A psychoanalytic contribution to psychic vampirism: a case vignette.
In conclusion, the vampire is a complex symbol of the voracious, ambiguous, horrific, transformed, and transforming, early mother figure. What may cause a regressive reaction leading to loss of object constancy? In this study I have addressed a specific physical transformation of the mother that created profound anxiety in her child. This experience can be felt as horrific. An emotional deadening may be another response. We are all susceptible to anxiety stemming from some loss of object constancy. Mr. A. certainly suffered from this phenomenon: witness his need to experience me as always available and sustained. He experienced his mother as an elusive, vague entity. We can only conjecture that his very early, preverbal upbringing was similarly experienced. To some extent, we were all exposed to some element of imperfect, inconsistent mothering. This reality, along with the other previously mentioned variables, could make us all vulnerable to vampiric anxieties. Also, I have suggested that these infantile experiences of frightening changes in the transformed mother, who may be felt as draining the life from the child, can become the basis for an organizing fantasy and lead to type of object-relating that is self-sacrificing to an extreme--a masochistic yielding to a severely demanding object. Through identification with that object a demanding, insatiable quality is acquired. Finally, this form of early experience is, perhaps, so much a part of human experience that it has become the basis of a myth of universal proportions.
Wilson
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New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis, USA.
D000328:Adult; D000437:Alcoholism; D016241:Child of Impaired Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007062:Identification, Psychological; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009229:Mythology; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D014167:Transference, Psychology