Cacodemonomania
Hludens sent a link to a piece in the current issue of Exquisite Corpse by David Brizer called “Copulating with Devils: Cacodemonomania.” Cacodemonomania, naturally, is the psychiatric establishment’s term for intercourse — or rather the delusion of intercourse — with demons. It’s a fun word to break down into its roots: caco means bad, unpleasant, ill, demono refers to demons, and mania is of course insanity. Cacodemonomania is a psychopathology in which you think demons fuck you. And this is not the vague kind of screwing by fate that might force you to say “Man, I’m fucked” when you lose the rent check. It is the real belief — sometimes accompanied by physical orgasms — that satan is sexing you up.
The author of “Copulating with Devils,” David Brizer, is a psychiatrist who has published books such as Quitting Smoking for Dummies and Psychiatry for Beginners. He is also a writer of short stories, and the two modes — the scientific and the fictional — seem to blend in “Copulating with Devils.” He cites the psychiatric literature on cacodemonomania, and yet he also gives an example of the condition that reads like pure fiction: “The patient, Hector P., was like a rodent, very much like one of those illicit creatures skulking on a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch…” You don’t usually find such picturesque descriptions in medical literature.
On the other hand, one of the reasons medical literature can be so much fun to read is precisely because it describes the most outrageous things in detached clinical language. You might want to compare Mr. Brizer’s (fictional?) example to the juicy part of the main article he cites, a piece titled “Cacodemonomania” that appeared in Pychiatry, Vol. 50, February 1987. Here’s a sample taken directly from the article:
“A 38-year-old, married, woman teacher, Mrs. A, was admitted… with a history of feelings of unreality, alterations in mood and expressions of the belief that she was possessed by an evil god that made her carry out actions against her will. Two years previously, while she was reading the New Testament, a ‘force’ inside her suggested that she could have more pleasurable sensations than those to be obtained while reading the Bible. She lay down on the bed and had sexual intercourse with the force, ‘as with a man,’ and with the physical sensation of penetration, resulting in orgasm. Since then there had been about twelve similar instances — some pleasurable but mostly not.”
When you read that, it doesn’t seem so insane to think that jerking off could be more pleasurable than reading the Bible. But when you go on to read the rest of the case history, you realize that the woman was probably a bit on what Freud would have called the “hysteric” side. Here’s another excerpt from the article:
“One day while sitting in the bath, Mrs. A became convinced that she was shedding large pieces of skin, which she could see and which were blocking the drain hole… [I]n 1982, while attending a Bible class, she began to feel that her god was different in some way from the god that other people experienced. She said, ‘The word Jesus is now anathema to me.’ She had been forced by her god to tear up the New Testament section of her Bible, which she put in a brown paper bag and posted through her religious minister’s door… When admitted in 1984, Mrs. A gave the additional history that over the previous six months the god that possessed her had had intercourse with her several times. She also described how one evening she became convinced that her own face had changed, the left side below her eye becoming horny and detached from the rest of her face…”
The psychiatrists reviewing the case point to the supporting role of a minister who encouraged Mrs. A in her belief that she was possessed. This mutual reinforcement is called a folie à deux, a madness of two, and it can be a powerful impulsion in delusional beliefs — which really gives you pause when you then consider that Mrs. A was a schoolteacher and continued to work throughout the period of her cacodemonomania. Now it’s possible that she was a perfectly good schoolteacher by day and a concubine of satan by night. But at the same time you have to wonder to what extent she might have further propagated her insane beliefs among her pupils. Maybe these kids will even grow up to be the sort of people who end up with phantom memories of abuse by satanic cults.
Fascinating, from a psychological perspective. So then what would they call someone who fantasizes about having sex with vampires? I think alot of people identify vampires, with a kind of evil.
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