The incubus enters the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct but intersecting trajectories. Roscher’s monograph on the nightmare, jointly published with Hillman’s commentary in Pan and the Nightmare (1972), provides the most sustained scholarly genealogy, tracing the figure through ancient medical writers—Rufus of Ephesus, Soranus, Oreibasius, Aetius—as a clinical entity characterized by choking, paralysis, and oppressive nocturnal visitation, and situating it within a comparative mythology of Pan, satyrs, lamias, and Lilith. Jung mobilizes the incubus as a structural concept within his theory of anima and animus possession: in the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology he specifies that ‘the woman’s incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man’s succubus is a vampire,’ thereby using the figure to articulate the asymmetry between animus (plurality) and anima (unity). Von Franz, in C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, invokes the incubus theologically, as the modality by which a dark God begets Merlin. Jung’s Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature employs the term metaphorically to characterize what Freud sought to demystify. The term thus oscillates between its technical demonological heritage, its structural role in contrasexual psychology, and its function as a trope for autonomous psychic compulsion—making it a sensitive register of the corpus’s engagement with the nocturnal, the possessive, and the archaic.
The woman’s incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man’s succubus is a vampire
This passage establishes Jung’s canonical structural contrast between the incubus (as the form animus possession takes in women) and the succubus (as anima possession in men), grounding the figure in contrasexual psychology.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997thesis
The woman’s incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man’s succubus is a vampire
Hillman cites and explicates Jung’s formula to argue that the incubus/succubus distinction underlies the theoretical asymmetry between animus as plurality and anima as unity.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis
When someone is plagued by the incubus, prescribe emetics and laxatives, put the patient on a light diet, purge the head by sneezing and gargling, and later rub in beaver oil and the like to prevent epilepsy.
Roscher’s survey of ancient medical sources presents the incubus as a clinical syndrome treated by Rufus of Ephesus, situating it within the somatic-demonological tradition that depth psychology inherited and reinterpreted.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
As an incubus he impregnated a pious virgin without her knowledge. This was the begetting of Merlin.
Von Franz employs the incubus theologically to describe the dark God’s mode of incarnation in the Merlin legend, linking the figure to the problem of evil’s autonomous generative power within Christian myth.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting
He wanted to unmask as illusion what the ‘absurd superstition’ of the past took to be a devilish incubus, to whip away the disguises worn by the evil spirit and turn him back into a harmless poodle—in a word, reduce him to a ‘psychological formula.’
Jung characterizes Freud’s intellectual project as an attempt to demystify the incubus by reducing demonic possession to psychological mechanism, implicitly critiquing this rationalist move as a misrecognition of the autonomous power of the unconscious.
, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting
it does free us from the incubus of ‘nothing but,’ which is the insistent leitmotiv of all one-sidedness.
Jung uses ‘incubus’ metaphorically to name the oppressive, suffocating grip that reductive one-sidedness exerts on psychological thinking, retaining the term’s etymological sense of crushing weight.
, The Development of Personality, 1954supporting
an erotic nightmare spirit appearing in the form of a satyr… This village had been haunted for ten months by the ghost of a satyr who had evil designs on the women
Roscher documents the classical erotic nightmare demon in the form of a satyr from Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius, illustrating the incubus’s genealogical connection to Pan and the ancient tradition of demonic sexual assault in sleep.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
it is one of the characteristics of night demons and specters that they are linked with night and darkness and that they have to escape if either a light is kindled or if day breaks.
This passage elaborates the phenomenology of nightmare demons—including incubus-type figures—through their binding to darkness and vulnerability to light, establishing the mythological framework within which depth psychology locates such figures.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the devil in the shape of a large black shaggy dog had entered through the door, rushed on their chests with the speed of lightning and then disappeared
Roscher records a collective incubus visitation experienced by an entire military battalion, demonstrating the nightmare demon’s capacity for epidemic contagion and its close phenomenological link to panic.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Adam, before he knew Eve, had a demon-wife called Lilith… whereupon Lilith changed into a nightmare or lamia who haunted pregnant women and kidnapped new-born infants.
Jung traces the lamia and the nightmare demon (cognate with the incubus tradition) to the figure of Lilith, locating the incubus phenomenon within the archetype of the Terrible Mother as devouring nocturnal spirit.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Hecate is a real spook-goddess of night and phantoms, a nightmare; she is sometimes shown riding a horse
Jung identifies Hecate as a nightmare goddess whose iconography overlaps with incubus mythology, associating the nocturnal demonic visitation with the chthonic feminine archetype.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside
a demon who sometimes appears as a werewolf, sometimes as a nightmare demon with the feet of a donkey or goat, with goat’s ears and a hairy skin, and in many ways recalls the old Greek Pan and the satyrs who of course also appear as nightmare demons.
Roscher traces the morphological overlap between the incubus figure, Pan, satyrs, and vampire traditions across Greek and Byzantine folklore, illuminating the cross-cultural diffusion of the nightmare demon motif.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside