of masturbation, and sexual abuse of her mother destroys the construct of the innocent child society holds dear. The film, however, restores some sense of innocence through its interpretation of the novel as an incontestable narrative of possession: Regan cannot be held responsible for the murders of Dennings, Merrick, and Karras because it is not she who kills them but rather the demon using her body as a vessel in the material realm. Regan emerges from the ordeal an innocent victim, with little recollection of what she has experienced or indeed what she has done. The scenes in which she performs physically impossible movements—scuttling down the stairs in a spider-walk, levitating, moving furniture telekinetically, and most infamously twisting her head around 360°—become empirical proof of her body's possession and confirm The Exorcist as unambiguously supernatural.
Even though William Peter Blatty penned the original novel upon which the film was based as well as the screenplay, the two differ considerably. While the film opts for a supernatural explanation—Regan is possessed by the Babylonian devil Pazuzu—Blatty's novel consistently questions the authenticity of Regan's possession by providing an alternate explanation for her behavior: hysteria. As Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston have discussed, it is the abandonment of the text's psychological realism that makes Friedkin's film a deeply conservative one which “presents us with data for a psychological interpretation … then rejects it in favor of a phenomenological Devil” (45). This article will show how the original text presents a psychological diagnosis of hysteria that precedes and challenges the metaphysical explanation of Regan's behavior which has been accepted culturally due to the enduring popularity and notoriety of the film.
Based loosely on the reported exorcism of a young boy known as “Robbie Manheim” in 1949 (Kermode 11–22), Blatty's novel articulates the tensions between the scientific and superstitious Catholic discourses which both desire to “save” the child through the characterization of Father Damien Karras, a priest and a psychiatrist struggling with his faith who has researched the occult “from the psychiatric side” (77). As Ann Douglas comments, the novel inaugurates the “family horror” genre which articulated late twentieth-century middle-class anxieties about the “splitting of the atom of the nuclear family,” with Regan, Chris and the absent father Howard “constitut[ing] the postmodern familiar cluster in fission” (294). For Douglas, family horror novels are “post-Freudian case studies” which “narrate a crisis, a moment of traumatic disturbance in the external and internal life of a single character or cluster of characters, member[s] of a nuclear or self-involved, self constituted family” (304). Within this context, Douglas reads Regan's possession as “an extreme version of Bertha Pappenheim's acute hysteria of a century earlier, which Freud and Josef Breuer immortalized as the illness and recovery of Anna O.” (ibid.). Expanding on Douglas's contention that Regan finds a precursor in Anna O., I will demonstrate how the novel can be read as a specifically Oedipal hysteria narrative through which Regan-as-demon expresses both sexual desire for the absent father and a violent rejection of the mother.
Although Freud's thinking on the Oedipus conflict was complex and changeable, 1 throughout my argument I use the terminology “Oedipal” to refer to the process of ego formation wherein the child desires the parent of the opposite sex and so rejects the parent of the same sex, with whom they eventually identify in order to disavow their unconscious incestuous desires and become a socialized subject. In earlier articulations, Freud considered the Oedipus complex in girls to be analogous to that of boys, but in its final stage he reformulated a female Oedipus complex which has a “prehistory,” where the girl's first love object is her mother (“Psychical Consequences” 675). This pre-Oedipal stage ends when the girl, having come to understand that she and her mother lack a penis, blames her mother for this lack, and rejects her in favor of the father, for whom she wishes to provide a child as a penis-substitute; thus, the Oedipal phase commences (675–76). However, while boys destroy the Oedipus complex in the face of the threat of castration presented by the mother's body and the vengeful father, as Freud explains, “[i]n girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus complex is lacking” (677). It is this persistence of the female Oedipus complex which I see as articulated by Regan's hysterical “possession.” Juliet Mitchell seminally remarked that “hysteria was, and is … the daughter's disease: a child's fantasy about her parents” (Women 308), and recent feminist scholarship has recast hysteria as symptomatic of the yearning for the pre-Oedipal maternal dyad. Barbara Creed understands the film version of The Exorcist , in which the close relationship between Regan and Chris is visualized and emphasized, as a violent reconciliation with the abject pre-Oedipal maternal. While these interpretations necessarily challenge the phallocentricism of Freud's model, this article reads the original novel in its socio-cultural context of post-Freud, but not yet pre-Oedipal, conservative, bourgeois America. I argue that Regan's fixation on her father and failure to resolve her Oedipal conflict can be just as damaging to patriarchy as the reunion with the pre-Oedipal mother which Creeds contends is performed through possession in the film.
Freud developed his psychoanalytical theories on unconscious and repressed desires through his early work in the 1890s with female hysterics. 2 The Oedipus complex thus originated from the psychodramas of Freud and Breuer's female patients, and Blatty's text appeared when the cultural construction of the Oedipal concept of hysteria remained embedded in this Freudian precedent. This is evidenced frequently by the text, such as when Chris notices how Regan's abnormal behavior first emerges after not hearing from her father on her birthday, a recognition that establishes the Oedipal context of the desired but unattainable father:
Beginning on the day after Regan's birthday—and following Howard's failure to call—[Chris] had noticed a sudden and dramatic change in her daughter's behavior and disposition. Insomnia. Quarrelsome. Fits of temper. Kicked things. Threw things. Screamed. Wouldn't eat. In addition, her energy seemed abnormal. She was constantly moving, touching and turning; tapping; running and jumping about. Doing poorly with schoolwork. Fantasy playmate. Eccentric attention tactics. (57)
The narrative follows the diagnostic history of hysteria as Dr. Klein, 3 Regan's psychiatrist, first offers the neurological possibility of a scar on Regan's temporal lobe, echoing the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's diagnosis of demonic possession as the psychosomatic result of a trauma to the brain (101). Indeed, Freud and Jung are name-dropped periodically throughout the text by both Klein and Karras, and Freud's theories of unconscious desires are offered as an explanation for Regan's behavior. For example, Klein explains to Chris that “hysteria … is a form of neurosis in which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders” and suggests that Regan could be suffering from “what Freud used to call the ‘conversion’ form of hysteria,” that “grows from unconscious guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, even multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like convulsions; hallucinations; abnormal motor excitement” (127, 128). Klein further suggests that her parents' divorce would produce unconscious feelings of guilt and stress in Regan which could manifest bodily as “rage and intense frustration” (128), and a “noted neuropsychiatrist” is called in, in the tradition of Charcot and Freud, to question Regan under hypnosis (120). This session ends abruptly when Regan objects to the interrogation by “squeezing his scrotum with a hand that had gripped him like an iron talon” (125), a sexually aggressive response which signals the violent intensity of her Oedipal desire, as provoked by male psychiatric probing.
