Those who associate "possession" with the gullible old days before the rise of modern science should consult Thomas B. Allen's Possession: The True Story of an Exorcism, a detailed and disturbing account of the actual case in 1949 upon which the novel and film The Exorcist were based.

Allen, who identifies himself as an agnostic, has located more than a dozen eyewitnesses who will attest to paranormal phenomena involving a 14-year-old boy whose aunt had introduced him to a Ouija board. Family members, neighbors, priests, and therapists claim to have seen objects floating in midair, a heavy chest of drawers sliding across the room, its drawers opening and closing at random, and welts spontaneously appearing on the boy's body, which formed letters and numbers. Most chilling perhaps is the testimony of the Jesuit priest who says that the boy, from a nominal Lutheran home, answered one of his queries in perfect Church Latin: "O sacerdos Christi, tu sci me esse diabolum. Cui me derogas?" (O priest of Christ, You know I am the devil. Why do you bother me?)

Of course, the Puritans' understanding of the symptoms they observed was inextricably linked to their supernaturalist world-view. Later commentators would dismiss not only their claims to have witnessed paranormal events, but also their credulity in believing such things were possible. The tragedy of Salem was not that the Puritans believed in the demonic, but rather that they equated demon possession with bewitchment. That is, they went beyond any scriptural precedent in assuming that the symptoms they observed were caused by human agents of Satan in their midst.

After centuries of commentary on Salem that often descended into caricature, Chadwick Hansen published a landmark study in 1969 called Witchcraft at Salem. Hansen exploded a good many popular myths, showing that accusations of witchcraft were rare in Puritan New England as compared to Europe, where thousands were executed as witches in the early modern era. Hansen also demonstrated that the Boston clergy discouraged rather than encouraged the public excitement over witchcraft, and that folk magic and witchcraft were indeed widespread in both old and New England at the time.

In dealing with the afflicted children themselves, Hansen records the severity of their symptoms, asserting that the children were not frauds but rather hysterics. He refers the reader to classic studies on hysteria, such as those by nineteenth-century French clinicians Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) and Pierre Janet (1859-1947).

Indeed, it was Charcot who pioneered the idea that religious ecstasies and demonic possessions were hysterical in nature. At his Paris clinic in the 1870s, Charcot gave public lectures, bringing his patients on stage to demonstrate a variety of neurological disorders. His demonstrations, as well as the 120 case studies of Janet, record most of the symptoms associated with possession: seizures and contortions, paralysis, anesthesia, restrictions of the senses, hallucinations, and altered personalities.

Nineteenth-century French physicians were fascinated by seemingly paranormal abilities of their hysteric patients, such as the ability to move about, read, and write in the dark, and even an apparent ability to see into the future (for which the doctors coined the word "clairvoyance"). British physicians, on the other hand, with their strong tradition of Scottish empiricism and common-sense philosophy, would admit only to their patients' remarkably improved abilities in penmanship, playing the piano, or parsing Greek sentences.

In Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, Mark S. Micale surveys theories of this malady, ranging from the ancients' conjectures about "wandering wombs" (hysterion means "womb") to recent feminist readings of the disease. Especially intriguing is Micale's discussion of the relations between psychology and religion in nineteenth-century France. For example, when asked late in his life about purported healings at the Roman Catholic shrine near Lourdes, Charcot--generally considered a scientific naturalist--wrote that many of those who journeyed there were undeniably hysterics, but that some of the healings there were "well-authenticated" and that he sometimes sent his own patients there. He added that physicians should not neglect "the great resources of the faith cure," ending with Hamlet's famous observation that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Pierre Janet was even more explicit in his conviction that psychology was not a replacement for metaphysics. While publishing detailed case studies of hysteria, he maintained a lively interest in religious philosophy, even in spiritism and the occult. Janet was particularly intrigued by a patient of his named Madeleine, who had mystical visions and bleeding spots on her hands and feet resembling the stigmata of Christ. Janet always expressed a great deal of respect for her and saw no contradiction in having his treatments of her supplemented by regular meetings with her spiritual adviser.

The term hysteria became a household word, not because of Charcot or Janet, but because of their famous contemporary, Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud, a student of Charcot's and a bitter rival of Janet, was an outspoken atheist who would not have countenanced their accommodations to a religious point of view. His early work, Studies in Hysteria (1895), offers a number of case studies, including that of "Anna O.," whose complex and baffling symptoms were generally hysterical in nature. It was Anna herself who coined the phrase "the talking cure," finding that her symptoms were eased when she was able to verbalize her fears, fantasies, and traumatic early experiences. From Anna and early patients like her, Freud developed the rudiments of psychoanalysis, including his theories of sexual trauma in childhood, repression, and the symbolic manifestations of the unconscious in dreams and fantasies. One scholar, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, has summed up Freudian psychoanalysis as "the child of the hysterical woman."

