Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History

Abstract

One message of psychoanalysis that finds its echo or development in contemporary literary theorizing is that life is story production, that identity (ego) is a product of the story one (always already) invents to explain/connect the data of one's past. Story production in turn involves two elements: a characterology, or structure of personae in their relations to each other, and a plot, through and in which this characterology is manifested/constituted. For example (and there is nothing random about it), the Oedipus complex, a triangle of relations, and the Oedipal scenario, a dream of incest and parricide, are synchronic and diachronic representations of the individual subject's insertion into our culture. Perhaps the most elaborate schematization of this characterology-of-insertion is Lacan's schema R,I presented in connection with a re-analysis of Freud's analysis of Dr. Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903). Lacan's schema presents a kind of from which Schreber's psychosis differs, a culturally determined norm depending, for example, on a Cartesian conception of the (skeptical) ego. Contemporary with Schreber's madness (and Freud's early work), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) exhibits an elaborate narrativization of Lacan's characterology. What follows is a demonstration of a mapping of the characters in Dracula onto the intersections of schema R by way of Freud's Group Psychology. The value of this demonstration is two-fold: in one light, it is an explanation-by-example of the sense of schema R; in another, it is one of a set of demonstrations on Gothic texts which outline the rise of the Oedipus complex as a determinant of bourgeois psychology in the nineteenth century. In the beginning of Dracula we are introduced to six young people and to the monster who is to threaten the peacefulness of their lives. These young people are all biologically unrelated, but connected as friends or friends' friends. After Lucy is killed and Mina attacked, as Maurice Richardson says,