Within this context then, descriptions of Regan “shrieking hysterically” or “hysterical[ly] screaming” (83, 108) explicitly connote her neurosis. The text is well versed in the epistemology of hysteria and clearly provides a psychiatric explanation for Regan's condition. Somatizing her libidinal outrage at being separated from her father by the divorce, the text implies that she converts the unconscious trauma of paternal loss into a demon which occupies her body and compels its deterioration. Yet, while the diagnosis of hysteria continues to be implied throughout the text, the deepest and most disturbing cause of her neurosis is left unidentified, that is, her Oedipal desire for her father. Regan's possession continues, and the psychiatric explanation is dismissed in favor of more desperate religious measures. Reading the novel in this way exposes the film as a reductive and conservative interpretation which, in assuming the metaphysical explanation over the psychological, re-establishes and asserts the patriarchal Christian moral order as Regan's savior.
The concept of hysteria has a long history dating back to Plato, 4 but it was Charcot who understood the condition as a visual performance and at his hospital la Salpêtrière he exhibited patients for a hungry audience. A favorite subject was Augustine, an icon of hysteria who was admitted to the asylum in 1875 at the age of fifteen for “‘paralysis of sensation in the right arm’ and for contractures or anaesthesias which affected the organs on the right side of her body” (Didi-Huberman quoting Bournville 100). Charcot had Augustine's convulsions sketched and photographed for the collections Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1876–1880) and Les Démoniaques dans l'art (1887), and in response she played the part of hysteric, in return for his attention (Showalter 154). Prefiguring Freud and Breuer's hysteria case studies, Augustine was the daughter/patient to Charcot's masterful father/doctor. Consequently, hysteria was established simultaneously as a medical condition and the performance of one—a result of, and a response to, paternal authority. Freud later developed Charcot's idea of physical trauma into a psychodynamic one, and his phallocentric model re-inscribed the disease as a neurosis centered on the daughter's Oedipal desire for the father. In 1895, Freud and Josef Breuer co-authored Studies on Hysteria , which documented the analysis and treatment of their hysterical subjects through the “talking cure,” a term coined by Breuer's most famous patient “Anna O.” to describe the cathartic process (34). As will be discussed, it is this absence of catharsis which proves most problematic for Regan.
Freud and Breuer's cases discuss adolescent girls who had extreme psychosomatic responses to the literal or emotional loss of their father, and thus the Oedipal drama as the etiology of hysteria was established. Breuer treated “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim) for symptoms of hysteria including “paralysing contractures, complete paralysis in the upper right and both lower extremities, partial paralysis in the upper left extremity,” as well as a squint and disturbances of vision, hearing and speech, hallucinations, split personality, and loss of consciousness which he diagnosed as the somatic response to caring for her ill father “whom she idolized” and who eventually died (Freud and Breuer 26, 29). Similarly, in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud diagnosed “Dora” (Ida Bauer) as suffering from hysterical loss of voice in response to her father's affair with “Frau K,” for whom she babysat, and her husband “Herr K's” own advances towards her. Both analysts became embroiled in the Oedipal fantasies with which they had diagnosed their patients, as both girls exhibited symptoms of hysterical pregnancy, with the paternity of the phantom babies being attributed to their respective analysts (Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas 67, 68).
Consequently, the advent of the psychoanalytic explanation enabled doctors and historians to diagnose cases of hysteria which were understood at the time to be evidence of demonic possession. In Les Démoniaques , Charcot and co-author Richer, through their method of medicine retrospective , pathologically bound religiosity to neurosis when they argued that medieval saints, stigmatics, and ecstatics should be classified as hysterical in the same manner as those thought to be demonically possessed (Mazzoni 27; Midelfort 204). In “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” (1922), Freud extrapolated psychoanalytically on Charcot's contention that what was considered evidence of demonic possession in the middle ages was symptomatic of a neurological disorder. He translated the demon in terms of psychiatry, explaining that “the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed” (72). Within this Freudian model, Regan's demonic transformation embodies the eruption of her Oedipal desires, the once repressed “bad and reprehensible wishes” which surfaced following her parents' divorce and her geographical and emotional separation from her father. Despite the melodramatic veneer of demonic possession, Regan's behavior closely echoes the Oedipal etiology of the archetypal case studies of Freudian hysteria, Dora and Anna O., and before them Charcot's Augustine.
Consequently, Regan's sexually aggressive possession becomes a form of rape fantasy wish-fulfillment as she submits to a powerful masculine force, which she unconsciously interprets as having the father-as-Devil physically “inside” her. As such, Regan shares much in common with other historical cases of demonic possession. Lyndal Roper, for example, has shown in her study of medieval witchcraft how women's communion with the Devil fitted the Oedipal theme and discusses the case of Regina Bartholome, who in 1670 confessed to living with the Devil, fantasizing that she fulfilled the Oedipal triad of daughter/lover/wife (227). 5 Like Regina before her, Regan's communion with the Devil enables her to express her forbidden desires towards her father by proxy. 6 Thus, Regan's hysterical manifestation of the Oedipal drama has a precedent in both psychoanalysis and the cultural unconscious, which Karras affirms when he cites Freud's “Demonological Neurosis” which discusses a case of male hysteria-as-demonic possession that makes explicit the symbolic role of the Devil as father-substitute (208). 7 Through her (self-)possession Regan attempts a sexual union with the father; because her body houses both herself and the demon, her acts of masturbation become symbolic paternal penetration.
