Renfield’s Syndrome and Vampirism As a Mental Illness

If we talk about vampires, it is impossible not to say something about clinical vampirism, a term that encompasses various types of acute mental disorders by which the subject associates blood with sexual arousal, in many cases, leading him to the conviction that he is indeed a vampire.

The subject of clinical vampirism is quite controversial even within the medical community.
There is no agreement regarding the symptoms of this disorder, a discrepancy that has been opportunely taken advantage of by the gothic culture to slip high-sounding terms, such as sanguinarius, used in English-speaking countries to discriminate against practitioners of consensual vampirism, it is that is, people who exchange blood in a voluntary and non-violent way.
Within the strictly psychiatric, clinical vampirism is a paraphilia, that is, an abnormal variable of sexuality.
For some specialists, clinical vampirism is an attenuated version of necrophilia, or love for the dead, a topic that abounds in Gothic literature, for example, in The Beloved Dead, by H.P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy; and Fitz James O’Brien’s The Child Who Loved a Tomb; to cite two notable cases.
Other branches of psychiatry clinical vampirism as a particularly aberrant form of sadism, though only in cases where the blood of the other functions as a trigger for sexual arousal, and also as a rare example of fetishism, which consists of achieving eroticization. through a part of the body of the other, and not the other in its entirety.
In this sense, blood is the fetish.

The controversy comes from psychiatry itself, which considers clinical vampirism as a symptom and not as a global and independent disorder.

Those who suffer from this disorder are often diagnosed as schizophrenics, psychotics and owners of other conditions.
However, sufferers of clinical vampirism often maintain that there is no eroticizing meaning to the blood they ingest or wish to ingest.
On the contrary, they almost always define that blood is a necessity, a food for which they can stay active, and whose absence causes them horrible physical and psychological suffering.
Statistically, clinical vampirism occurs much more in men than in women. Perhaps, a woman’s familiarity with her own blood plays a predominant role in this statistic.
The stages of development of clinical vampirism could be listed as follows; in a way, the descending ladder by which one can become a vampire:

Childhood:
The subject is prey to a bloody event, not necessarily violent, for which he discovers that blood is a trigger for excitement.

Autovampirism:
The subject finds that the sight of his own blood, and even the taste of it, fills him with sensual satisfaction.

Zoophagia:
Your own blood ceases to be effective in achieving pleasure. Subject begins to taste the blood of animals, especially domestic animals.

Clinical vampirism:
Here we reach an advanced stage of the disorder, whereby the subject seeks to drink the blood of other human beings, sometimes biting their victims.
Most of those who suffer from clinical vampirism declare that blood is an addiction, a drug, an increasingly essential need.
From a less philosophical angle, there is no difference between the supernatural vampire and the clinical vampire: they both seek and obsess about the same thing.
If we find ourselves in the uncomfortable situation of dealing with any of these vampire races, the above second case offers greater difficulties, since sunlight, mirrors, garlic, and other prophylactic methods are virtually ineffective.

Renfield syndrome: vampirism as a psychiatric illness.

The psychologist Richard Noll —author of: Vampires: reports in the psychiatric literature (Vampires: Reports in the Psychiatric Literature)— proposed in 1992 the name Renfield Syndrome to define a variable of clinical vampirism, that is, vampirism as a psychiatric illness.
Even today there is no agreement among specialists about what exactly Renfield Syndrome is.
For some, it would be a strange variety of schizophrenia, for others a simple paraphilia; and finally there are those who support the hypothesis of dysorexia, that is, an eating disorder.

Needless to say, Renfield’s Syndrome owes its name to the character in Bram Stoker’s vampire novel: Dracula (Dracula).

In the novel, Renfield is a lawyer who has gone mad during his stay in Count Dracula’s castle.
When Bram Stoker introduces him to the story, Renfield finds himself confined to an insane asylum, spending his days obsessed with eating flies and birds, certain that he will absorb the life force of these creatures.
Bram Stoker makes it clear that this repulsive diet fits what poor Renfield can get inside his cell. If it were up to him, his menu would be a bit more varied.
Specialists maintain that Renfield’s Syndrome manifests itself after an incident in childhood in which the subject associates blood as a trigger for pleasure. During puberty, this exclusively oral pleasure becomes erotic.

Renfield’s Syndrome advances on the subject’s psyche in three stages:

The first, known as autohemophagia or autovampirism, leads the patient to drink his own blood, sometimes prompting him to flagellate himself.
The second phase is zoophagy, where the patient is driven to eat or drink the blood of animals, although not always violently.
A late manifestation of Renfield Syndrome has given examples of people buying animal blood at butcher shops to stock up.
In the last stage is that of clinical vampirism, the patient seeks the blood of other human beings, either paying for it or violently. The most severe cases of Renfield Syndrome translate into horrific crimes.

Although Renfield’s Syndrome has not yet been unanimously accepted, it is not a novelty in psychiatry.
In his original essay, Richard Noll points to the work of German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing: Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886, detailing a case virtually identical to that of Bram Stoker’s Renfield, surmising that Stoker may have been familiar with that publication.

But the truth is that Bram Stoker surely never imagined that one of his secondary characters would end up being an essential example for a psychiatric disorder, or maybe yes, we will never know. In such a case, it is fair to ask how many madmen have ended their days in a padded cell, or at a stake, because of illness.

https://dimidesan.com/vampires-and-their-eternal-future/

https://dimidesan.com/lilim-the-children-of-lilith/

https://dimidesan.com/all-about-vampires/