This study seems to be much ado about very little and tends to show that Sigmund Freud was very careless and inaccurate, hardly a new or startling discovery since Freud remarked that he was often very sloppy.
It concerns the case of Johann Christoph Haizmann, a destitute painter who was born in Traunstein, Bavaria, in 1652, and having lost a parent, supposedly made two bonds with the devil, one in the year 1668, written in ink, the other in 1669 written in blood. From the study of the available documents, mainly a folk-song about the painter, a brief account by Father G. Petschacher, and a collection of documents compiled by Father A. Eremiasch, Freud made a psychoanalytical study of the case, arriving at the conclusion that the illness should be interpreted as a conflict over unconscious homosexuality, that is in terms of the father-complex, an interpretation which he made also