Furthermore, it appears that Regan herself is well-versed in this history. We learn that she has prior knowledge of demonic possession from clandestinely reading a book leant to her mother called A Study of Devil Worship and Related Occult Phenomena that contains a chapter “States of Possession” which mentions “quasi-possession—those cases that are ultimately reducible to fraud, paranoia and hysteria” (166). Thus, Regan is not only aware of the signs of demonic possession, she has also read that the body itself can manifest such signs factitiously. As with Karras's intertextual nods to Freud, this textual self-referentiality reveals the often-overlooked complexity of The Exorcist as a novel which engages with the tensions between demonological and medical discourses of possession.
Like the hysterics at la Salpêtrière , Regan is subject to numerous diagnostic tests before Chris rejects a medical explanation in favor of possession. The description of these tests and Regan's reactions follow the structure of Charcot's performance-as-diagnosis plot in which the subject would respond to his probing in an extreme manner so as to confirm her hysteria through the act of spectacle (Didi-Huberman 83–279). Regan is uncannily like Augustine in her hysterical attacks: like Regan, Charcot's patient would “vociferate, laugh, and vomit, all at once” (Didi-Huberman 261), and after having X-rays taken, Regan exhibits her most extreme symptoms of hysteria, including the acquisition of a previously unknown language, the uncharacteristic use of obscene language, the performance of bodily convulsions and contractures, and public displays of masturbation. Echoing Augustine's hysterical paroxysms, Regan's demonic Oedipal psychodrama reads as an example of textbook hysteria:
Shrieking hysterically, [Regan] was flailing her arms as her body seemed to fling itself horizontally into the air above her bed and then slammed down savagely onto the mattress …. She would lift about a foot each time and then fall with a wrenching of her breath, as if unseen hands had picked her up and thrown her down …. The up and down movements ceased abruptly and the girl twisted feverishly from side to side with her eyes rolled upward into their sockets so that only the whites were exposed …. Still twisting and jerking, Regan arched her head back, disclosing a swollen, bulging throat. She began to mutter something incomprehensible in an oddly guttural tone.
“…nowonmai … nowonmai …”
… A yelping laugh gushed up from her throat, and then she fell on her back as if someone had pushed her. She pulled up her nightgown exposing her genitals. “Fuck me! Fuck me!” she screamed at the doctors, and with both hands began masturbating frantically. (109–11)
Furthermore, the obstruction in Regan's throat, which she implies is caused by the demon inside her body—“Please, stop him! It hurts! Make him stop ! Make him stop ! I can't breathe !” (110)—echoes the symptom globus hystericus from which “Dora” suffered, a sensation of choking which, as Plato suggested, indicated that the empty womb was rising up through the body and suffocating the subject. The symptoms Regan manifests symbolize her Oedipal desire to provide her father with a child, as represented by her lamenting womb wandering around her body. This episode culminates in a violent bodily contortion that evokes the arc de cercle (Didi-Huberman Figure 106, 267), a pose which the “possessed” Loudun nuns 8 and many of Charcot's patients, including Augustine, were purported to have made during attacks of grande hystérie : “[Regan] started to arch her body upward into an impossible position, bending it backward like a bow until the brow of her head had touched her feet. She was screaming in pain. The doctors eyed each other with questioning surmise. Then Klein gave a signal to the neurologist. But before the consultant could seizer her, Regan fell limp and wet the bed” (110). Regan later repeats the arc when she “[glides], spiderlike, rapidly … her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet …her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent” (119); here, Regan also echoes the image of Augustine with her tongue stuck out during fits (Didi-Huberman Figure 105, 260). Charcot defined such contractures as attitudes passionnelles , poses that re-enacted past incidents of the patient's life and to which in Iconographies he gave subtitles such as “amorous supplication,” “ecstasy” and “eroticism,” which Elaine Showalter points out “suggest Charcot's interpretation of hysteria as linked to female sexuality, despite his disclaimers” (150).
Freud would later make explicit the implication that hysterical subjects were repeating past sexual trauma or desire with his theory of the Oedipal etiology of hysteria. Regan communicates her desire through her bodily manipulations as she lifts her groin up and places it as the highest point of her form, presenting herself, as Freud explained, “in the posture of a body that is suitable for sexual intercourse” (“Hysterical Attacks” 230). Indeed, the entire episode of possession constellates around Regan's bed as the site of her unfulfilled desires. Augustine's attitudes were described in a similarly sexual nature and interpreted as the call to an imaginary lover: “She closes her eyes, her physiognomy denoting possession and satisfied desire … then then come the little cries, smiles, movements of the pelvis, words of desire or encouragement” (Bournville qtd. in Didi-Huberman 144). If, as Charcot attested, the attitudes played out past experiences which contributed to the patient's hysteria, then Augustine's imaginary lover may well be her employer and mother's lover who attempted to rape her and who is associated with her own father in her hysterical flashbacks: “Pig! Pig! I'll tell papa … Pig! How heavy you are!” (qtd. in Didi-Huberman 160). Trapped in the Oedipal dynamic, Augustine is in a state of “possession,” at the mercy of the father figure as she replays her trauma in an “incessant deliria of rape” (160). Father is to be desired, revered, and feared, and we see Regan articulating this tension in her own hysterical seizures and contractures.
