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Confusion about the nature of possession is as old as, if not older than, recorded history. Present-day popular thinking about it compounds the confusion. It has become a hodgepodge of superstition, primitive lore, ancient demonology, musty theological dogma, esoteric doctrine and largely preconceived psychiatric and psychoanalytic opinion. Cutting through the layers of centuries old incrustations that cling to the concept like barnacles to the hull of a sunken ship, four major aspects of the possession syndrome can be distinguished:
The acting out by the victim of his inner conflicts, with a tendency to dramatize his struggle with repressed instinctual drives and to project them into the outside world. The identity of the evil demon or the benign divinity possessing the individual is then determined by his personal history, by his religious background, by his cultural conditioning and by the idiosyncratic beliefs held by him or current in his social environment. His possession may occur either in the trance state—if so, it is usually described as “somnambulic possession”—or in the waking state, in which case it has somewhat inappropriately been termed “lucid possession.” A modern example purged of its demoniacal aspects is the mediumistic trance in which a so-called trance personality, usually derived from a dissociated part or “complex” of the medium's mind, makes its appearance. A classic case is a young lady described by Jung (1902) who produced as a trance personality the glamorous knight Ullrich von Grebenstein, which was in effect a projection of her own masculine tendencies. A more recent example are the “spirit controls” Abdul Latif and Uvani, who announced themselves in the trances of the noted American medium, Eileen Garrett
. Here, too, a psychoanalytic interpretation in terms of splitting and projection is readily at hand. In other cases we are dealing with what Gustav Bychowski (1956) described as externalizations of a parental introject, with numino