Fernando Coura Assis
Psychoanalyst; Postgraduate Program in Political Psychology,
University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil
Abstract:
William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist and William Friedkin’s 1973 film adaptation organize the possession of twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil around a struggle over who may speak for, about, and through her. Existing scholarship has productively examined the work’s conflict between science and religion, its medical imagery, gendered body horror, and the acoustic construction of demonic evil. This article shifts the question from what Regan’s possession means to how the disruption of voice, agency, and interpretive authority makes possession horrifying. Drawing on Freud’s uncanny, Lacan’s accounts of the divided subject, the signifier, and the Other, and psychoanalytic work on cinematic voice, I argue that possession functions as an extreme crisis of enunciation. Regan’s body becomes the site where medicine, psychiatry, maternal testimony, Catholic ritual, and the demon compete to determine the truth of her condition. Comparison of novel and film shows that adaptation intensifies this crisis by separating visible body from audible agency. The horror of possession lies not only in bodily invasion, but in the possibility that one’s voice may cease to guarantee one’s authorship of speech.
Keywords:
The Exorcist; psychoanalysis; possession; voice; subjectivity; Lacan
To cite as: Assis, Fernando Coura (2026), “Who Speaks Through Regan? Possession, Voice, and the Crisis of Subjectivity in The Exorcist.” PsyArt 30, pp. 29-41.