Regan's arc is translated infamously to monstrous effect on screen when, arched over backwards like a spider, she scurries fiendishly down a flight of stairs, hissing and bleeding profusely from her mouth. It is testament to both the special effects and the original description of Regan's contortion that this scene, despite its relative crudeness, remains so viscerally inassimilable, and yet it is not, as deceptively suggested by the text, “an impossible position.” During attacks of grande hystérie , Charcot's patients would regularly contort and convulse in a tetanic manner which attested to the ability of the hysteric's body to be “articulated at will, endowed as it was with an incredible plastic submission ” (see Figures 46–8 in Didi-Huberman, 192). Charcot's beloved Augustine in her attitudes struck the archetypal poses of hysteria and shows that, possessed by hysteria, the adolescent female body was capable of things considered alien and unknown to itself: “The whole body became rigid; the arms stiffened, sometimes executing more or less perfect circumduction; then they would often approach each other on the median line, the wrists touching each other on the dorsal side” (Didi-Huberman quoting Bournville and Regnard 123). Regan's ability to move her bed from the floor during her seizures (83, 285) also echoes Augustine's attacks, as Didi-Huberman describes how she would be straitjacketed “on a bed that she would have turned upside down if she had not been fettered” (113). Scholars since have identified such seizures as female orgasms (see Maines), and so within the Oedipal framework Regan's fits are the climax to her sexual communion with the Devil-as-father who she believes is literally inside her.
Even the welts on Regan's chest, “bas-relief script rising up in clear letters of blood-red skin. Two words: help me” (262), which appear to have been written from inside her body as though the real Regan is trapped inside herself, find a physiological explanation in the medical condition dermatographic urticara , in which the skin becomes raised and inflamed in response to touch. As Janet Beizer has discussed, this was translated as a symptom of hysteria by Charcot and others, evidence of the hysteric's body as impressionable, hypersensitive and hyperexpressive (20). Beizer mentions how doctors “fascinated by dermatographism often used the sign of the Devil in their writing experiments” and reproduces a photograph of a woman's back which has SATAN inscribed in large welts above her shoulder blades (Figure 3, 25). Regan's dermatography thus inscribes hysteria on her body in the same manner as the wounds of Christ do with stigmatics (see Littlewood and Bartocci 598), but at the same time it also evidences her own visceral belief in her possession. The confirmation of Regan's possession as performance comes from her reaction to being doused with unblessed tap water, which Karras tells her is holy water: “Immediately the demon was cringing, writhing, bellowing in terror and in pain: ‘It burns it burns! Ahh, stop it! Cease, priest bastard, cease!’ Expressionless, Karras stopped sprinkling. Hysteria. Suggestion. She did read the book ” (227). Karras sets up this deceit as a test to expose Regan's possession as a masquerade, and it works, but he ultimately rejects this evidence and instead pursues the possession route to its fatal conclusion in order to reaffirm his faith. Regan's hysteria is a performance in which all actors must take their parts for it to play out successfully, and in this sense the masquerade of demonic possession can never fully be exposed. 9 By omitting the text's Freudian references in the film's adaptations of these episodes, the psychological interpretation, originally emphasized in the novel, is suppressed in the film.
As Charcot and his spectators had invested in the diagnosis of hysteria and desired visual proof in the form of performances and photographs, so did audiences of The Exorcist want evidence of Regan's demonic possession. Seeing was believing, and both Augustine's and Regan's bodies were subjected to scrutiny and interpretation, and in Regan's case the translation from text to film is especially reductive. The most shocking scene of the film graphically depicts Regan's head spinning 360° and this scene thus offers empirical evidence of possession, as the special effects show Regan's body contorting into a physiological impossibility. Crucially, however, in Blatty's original text, this contortion is only viewed by Chris, who is deeply emotionally and psychologically disturbed following her oral abuse at the hands of her daughter:
Chris crumpled to the floor in a daze of horror, in a swirling of images, sounds in the room, as her vision spun madly, blurring, unfocused, her ears ringing loud with chaotic distortions as she tried to raise herself, was too weak, faltered, then looked toward the still-blurred bed…. Then she cringed, shrinking back in incredulous terror as she thought she saw hazily, in a swimming fog, her daughter's head turning slowly around on a motionless torso, rotating monstrously, inexorably, until at last it seemed facing backward. (184)
The film's literal translation is repeated during the scene of the exorcism, where Linda Blair's head rotates a complete 360°, thus eliminating the ambiguity of the text which is not so explicit. In the novel, by contrast, Regan's contortions can be read as the hysteric's orgasmic seizure, her apparently anatomically impossible head-spinning finding a precursor in Augustine's “fantastic” contractures during which “her neck would suddenly twist so violently that her chin would pass her shoulder and touch her shoulder blade” (Didi-Huberman 122). Furthermore, Chris's reliability as a witness is questionable. Earlier in the text, Chris had mentioned, “I thought I saw someone levitate once. In Bhutan” (68), indicating both a belief in psychokinesis and an implicit doubt in the reality of the spectacle, and her witnessing of the contortion is characterized by the same visual uncertainty; her vision is spinning, blurred, “unfocused” when she “thought she saw , hazily, in a swimming fog” Regan's head spin. Chris needs to believe a malevolent influence is making her daughter behave in such a grotesque manner because the alternative, that Regan's own psychosis is responsible, is too much to bear. This is evidenced by Chris's conversation with Karras about Regan killing Dennings, as Karras tries to persuade Chris she imagined the contortion: “‘But the head turned around’ said Chris. ‘You'd hit your own head pretty hard against the wall’ Karras answered. ‘You were also in shock. You imagined it.’ ‘She told me she did it,’ Chris intoned without expression” (242). Chris would rather believe that her daughter is possessed and in this state has committed murder, rather than consider the possibility that her daughter might be rejecting her.
