El vampirismo desde la vertiente psicomédica Apuntes histórico-literarios para la reconsideración de una condición psiquiátrica

Abstract

In 1886, the neurologist Richard Von Krafft-Ebing published his bookPsychopathia Sexualis and offered the first explanations about paraphilias such as vampirism. This phenomenon has usually maintained in the margins of clinical research because of its rarity, receiving a literary treatment. Whenever science stopped estimating it as another medical event, it has been observed among psychologists and psychiatrists as a psychosexual bias problem that has never been well understood in mental health terms. Thus, since the end of the 19th century, a review of scientific literature has not found more than 70 cases of clinically significant vampirism. The obsession with blood sinks its roots in ancient traditions that, already merged with the business contemporary popular culture, are observed from mere curiosity. Therefore, it is difficult to decide how much in the modern vampirism is organic, mental, or simply cultural and fictional, as in the Bram Stoker’s novel. It is complex to determine how much of what today we could consider "vampiric" is genuine, while linked to the "vampire epidemic", which granted it validity in the context of Enlightened Western Europe, because the current vampires don’t look like the vampires that revolutionized the court of the Habsburgs. Vampirism is today a form of very strange mental pathology. It lacks a typical scheme that allows it to be located in its own clinical space, which has prevented its nosological categorization. However, in 1984, Herschel Prins coined the term "Renfield’s syndrome", in reference to Stoker's character, to name the picture of clinical vampirism, characterized by a sexual fetishism linked to blood. In any case, the behaviors of this clinical condition are always associated with other psychiatric disorders, usually of a psychotic type.