Psychoanalysis and the witchcraft continuum

Psychoanalysis is more often than not of the tradition of the Christian Inquisition, in that it wants to establish some intimacy within the sphere of evil.

We may be familiar with the Medieval notion of witches, being those who were morally corrupted by the devil, to the point that only torture or death could "save" them.  Such spiritual corruption attributed to women, both young and old, was considered to put them at odds with the divine truth, the absolute metaphysical reality, including the ability to be aware of their condition.   Only through continually wearing them down over a number of days and sleepless nights, could those accused of witchcraft be even brought into awareness of the sinister nature of their deeds.   Otherwise they would deny their evil, because the devil was in them.

Much of contemporary psychoanalysis also puts individuals, especially women, at odds with "The truth".  This divine truth is always patriarchal ideology, especially in the Judaic formulations of a Freud. According to these formulations, the truth is never self-evident, never on the surface, but always has to be rummaged for.  Original assertions have to be discarded, whilst one waits for a moment of unguarded speech, at which point the accused will inevitably acknowledge that everything she had said was back to front.

This is the moment the priest/inquisitor had been waiting for.   He had known it was coming all along as the process of disregarding whatever the " witch" had said whilst applying pressure to say something else inevitably brings this about.

One does not vigorously deny anything, unless those allegations happen to be true.  Vigorous denials are a sign of the spiritual warfare for one's soul, with God and the Devil battling each other for supremacy.  To assure God wins, the woman has to die, and it is always a shame when she doesn't go to her death gracefully.  That's when the stage plans are in danger of being ruined.

The priest must battle valiantly, therefore, against Satan's forces, to win the moment of forced intimacy in which "the witch" confesses to her crimes and is willing to go to her death for her sins.  This is the moment the priest had been waiting for -- when he and the "witch" are one, in crime and forgiveness.

This fundamental reversal, where the one really guilty of a crime (the priest) causes his victim to confess to an outrageous level of sinfulness and guilt is the stage play constantly repeated in every patriarchal system, especially those of Abrahamic derivation.  Psychoanalysis is no different whenever it posits the existence of an unconscious at odds with normative communication.

If one denies what has been stated many times, in order to find a residue of "truth" in what has not been said, then one is guilty of belief in witchcraft.