negative feelings towards them are repressed, and that these feelings come back to haunt the living – whether family, friends, or lovers – in dreams. Ernest Jones took up this theme in a groundbreaking essay on the vampire, published in German in 1912. He argued that the image of the vampire was a ‘projection’ – an embodiment of the living person’s ambivalent feelings, both of hatred and love, towards the dead person. It is for this reason that the vampire is said to return to visit the home of its nearest relatives.
In addition, Jones maintained that the vampire ‘belief complex’, as he termed it, was a form of regression to an early infant state. This state he described as ‘an infantile sadistic-masochistic phase of development’ in which the young child expresses anger towards his parents, especially his mother, by biting. He argued that when the child grows up and the parent dies, he or she may begin to feel unconsciously guilty about these early hostile feelings (and others accrued along the way), and may therefore begin to ‘project’ these feelings onto the dead parent, imagining that the parent will come back in a hostile guise to wreak revenge.
In addition, he maintained that the mixture of emotions conjured up by the folkloric image of the vampire is expressed by the ‘sucking’ aspect of the child’s experience, which symbolizes love, and nurturing; and that furthermore, there is a ‘biting’ aspect, which represents hatred, or at any rate some kind of destructive, violent impulse.
Oral fixation: sucking and biting
This argument may perhaps seem tortuous, but in later studies on the psychology of sexuality, psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein took up the theme of Jones’ early paper on the vampire. In their descriptions of infant development, they discussed the way that, once the baby’s teeth come through, it begins to find pleasure not just from sucking at its mother’s breast, but from biting it as well. (It is often, at this stage, when the biting becomes excessive, that the mother will understandably decide to wean the baby.) Depending on how successfully the baby and mother negotiate these important developmental stages, the infant will mature normally, or become fixated, to a lesser or greater degree, at the oral stage. This kind of fixation leads to various types of unhealthily rigid personality traits, mental imbalance, or, in the worst case, severe psychological illness.
Thus, according to this psychological reading, the vampire stands as a represen-tation of humanity’s fixation on the primitive oral stage of development, in which pleasure is received by sucking, biting, chewing, and so on. Our interest in, and excitement about, vampires, is to do with this early memory of infancy, and may also be an attempt to overcome the ambiguities occasioned by such powerful, contradictory emotions.
Whether or not we accept this explanation, it does seem likely that the figure of the vampire embodies some of our darkest fears and desires: firstly, our anxieties about our possible hostile feelings to those who have gone before us, especially parents and family relatives; and secondly, our primitive urge to return to the oral stage, in which sucking and biting are a childish source of pleasure.
The Aswang
These intellectual adventures into the primitive world of ancient folklore, pointing out recurring cross-cultural images, were exciting developments in several fields, from psychology to anthropology. While psychoanalysts studied the meaning of folkloric figures in terms of individual psychology, cultural anthropologists began to see links between the myths and legends of many different cultures around the world. And none appeared to recur more frequently than the figure of the bloodsucking revenant or vampire.
Today, many of these myths and legends continue to persist, particularly in parts of the world where folklore still plays a major part in
In addition, Jones maintained that the vampire ‘belief complex’, as he termed it, was a form of regression to an early infant state. This state he described as ‘an infantile sadistic-masochistic phase of development’ in which the young child expresses anger towards his parents, especially his mother, by biting. He argued that when the child grows up and the parent dies, he or she may begin to feel unconsciously guilty about these early hostile feelings (and others accrued along the way), and may therefore begin to ‘project’ these feelings onto the dead parent, imagining that the parent will come back in a hostile guise to wreak revenge.
In addition, he maintained that the mixture of emotions conjured up by the folkloric image of the vampire is expressed by the ‘sucking’ aspect of the child’s experience, which symbolizes love, and nurturing; and that furthermore, there is a ‘biting’ aspect, which represents hatred, or at any rate some kind of destructive, violent impulse.
Oral fixation: sucking and biting
This argument may perhaps seem tortuous, but in later studies on the psychology of sexuality, psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein took up the theme of Jones’ early paper on the vampire. In their descriptions of infant development, they discussed the way that, once the baby’s teeth come through, it begins to find pleasure not just from sucking at its mother’s breast, but from biting it as well. (It is often, at this stage, when the biting becomes excessive, that the mother will understandably decide to wean the baby.) Depending on how successfully the baby and mother negotiate these important developmental stages, the infant will mature normally, or become fixated, to a lesser or greater degree, at the oral stage. This kind of fixation leads to various types of unhealthily rigid personality traits, mental imbalance, or, in the worst case, severe psychological illness.
Thus, according to this psychological reading, the vampire stands as a represen-tation of humanity’s fixation on the primitive oral stage of development, in which pleasure is received by sucking, biting, chewing, and so on. Our interest in, and excitement about, vampires, is to do with this early memory of infancy, and may also be an attempt to overcome the ambiguities occasioned by such powerful, contradictory emotions.
Whether or not we accept this explanation, it does seem likely that the figure of the vampire embodies some of our darkest fears and desires: firstly, our anxieties about our possible hostile feelings to those who have gone before us, especially parents and family relatives; and secondly, our primitive urge to return to the oral stage, in which sucking and biting are a childish source of pleasure.
The Aswang
These intellectual adventures into the primitive world of ancient folklore, pointing out recurring cross-cultural images, were exciting developments in several fields, from psychology to anthropology. While psychoanalysts studied the meaning of folkloric figures in terms of individual psychology, cultural anthropologists began to see links between the myths and legends of many different cultures around the world. And none appeared to recur more frequently than the figure of the bloodsucking revenant or vampire.
Today, many of these myths and legends continue to persist, particularly in parts of the world where folklore still plays a major part in
Similar Books