In her discussion of Friedkin's film, Creed argues that Regan's possession expresses the pre-Oedipal bond shared between mother and daughter before the intervention of paternal authority and that her obscene outbursts and brazen excretions “[construct] monstrosity's source as the failure of paternal order to ensure the break, the separation of mother and child” (38). Creed translates this failure of the paternal into “a refusal of the mother and child to recognize the paternal order” which rearticulates Regan's possession as a protest that returns her to a pre-Oedipal maternal state, and certainly the film does emphasize the closeness of the mother-daughter relationship (40). Regan's body, in its disgusting carnivalesque display, represents for Creed what mothers would be if not tempered by paternal rule: “The deep bond between mother and daughter is reinforced … at a number of different levels: Mother's swearing becomes Regan's obscenities; Mother's sexual frustrations become Regan's lewd suggestions; Mother's anger becomes Regan's power” (39). Thus, for Creed, the Devil inside Regan “may well be female” (32).
Although Creed's argument is rewarding in that it rearticulates the demonic possession narrative into a psychosomatic one, it does not account for the subtleties of Regan's rejection of paternal rule. Although Regan violently abjects herself in front of both priests by vomiting, she also implores them, as Fathers, to have intercourse with her—“Do you want to fuck her? Loose the straps and I will let you go at it!”—while to the male doctors who visit her she commands, “Fuck me. Fuck me!” and “with both her hands began masturbating frantically” (197, 109). The crucifix masturbation scene further confirms Regan's unconscious desire to have sex with her father, as she uses Christ on the Cross, God's representative on earth, to penetrate herself. This scene does not depict the demon's desire to corrupt the body of an innocent through a sacrilegious act but instead expresses Regan's wish to have sex with the (Holy) Father, whom Freud identified as interchangeable with both the Devil and the biological father (“Demonological Neurosis” 86).
Rather than simply forbidding paternal intervention, as Creed argues, Regan seduces men who desire to cure her into her room, then dispatches them if they prove a threat to the absent father she desires. This is evidenced most acutely through the murder of Chris's friend and director Dennings, whom Regan identifies as possible heir to her father's position crucially before she is in the throes of her apparent possession. At one point, she sullenly states, “[Y]ou're going to marry him, Mommy, aren't you?”; when Chris says no, Regan then asks, “[Y]ou don't like him like Daddy?” (47). Clearly, what is important to Regan is not the threat to her own place in her mother's affections but the possibility that her father could be so easily replaced. Dennings's horrendous death—Regan breaks his neck and twists his head round before throwing him out of her window—thus becomes her disavowal of his threat through a symbolic decapitation/castration and his expulsion from the family home.
In the same conversation, Chris asserts, “I love your daddy, honey; I'll always love your daddy”; whether a white lie or the truth, Chris has set herself up in opposition to Regan's desire for her father. Their divorce does not void the Oedipal dynamic but instead “reinterprets and rearranges … what Freud called the ‘family romance’ for a post-nuclear family generation” (Douglas 302). Evidently, your parents don't have to be married for you to feel the Oedipal tension. Furthermore, Regan's rejection of male scrutiny can also been understood as her projection of the jealousy she wishes her father would feel in response to other men examining her. Ventriloquizing the father-as-Devil, her warning to Klein to keep his “goddamned fingers away from [my] cunt” (61) and the assault on the neuropsychiatrist are the threats Regan hopes her father-as-lover would make to rivals of his own objectifying gaze. Through her possession, Regan expresses a desire for her absent father's possessiveness.
The Exorcist thus presents an extreme consequence of severing the Oedipal bond before its potential resolution, for Regan solicits then violently rejects all other possible father figures whom she sees as replacing the original father's place in the family unit; tellingly Karl, Chris's handyman, who is married to Willie the housekeeper and embroiled in his own filial drama, is not dispatched as she does not perceive him as a threat. 10 Similarly, the married Lieutenant Kinderman who investigates Dennings's death is safe, as he never enters Regan's room or comes into direct contact with her. So, though Creed does identify that “Regan is ‘possessed’ with an incestuous longing” (41), she continues to attribute this longing for mother. Yet, though Regan does engage in a sexual act with her mother, the graphic oral rape which leaves Chris covered in the blood of her daughter's lacerated vagina is not an extreme expression of erotic desire to reunite with her but a vicious mockery and rejection of her maternal authority, as symbolized by Regan's literal and violent pushing away of Chris after the act: “‘Lick me, lick me! Aahhhhhh!’ Then the hand that was holding Chris's head down jerked it upward while the other arm smashed her a blow across the chest that sent Chris reeling across the room and crashing to a wall with stunning force while Regan laughed with bellowing spite” (183). This scene figures Regan's bleeding as both menstrual and sexual, as her “vagina gushed blood onto sheets with her hymen, the tissues ripped” (183). While her penetration with the crucifix means she has lost her virginity to the symbolic father and locates her body as a site of sexual desire for him, the notion of menstrual blood signifies her womb's desire, and failure, to bear him a child. Just as Augustine's periods started when she entered la Salpêtrière , where “under the very eyes and tender concern of her physicians … she ‘became a woman’” (Didi-Huberman quoting Bournville 117), so, too, does Regan's menstruation correlate with her hysterical manifestation of the desire to please her father.