For the first half of this century, it seemed that the issue was pretty much settled, since the notion of hysteria gave a name, a cause, and a cure to the symptoms under discussion here. But for reasons no one quite understands, cases of hysteria such as those described by Charcot, Janet, and Freud began to wane in Europe and America and pretty much disappeared by 1920. Even more significantly, the prestige of Freudian psychology has steadily declined as his theories have been increasingly discounted, his methods labeled unscientific, and even his personal integrity and character called into question. Donald Spence and Frederick Crews have offered devastating critiques of the psychoanalytic project, and Elizabeth Loftus and others have questioned whether there is even such a thing as repression, a displacement of hurtful memories from the conscious mind to some mysterious realm called the "unconscious."

As contemporary American and European psychiatry has moved away from classical psychoanalytic models, the term hysteria has been abandoned, replaced in diagnostic manuals with classifications such as "dissociative disorder--conversion type," "psychogenic pain disorder," "histrionic personality type," or "borderline personality disorder." (At least one student of psychology, T. Craig Isaacs, in a 1986 dissertation, argued that the symptoms of spirit possession do not correlate satisfactorily with any of the classifications used in diagnostic manuals in the United States. In other countries, clinicians use the term "possession disorder," a label avoided in this country because of its metaphysical nuances.)

Just as hysteria suddenly and mysteriously disappeared early in this century, so near the century's end the reported incidence of "multiple personality disorder" (MPD) has skyrocketed. In 1980, the diagnostic manual for mental health professionals (DSM III) recognized mpd as a condition involving two or more distinct, fully integrated personalities, with the dominant personality at a given time determining behavior. This classification has become increasingly problematic, and in 1994 the revised diagnostic manual replaced mpd with the rubric "dissociative identity disorder."

David Spiegel, who chaired the committee that made the changes, explained that this is a real disorder, but that it involves "a failure of integration of various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness. The problem is not having more than one personality; it is having less than one personality."

According to Ian Hacking's excellent new study, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, there were fewer than a dozen cases of this reputed syndrome before the publication of the novelized case study Sybil in 1975. Since then there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new patients, virtually all in America. Hacking describes the typical mpd patient as a woman in her midthirties who has been in some form of counseling for an average of seven years before being diagnosed with mpd. She is nearly always an excellent hypnotic subject and, on average, feels that she has 16 "alters" besides her host personality. The usual explanation for the condition is childhood trauma, most often sexual abuse.

Hacking notes that while advocates of MPD make up a popular, grassroots movement, they are by no means monolithic. One prominent practitioner, Ralph Allison, uses Theosophy as the metaphysical baseline for his understanding of MPD, and confesses that sometimes in therapy he has to "exorcise an intruding spirit." There is also a feminist strain, which focuses on abused female children in a patriarchal society; there is a religious strain, which argues for a Satanic underground that tortures and even murders thousands of infants every year; and there are even MPD therapists who specialize in past-life regressions and in memories of alien abductions.

Obviously, therapies that evoke these kinds of memories are going to provoke a reaction, especially when adults accuse family members retrospectively of childhood sexual abuse. In 1992 the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established as a support group for families targeted by such allegations. As their name suggests, members of this organization argue that false memories of abuse are created under hypnosis, and that uncritical therapists confuse fantasy with recollection.

These arguments receive powerful support in Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters's Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. Ofshe and Watters begin unequivocally: "We believe there is now sufficient evidence--within the therapists' own accounts of their techniques-to show that a significant cadre of poorly trained, overzealous, or ideologically-driven psychotherapists have pursued a series of pseudoscientific notions that have ultimately damaged the patients who have come to them for help." In their discussions of MPD therapy sessions, Ofshe and Watters recount symptoms by now familiar: patients who feel invaded by an alien presence; who rapidly change voices and personalities; who may get down on all fours and bark like animals; who may have welts appear on their bodies when visualizing abusive scenes; and who may injure or even try to kill themselves. But Ofshe and Watters argue that very few clients come in with these symptoms, that it is the therapy sessions themselves that create these symptoms. In their analysis, the symptoms of mpd are induced by uncritical use of hypnosis and by the patients' own chronic abuse of self-hypnosis.

This leaves us at something of an impasse. Here we have a collection of symptoms that have been observed since ancient times (though the more florid physical manifestations are relatively uncommon now). This condition was demonized in the early modern era, psychoanalyzed in the beginning of our century, and would now seem to be increasingly politicized. Terms such as possession, hysteria, or multiple personality all have their drawbacks, yet this dissociative disorder is very much with us as we approach a new century.

For contemporary Christians, the key issue is one of rightly gauging the boundaries between the theological, the sociological, and the psychological. In cases like these, it may be hazardous to ignore the reality of what we cannot see. But it may be equally damaging to assume that merely owning a Bible equips one as a mental health therapist.

The apostle Paul promised that some would be given the gift of discerning spirits. In our era, I believe such a gift is to be cultivated by broad acquaintance with mental health theories and practices, as well as a solid grounding in biblical principles. In an oft-quoted remark, C. S. Lewis commented that "there are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.