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While reading Walter Franklin Prince's account* of his strange experience with Mrs. Phyllis Latimer who had come to him complaining of an “obsession,” I found myself drifting into a state of déja vu. In the image which I had conjured as I read, I saw Dr. Prince talking into the space surrounding Mrs. Latimer. When I looked up from my reading, a visual memory floated before me of a theatrical performance I had seen thirty years earlier, in 1939. It was the Yiddish folk-drama, The Dybbuk. In Act Four of Ansky's play, in a scene highly charged with dramatic excitement, in a mood of darkest mysticism, the great Rabbi Azrael stands before the maiden Leah and proceeds to exorcise the Dybbuk which had possessed her.
A flood of coincidences and resemblances soon poured in on me which I sort out here in this brief communication.
Item 1: The Dybbuk was first presented in New York by Maurice Schwartz's Jewish Art Theater for the 1921-22 season. Dr. Prince reports that Mrs. Latimer came to him on “one of the first days of May, 1922.” We have no evidence that Dr. Prince saw the Yiddish version of the play, but it is likely that its mystical mood and its psychic content entered into the discussions of Prince and his colleagues at the American Society for Psychical Research. As Dr. Prince indicates in his report, he advised Mrs. Latimer that “According to the standard teaching of our time your trouble is solely one of your own mentality or your own brain. But I am willing to try an experiment on the basis of your belief that you are really obsessed.” And thereupon Dr. Prince addressed the spirit much as the fictional Rabbi Azrael addressed Leah's Dybbuk.
There are significant differences, however, between the statements made by the very real Dr. Prince and the fictional Rabbi Azral. Dr.