True or False Possession: How to Distinguish the Demonic from the Demented

Unhinged or unholy? Fiend or fraud?

That's what authorities had to decide about the Carmelite nun Marie-Thérèse Noblet (1889-1930). She suffered sudden diseases that were as quickly cured, chokings, night beatings, unclean visions of blasphemous scenes, violent shakes witnessed by onlookers, foul assaults from filthy beasts, including one she recalled as full of terrible beauty with eyes full of hate.

Then there's Sr. Jeanne of the Angels, the 17th-century prioress of her Ursuline convent, plagued by diabolical visits with an explicitly erotic element, which spread, epidemic-like, to the Ursuline sisters under her care, whose convulsive attacks and obscene contortions scandalized all who witnessed them.

Were these sisters demonic? Deranged? Or merely deceitful?

That's the first question exorcists must answer--the question addressed in these pages by the world-famous French neuropsychiatrist Jeanne Lhermitte.

Genuine demonic possessions, admits Lhermitte, evade the explanations and exceed the competence of even the wisest physicians: they must not be handled in the clinic, but by the Church. At the same time, exorcisms do not help those who are mentally ill. So skilled physicians and trained clergy must press past the visions, the gibbering, the howlings and grindings of teeth, and other frightening symptoms to discern whether they're dealing with real possession, or only pathology, mental or physical.

That's the work Dr. Lhermitte undertakes in these these pages.

With sober clarity and reserve, he reviews the detailed clinical records of scores of cases that startled and alarmed our forefathers as well as the cases of many souls he's examined personally: unfortunate souls judged possessed, who manifested symptoms ranging from the picturesque to the loathsome and pitiful. By means of these cases, Lhermitte illuminates the criteria the Church holds to be decisive signs of genuine possession . . . and those that assure us that despite filth and fits, shrieks and slobbering in other cases the influence of the demon is sought in vain.

Good priests and wise Catholic physicians know that, for the sake of souls, disturbed souls must never be hastily examined or casually judged. True or False Possession? will teach you, too, not to rush to judgment, and show you when it's time to call the priest.

Jacques Jean Lhermitte was the son of an artist. Following early education at St. Etienne he studied in Paris, graduating in medicine in 1907. He specialised in neurology and became Chef-de-clinique for nervous diseases in 1908, 1910 Chef de laboratoire, and professeur agrégé for psychiatry 1922. He later became Médecin at the Hospice Paul Brousse, head of the Fondation Dejerine, and clinical director at the Salpêtrière.

During World War I he studied spinal injuries and became interested in neuropsychiatry. This led to publications on visual hallucinations of the self. A deeply religious man, he explored the common territory between theology and medicine, and this led to interesting studies on demoniacal possession and stigmatisation. Lhermitte was a great clinical neurologists whose enthusiasm which infected his younger contemporaries.