Initially, this paper aims to outline some historical references about hysteria, especially from its demonological perspective and regarding the “theories” which associate the idea of ‘demon’ to ‘illnesses of the soul’. We take into account Freud’s paper ‘A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis’ (1923), written in a time when Freud examined witchcraft, possessions and other phenomena and analyzed Christoph Haizmann’s case who, harassed by convulsions and frightening hallucinations, makes a deal with the devil. In that paper, Freud associates the figure of the demon to the figure of the father, outlining a fundamental question for the studies on hysteria, which will serve for Lacan’s developments about that subject.
Key words:
Hysteria; possession; function of the fathe
