Daemons, Lovers, and Psychotherapy

There are many ways to define a daemon. Freud defined a daemon in the context of psychotherapy.

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed daemons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed" (1905, p.109).

But he was wrong.

These "half-tamed daemons" are not evil. You don’t get to inhabit the human breast without having once been loved. Nor do you get to fall in love without having once been half-tamed. Nor can psychotherapy be effective without love.

“Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love,” Freud wrote in a letter to Jung (Freud/Jung 1974).

And if daemons arise in the context of love, can they be said to be evil at all? Or are these "half-tamed daemons" creatures that are loved most dearly when lost, seen most clearly when gone, heard most acutely when you call out and get no response? Is the daemon a creature you sense as if for the first time when you hold its cloth to your face for a smell that is waning, never to be restored?

You feel its loss and you want it back — tame, half-tame, wounded but alive — and that’s when you realize it is not coming back. That’s when you realize the daemon is gone.

Except in the transference.

“To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying…to the present moment” (Freud. 1905, p. 116).

And in that recognition of loss, there is pain.

There are many ways to look at pain.

For evolution, there are only two.

One form of pain travels from, let’s say, the thorn that’s just pierced your finger to the spinal cord, up to the brain stem, the thalamus, and then to the post-central gyrus of the cerebral cortex. And when that pain, carried in thick, fast-conducting fibers, discharges in the cortex, you cry out, and the mammal who you are, indeed any mammal, feels pain and pulls away.

The second form of pain is lingering. It is carried in thinner, slower-conducting fibers that also travel from the thorn that’s just pierced your finger to the spinal cord, where it follows a different path up to the brain stem, then to a different part of the thalamus, from where it is sent to a deeper more primitive part of the cerebral cortex called the insular cortex. This second, "slow pain" is more about homeostasis than it is about a quick response.

So, if you have removed the thorn, cleaned the wound — and the wound healed — the next time you would know to be more careful around roses and their thorns.

If, however, a piece of thorn remained, the wound festered, got infected, and caused the release of cytokines — a small signaling protein that initiates “sickness behaviors” — then you would begin to experience the systemic effects of "slow" pain — the pain of suffering, the pain of infection.

The pain of loss.

The pain of the loss of one’s place in the group and the pain of a festering wound are both sent to the same place in the brain — the anterior insular cortex — because both, evolution reasoned, are serious threats to life. One’s place in a group, like intact skin, is critical to survival.

And thus daemons, “those half-tamed daemons that inhabit the human heart” may cause pain but they are not to be feared. They are to be tended.

“The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution…as a chemist. But when have chemists ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances?” (1915, p. 171).

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