Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 4: The Psychoanalytic Vampire
Sally Miller- ‘Nursery Fears made Flesh and Sinew’: Vampires, the Body and Eating Disorders
Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, London, United Kingdom

This paper concentrates on understanding certain aspects of the vampire myth in English and American literature. In particular, I examine the vampire’s relation to blood, sexuality, and the body in various texts, using psychoanalytic concepts to shed light on some previously undiscussed aspects of this complex relationship.
To begin, I propose a psychoanalytic model to inform an understanding of the vampire. Here I look at modern and nineteenth-century accounts of the vampire, examining the role of blood, biting and the Oedipus complex.
There are however, distinct differences between the fiction and poetry of early vampire writers, such as Coleridge, Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, and modern works by authors as diverse as Anne Rice, Jewelle Gomez and Todd Grimson. Therefore, in the second part of my paper, I focus exclusively on modern fiction, examining the relationship between the contemporary vampire and psychoanalytic understandings of eating disorders, in particular anorexia nervosa. By doing this I draw attention to recent developments in the vampire myth and provide some explanation for them.
I conclude by suggesting that there exists a close relationship between the psychoanalytic understanding of anorectic and the fictional portrayal of the contemporary vampire. The key features they share being: an ambivalent relationship to the mother, seen in the desire to possess/destroy her and the fear of retaliation for these wishes; an inability to separate from the mother, as is seen in the denial of sexual difference; and the inability to discern one’s body as one’s own, articulated through the perception of appetite as alien to the self and phantasies of surviving the death of the body. Finally, I propose that the contemporary vampire and the anorectic share not only the same psychic background to their behaviour but arrive at the same conclusion – the destruction of the body.

Fiona Peters- Looking in the mirror: Vampires, the Symbolic and the Thing
University of the West of England, United Kingdom

Combining the philosophy of Kant with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Slavoj Zizek argues that vampires, in their perceived status as neither fully dead nor fully alive, become transgressive representations of the 'thing in itself', and are thus able to elude the deathly Symbolic world to which human beings are condemned:
" This Kantian background is most easily perceived in the vampire novels: when, in a typical scene, the hero endeavours to deliver the innocent girl who has become a vampire by finishing her off in the appropriate way (the wooden stake through the heart and so on), the aim of this operation is to differentiate the Thing from the body, to drive out the Thing, this embodiment of perverse and traumatic enjoyment, from the body subordinated to the "normal" causal link."
In this paper I will examine the ways in which the presence of the Thing, excessive enjoyment revealed to us in examples of the uncanny as well as through beings such as vampires who twist the boundaries between death and life, both structures and subverts Dracula by Bram Stoker. As Zizek argues:
"The paradox of vampires is that, precisely as "living dead", they are far more alive than us, mortified by the symbolic network. The usual Marxist metaphor is that of capital sucking the blood out of the workforce, embodiment of the rule of dead over the living; perhaps the time has come to reverse it: the real "living dead" are we, common mortals, condemned to vegetate in the Symbolic."
In Jacques Lacan's seminal essay 'The Mirror Stage', he argues that becoming a human subject is not a given but instead relies on a process of identifications that he explains metaphorically through the ways in which the child begins to become transfixed by its own image in the mirror. This for Lacan is fundamentally a misrecognition that sets the human being on a path that forever excludes any notion of fullness, and in fact 'creates' an unconscious:
"The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire development."
Vampires have no need for an unconscious - nor can they be seen in mirrors because they do not rely on the process of identifications that Lacan describes; in other words they have not become formed as human subjects, and in the case of those who become vampires after being human, they have in fact achieved that which is an impossibility for the rest of us - they have evaded the symbolic order and revealed the presence of the Thing. Or, as Zizek points out:
"It is therefore clear why vampires are invisible in the mirror: because they have read Lacan and, consequently, know how to behave-they materialize object a which, by definition, cannot be mirrored."

Hyun-Jung Lee- ‘One for Ever’: The Threat of the Abject in Le Fanu’s Carmilla
Department of English, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA

This paper reads Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla alongside Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Kristeva’s related theory on the abject to uncover the source of Carmilla’s threat and potency as a transgressive figure. As Kelly Hurley suggests in her study of fin-de-siècle horror, literary Gothic at the end of the Victorian era takes the uncanny and compounds it with the abject. Le Fanu’s Carmilla anticipates this fin-de-siècle turn in Victorian Gothic texts, offering a provocative example of the workings of the uncanny in Gothic and the abject that constantly haunts it. While many recent critics interpret Carmilla’s voracious desire for Laura in the context of nineteenth-century female sexuality—whether homoerotic or autoerotic—few focus on the text’s specific formulation of that desire as a craving to merge with its object, the need to “become one” with the beloved. Instead of reading the “dangerous” attraction between Laura and Carmilla as a threat to patriarchal, heterosexual order, this paper views Carmilla as an incarnation of the abject: the long-forgotten part of the self that has been othered in the originary formation of identity. Carmilla’s insistence on the unity between her victim and herself—“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever” —invokes the repellent lure of subjectivity’s dissolution in the moment of abjection. This assertion of unity threatens existing cultural ideologies by suggesting that self and other—good and evil, proper and improper, domestic and foreign—are constructed from the same originary material. This paper argues that, surpassing all threats to patriarchal or heterosexual order, it is this anarchic possibility that is truly “dangerous” in Le Fanu’s Carmilla, because it undoes not just sexual demarcations but also countless other conceptual distinctions structuring Victorian society.

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