This hostility toward the mother is present in the text even before Regan is fully possessed, as evidenced by her refusal to let Chris play with the Ouija board because she is not pretty enough (45–46). This attack is articulated through Regan's imaginary friend Captain Howdy, a figure of patriarchal authority that Chris recognizes is modeled after Regan's father, Howard: “A fantasy playmate. It didn't sound healthy. Why ‘Howdy’? For Howard? Pretty close ” (45). Despite Howard's absence in the text, it is Chris who embodies abandonment. At the height of her exorcism, Regan-as-demon reveals that she blames Chris for the disintegration of her family, the loss of her father, and her own psychosis: “‘Ah, yes, come see your handiwork, sow-mother! Come! … See the puke ! See the murderous bitch! … Are you pleased? It is you who have done it! Yes, you with your career before anything , your career before your husband , before her, before … your divorce !’” (291). Desiring the absent biological father's love, Regan continues to fulfill the Oedipal pattern through her rejection of the mother whom she blames for his departure. As Creed's pre-Oedipal reading demonstrates, psychoanalytical theory has evolved beyond Freud's phallocentric model of the Oedipal conflict, and the psychoanalytical and cultural epistemologies of hysteria are at a distinctly post-Freudian point. 11 However, Blatty's novel, written before the feminist post-structuralist concept of l'ecriture feminine re-appropriated the figure of the hysteric, is still bound up in the incestuous father/daughter, doctor/patient dynamic which Charcot established with Augustine and Freud and Breuer continued with Dora and Anna O. Regan repeats this dynamic with her doctors and then her priests, all of whom subject her to scrutiny to which she responds with sexually aggressive hysterical outbursts. That Regan ultimately rejects the attention of these men serves to underpin the severity of her originary Oedipal conflict: no one will do but her father. Initially, Chris, versed in pop-Freudianism, is not blind to the possibility of this type of neurosis, for she interprets Captain Howdy as Regan's father Howard, reads Howdy's rejection of her as “unconscious hostility” (46), and anticipates the psychiatric diagnosis of hysteria brought about as a reaction to the trauma of divorce (241). Chris is clearly aware of the psychological possibilities, but it is more comforting to accept that her daughter is possessed and thus maintain an emotional connection with her, albeit a distressing one, rather than accept that her daughter's anguish is caused by a deep affection for the estranged father which would implicitly devalue her own parental status.
Because Chris accepts Regan's hysterical performance of demonic possession as reality, she not only encourages the psychosis but perpetuates it. This dynamic is symptomatic of Shared Psychotic Disorder, or Folie à Deux , first reported in 1877 by Ernest-Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret, which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines as “a delusion that develops in an individual who is involved in a close relationship with another person (sometimes termed the ‘inducer’ or ‘the primary case’) who already has a Psychotic Disorder with prominent delusions” (305). Karras overtly diagnoses the mother as herself hysterical, “that's just what it is: hysterical imagining ” (243), and so there is implicitly a lingering sense of heredity surrounding Regan's condition which echoes the nineteenth-century belief that hysteria was passed down the maternal line; in the narrative, it is Chris who first hears/hallucinates the rapping sounds which are later associated with the demon (21). She is described elsewhere as being “on the brim of hysteria” (107) and, as an actress, she fits Charcot's hysterical model of performing a melodramatic part for an audience. Freud argued that the daughter's mimicry of hysterical symptoms “signifies a hostile desire on the girl's part to take the mother's place, and…expresses her object-love towards her father” (Group Psychology 38). If Chris is predisposed to hysteria, Regan's condition is a jealous response which replicates and betters it in order to supersede her rival.
S.J. Kiraly discusses a case of Folie à Deux between mother and daughter in which both parties were convinced they were being spoken to and influenced by the Devil. Like Regan, the daughter experienced familial tensions: her father (like Anna O.'s) was ill and both she and her mother, who like Chris is described as “very theatrical” and “giving her history with a hysterical flavour,” were involved in his convalescence (224). With the father absented through his illness, the mother-daughter dynamic is established, and Kiraly interprets their shared psychosis of possession as the manifestation of the daughter's unconscious guilt towards the father and hostility towards the mother, which the mother identifies with “in order to rescue the relationship” (227). Chris's conviction fulfills the same function; having lost a young son, Jamie, several years ago to the failure of medicine, Chris harbors a “deep distrust of doctors and nurses” (115) and so rejects the logical psychiatric diagnosis that Regan is hysterical, instead pursuing the supernatural explanation of possession in an attempt to re-possess and lay claim to her daughter.
This is confirmed by her refusal to tell Regan's father about his daughter's condition despite Karras's encouragement: “‘I've asked you to drive a demon out, goddammit , not ask another one in!’ she cried at Karras in sudden hysteria.… ‘[W]hat in the hell do I want with Howard ? … [W]hat the hell good is Howard right now? What's the good? ’” (241). Via his psychiatric background, Karras identifies the source of Regan's illness and starts to suggest to Chris that “there's a strong possibility that [her] disorder is rooted in a guilt over—” but she anticipates his reasoning and cuts him off: “Guilt over what?… Over the divorce? All that psychiatric bullshit?” (241). Regan's separation from her father and the severing of the Oedipal structure that underpinned the family unit, triggered by Chris's rejection of Howard through divorce, is the trauma to which Regan has reacted so violently through her hysterical performance of possession.
Yet Chris refuses to accept that a reunion with the father would help, instead figuring him as a malevolent force just as damaging as the demon inside her daughter, denying that their divorce is the cause of the trauma and so implicitly exonerating herself of any blame. Indeed, Chris would rather believe that Regan is possessed than concede that her father's involvement would be beneficial. The possibility of hysteria as a response to the Oedipal dynamic is unbearable for Chris as it displaces her primacy as mother and instead positions Regan's father at the center of her desire; as Karras identifies, Chris is “worried that her daughter is not possessed!” (233). Left a single mother by an acrimonious divorce, she would rather lose possession of her daughter to the Devil than to the biological father. In this sense, then, Regan's hysteria becomes an act of self-possession as she establishes a subject position which is not answerable to mother and which allows her to express her taboo unconscious desires. What is problematic, and what remains open and unacknowledged at the end of the text, is that these desires are not sufficiently tempered as Regan is still locked in the Oedipal psychodrama, which Freud prophesized as female destiny: “Girls remain in it for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late and even so, incompletely” (“Femininity” 129). Perhaps this is also why both Sharon, Regan's nanny, and Chris find Father Karras so attractive (76, 290).
