Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

I woke up during the night because I felt an odd sort of external presence around me, an eerie presence, like evil and seductive, that felt like it was smothering me, and I couldn’t move or protect myself because my body felt completely paralyzed. Can you explain what this was all about?

 
n medieval times, this experience was attributed to an incubus, a demon thought to lie on and seduce sleeping persons, especially women. (In medieval folklore, a demon causing a corresponding experience for a man was sometimes called a succubus.)

Now, a modern psychological explanation of these experiences begins with a close look at the words smothering and seduction.

Let’s begin this examination by considering how every human infant, being completely helpless at birth, needs to be nursed and protected in order to survive. The infant needs to be enveloped, so to speak, in a mother’s love—and this whole experience can have the quality of an idyllic, intoxicating bliss. Nevertheless, every infant is destined to become an independently functioning adult, and to achieve this independence the growing child must be separated psychologically from the mother through the influence of the father. So right here we have a fundamental tension: the bliss of envelopment in another, if it isn’t eventually stopped, can actually stifle the attainment of independence.

As adults—especially if we have been forced into independence rather than initiated into it through proper guidance—we can feel a nostalgic yearning for the bliss of an infantile envelopment in a mother. And so we will create intoxicating fantasies of being “enveloped” by another person. But because contemporary culture invariably confuses sexuality with love, these fantasies of envelopment become fantasies of sexual seduction.

Now here’s where things get psychologically complicated. Just as infantile envelopment in a mother can also be stifling, adult seduction has its own dark side: smothering. Sexual seduction, at its psychological core, really is a matter of manipulation by the desire of another. And when seen in its raw reality, manipulation is far from being blissful. In fact, it’s downright terrifying.

Imagine a place where there is no justice and no truth, only unbridled hedonism, a preoccupation with personal satisfaction even to the point of causing pain to others. Imagine being vulnerable to being seized and used by any other being who stumbles upon you. Scream all you want and no one will hear you because everyone else is screaming too. So you can’t really scream at all.   Well, this is the place of the demonic.

Therefore, when you unconsciously direct your life desire to being seduced, you enter the place of the demonic. At first it might seem exciting and intoxicating. But sooner or later, before you’re totally lost, your unconscious will wake you up to the sheer terror of the paralyzing danger in which you have placed yourself.

But will you listen?

And if you do listen, how do you fight off the demonic? You change your attitude. Turn away from the intoxicating abandonment to self-serving illusions of ecstasy and learn how to sacrifice yourself in service to others through real love. It’s that simple.

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