This Folie à Deux proves infectious, evolving into a case of Folie à Plusieurs (like the Loudun nuns), as more characters submit to the demonic possession explanation in order to assuage their own anxieties. While Chris must participate in Regan's hysterical charade to reject the possibility that her daughter harbors incestuous desires for the father, Merrin needs to believe it is Pazuzu who inhabits Regan as its defeat has been his raison d'être . Similarly, Karras, who initially asserts the psychiatric diagnosis, invests in the Devil inside Regan which he mimics through his own possession in order to triumph over his crisis of faith and atone for the death of his mother who he feels he neglected when she was admitted to a state-run psychiatric hospital. This sense of neurotic contagion continues beyond the text through the film's effect on audiences, who reacted with similar hysterical symptoms of fainting and vomiting, which James C. Bozzuto interestingly argues is related to viewers' own parental loss. 12 Evidently, not diagnosing Regan's Oedipal hysteria within the text has succeeded in perpetuating psychosis beyond it.
As Regan's “possession” plays out in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the center of the Nixon administration, her behavior exposes the fallibility of the traditional conservative emblem of the patriarchal family unit and forecasts the shattering of the American Dream. As Douglas and Hoppenstand have discussed, Regan's adolescent body becomes the battleground on which the fight between propriety and rebellion is waged and, in the film, a vessel for the eventual reestablishment of order; like Anna O., she remembers very little. Regan's possession and salvation thus offers comfort to a Western lay-Christian audience, as the existence of the Devil must necessarily confirm that of the ultimately more powerful God.
If read as a supernatural narrative of possession, not despite but because of its demonic content, The Exorcist is a profoundly religious tale with a relatively happy ending which reassures its readership by restoring order through the triumph of good over evil. 13 Perhaps this explains why Blatty, “conservatively-inclined” and “deeply Catholic” (Cull 47), omitted the ambiguity from the original screenplay. Colleen McDannell argues that through the film, “Blatty sought to bring to the screen his real theological concerns and answers,” and thus “The Exorcist then is not merely a horror film; it is a Catholic horror film. And, more specifically, it is a Jesuit horror film” (198–99). Similarly, Nick Cull writes that in the wake of the Cold War and the threat of Communist opposition both overseas and in America, Blatty “wrote The Exorcist and produced it as a motion picture to scare a new generation of Americans back into church. [He] was quite open about this aim. He called his novel ‘an apostolic work’” (47). If taken at face-value as an uncomplicated tale of demonic possession, the film's (mis)interpretation of the novel reinforces the hegemony and so ultimately does not undercut, but rather underpins, values of Western conservatism.
However, while Blatty's moral intentions are clear, the text nonetheless supports a psychological reading, and interpreted as a hysteria narrative, it ends with the deaths of three men at the hands of a young girl, whose psychosis has hoodwinked not only those around her but also readers and critics into believing she is an innocent victim. Hoppenstand, for example, reads the text much like McDannell views the film: as a possession narrative which articulates Blatty's concerns about “the efficacy of the Church in the modern, pragmatic world” (36) and which uses the possessed body of “an innocent adolescent girl,” “the child as victim ” as a metaphor (36, 37, my emphasis). As a response to the trauma of divorce, the failure of the family unit, and the absent father whom she desires, Regan's hysteria articulates anxieties about the implosion of the traditional nuclear family with the innocent and well-mannered child at its core, yet does not allay these anxieties through the eventual re-establishment of a moral force. If Regan's behavior is read as evidence of repression and psychosis as opposed to possession, The Exorcist becomes unsettling for entirely different reasons, for blame cannot be shifted from the child and apportioned to the demon. Thus, all Regan's obscene and sacrilegious actions, the masturbation with the crucifix, the oral rape of her mother, the murders of three men including two priests, are performed not through her but by her, and no one else.
Within the Freudian model of hysteria, the root cause of the neurosis, that is, the Oedipal trauma, must be diagnosed, discussed, and disavowed in order that the patient is cured. It is this act of catharsis which provided Freud and Breuer with their case studies, as Julia Borossa summarizes: “Hysterics' symptoms made sense, inasmuch as they were a response to a psychic (as opposed to physical) trauma …. [T]his trauma had to do with libidinal impulses which had been thwarted” and required “a cure, of a cathartic nature, depended on the remembrance and expression of that trauma in narrative form, within the context of a therapeutic relationship” (32). However, because the potential diagnosis of hysteria is rejected in favor of the supernatural explanation of demonic possession, Regan is not given the opportunity to talk through her anxieties surrounding her absent father, and thus her neurosis, undiagnosed and unabated, transforms into psychosis. Regan's true anxiety, her “Ur-text” as Douglas defines it, “alone can validate its authenticity and existence” but remains “forever inaccessible” (304) and at the end of both novel and film she “is lost, latent again, not expressed: the narrative closes over her” (298). Repressed and not possessed, inevitably Regan's hysteria erupts again, this time in the movie sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), in which psychiatrist Dr. Tuskin discovers that “the demon” still lurks within her. Clearly, not diagnosing and curing hysteria has its commercial advantages
The novel The Exorcist confirms the Oedipal conflict as the driving force behind Regan's condition. Her father pervades the text by his very absence; his presence echoes around the house through his daughter's longing for him. The very title evokes the Catholic Father and places the figure of the patriarch as the epicenter of the text around which all trauma orbits. Regan is the modern-day Augustine, Dora, Anna O., expressing the Oedipal tensions of the hysteria narrative which has been embedded in the Western cultural (un)conscious since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Her body performs the script of the father/daughter/doctor/patient dynamic in which the female hysteric repeatedly finds herself locked and from which she cannot escape. Regan remains trapped in her hysteria as Chris's unwavering belief in her daughter's possession attempts to remove the psychosomatic possibility that her body is capable of its own grotesque transformation and the murders of three men, while audience responses to the text and its filmic adaptation have concentrated on the supernatural element and so exonerated Regan by rejecting the notion of psychosis. Even Creed's insightful interpretation neglects Oedipal hysteria, the role of the father and the daughter's desire for him. So, it seems, the demonic is more permissible than the neurotic, and The Exorcist ultimately demonizes hysteria.
Consequently, The Exorcist as a good versus evil tale of demonic possession has become a cultural given, and to offer an alternative reading seems sacrilegious. The demonic possibility is so seductive and possessive that while the novel suggests that our repressed anxieties and desires can potentially have a catastrophic effect on the social and moral order, the film's interpretation of literal demonic possession through the fetishization of Regan's abused body as cipher for such neuroses undoes this suggestion. Although perhaps not as satisfying to post-Freudians as a pre-Oedipal reading, considering The Exorcist as a case study of Oedipal hysteria exposes how the phallocentric model can be potentially ruinous for the patriarchal society it underpins. It is precisely because Regan has not sublimated her desire, because it remains so potent beneath her innocent surface that through the masquerade of demonic possession this “angel” (24) can murder three men, yet escape blame or punishment.
1. See Bennett Simon and Rachel B. Blass (1991) for a concise overview of the evolution of Freud's theories on the Oedipus complex. Jung coined “Electra complex” (which Freud rejected) to define the female Oedipus complex (154), but for reasons of clarity and concision I will not be using the term.
2. Hendrika C. Freud emphasises the causality between the Oedipus complex and hysteria, explaining that “in psychoanalysis, hysteria and the Oedipus complex were for a long time more or less synonymous” (159).
3. Dr. Klein could be a reference to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, a contemporary of Freud and pioneer of object relations theory.
4. The classical definition of hysteria, derived from the Greek hysteron , womb, fashioned the condition as a female preserve by locating its origins in the reproductive system. The womb was considered a volatile organ which if left empty would migrate around the woman's body in search of a child, blocking the respiratory passages and “by not allowing her to breathe, throws her into extreme emergencies, and visits all sorts of other illnesses upon her” (Plato 87, 91c). The empty womb as mechanism of hysteria was expanded by Freud whose Oedipal model of the neurosis, with the desire to have sex with the father and provide him with a child at its core, located a paternal trauma as the root cause of his patients' symptoms. Freud studied under Charcot, promoter of hystero-epilepsy as a neurological condition, the diagnosis Regan's doctor Klein originally offers before suggesting the Freudian alternative of conversion hysteria.
5. Regina's behavior betrayed her Oedipal desires which she fulfilled vicariously when she signed a diabolical pact where she had “forsworn God and the Trinity, and she had taken the Devil—her lover—as her father in God's stead” (226). As such, Regina enters into a relationship with the Devil in which he takes the place of both fathers, biological and holy, and in her confession she explained how “she had even imagined the possibility of giving him children,” which “allowed her to develop the Oedipal narrative yet further so that she might in imagination provide her father with the phallic compensation of children” (234).
6. Regan's condition also finds a precedent in the mass “possessions” of the Ursuline nuns at the French convent of Loudun between 1632 and 1640, where “hysteria was the devil's ventriloquist” (Beizer 47). In the Loudun case, the “young girl” Sister Clara prefigures Regan with her “strange convulsions, blaspheming, rolling on the ground, exposing her person in the most indecent manner…with foul and lascivious expressions and actions” while the collectively “possessed” nuns are an example of Folie à Plusieurs , or group hysteria (des Niau 2: 31).
7. In “Demonological Neurosis,” Freud discusses how Christoph Haizmann made a pact with the Devil to improve his business and nine years later began to experience terrible seizures. When he signed the pact, Christoph's father had recently died, and as such the Devil becomes a replacement for the absent father. Freud makes this explicit by drawing on the correlation between the Devil and God as the ultimate imago of the “exalted father”: “Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype of both God and the Devil” (85, 86). As the Oedipal model is predicated on heterosexuality for Freud, he could not explicitly diagnose Christoph as a hysteric but conceded that his delusions are the return of his repressed “feminine attitude to [the father] which culminates in a phantasy of bearing him a child” (90).
8. The nuns performed erotically charged attitudes passionnelles similar in description to Augustine's and Regan's head spinning and arc de cercle: “[They] struck their chests and backs into their heads, as if they had their necks broken, and with inconceivable rapidity …. They threw themselves back till their heads touched their feet, and walked in this position with wonderful rapidity, and for a long time …. They made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men (des Niau 2: 31, 37–34, 44). Regan's hysterical onslaught of sexual violence thus finds a genealogy in both Augustine and the Loudun nuns, whose repressed desires were also aimed at the Father, the handsome and corrupt priest Urbain Grandier about whom the nuns had purportedly had illicit dreams and who was accused of, and executed for, invoking their possessions (see de Certeau).
9. In “La Foi qui gúerit” (“Faith Healing”), Charcot conceded that the idea of a miraculous cure could be just as potent as a medical one; as such, Regan can be “saved” because her possession-as-hysteria demands it, and within the context of auto-suggestion her belief in the possession requires an equally potent faith—that of Father Merrin in Jesus Christ—to cure her. As Didi-Huberman summarizes, “healing is not a cure but a symptom—a hysterical symptom ” (242).
10. Karl's drug addict daughter Elvira is an interesting counterpoint to Regan, as while Elvira's rejection of her parents disavows the Oedipal family drama which still traumatizes Regan, she fulfils a similar function in the text as the rebellious daughter destroying the family unit, and by association society, with her bad behavior (see Hoppenstand 37). Tellingly, this subplot, which services the psychological narrative over the supernatural, is completely omitted from the film.
11. Feminist scholars such as Elisabeth Bronfen (1998) and Hendrika C. Freud (2011) have refigured hysteria engagingly to show how it can be read as the response to the first trauma we all experience, that of separation from the maternal body, while work on shell shock and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has dispelled the notion that hysteria is a female preserve (Showalter 167–94).
12. Bozzuto cements the notion of Devil-as-parent and suggests that for his subjects the film precipitated a psychotic reaction because it tapped into their own trauma regarding parental loss and “forced them to experience anger and hostility” toward the lost parent which “resulted in these fears of identification with the Devil, or in concerns over possession” (47).
13. The film was commended by Father Kenneth Jadoff in the Catholic News as “deeply spiritual” (Kermode 10).
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