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Freudian Id In Bram Stoker's Depiction Of Vampirism

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The vampiric Id
An Insight into the Reflection of the Freudian Id in Bram Stoker's Depiction of Vampirism

Being key figures of the Victorian era both, Bram Stoker and Sigmund Freud, were influenced by the mindset of their time. Especially in Stoker's most famous novel Dracula, which laid the foundation for the modern vampire novel, and in Freud's structural model of the psyche, which is still a key concept in psychology, there are striking analogies. In Freud's model, the human psyche is split into three interrelated instances: the id, the ego and the superego. The ego functions as a mediator between the antagonizing superego, containing social as well as cultural norms and values, and the drive-controlled id, representing the inherent bodily …show more content…

According to Freud's psychoanalysis, the id consists of the bodily drives, which are dichotomously subdivided into the destructive death drives and the life-preserving Eros (Freud 1994, 44). Stoker's vampires are a blend of both concepts: simultaneously dead and undead, stealing life to live themselves (Stoker 211). In their most urging motive for action, their desire for human blood, the two sides of Eros are merged: The self-preserving drives, in particular hunger and thirst, as well as the Libido, the sexual desire (Freud 1994, 45). More specifically, evidence of the vampire personifying sexual desire, and the act of sucking blood symbolizing intercourse, can be found throughout the entire novel. It occurs, for example, in the repeated description of the female vampires as “voluptuous” (Stoker 187), or in Jonathan Harker's feelings of “languorous ecstasy” (43) and “wicked, burning desire”, as he awaits the vampire's kiss (42). Even the description of Lord Godalming killing his vampiric fiancée contains a morbid sexual undertone (192). On the contrary, Stoker's vampires also portray Eros antagonists, the death drives. Those comprise the human's self-destructive desire to return to its inorganic, inanimate state (Ermann 48), which can be connected to the vampires' death-like sleep in coffins (Stoker 50), their un-dead nature (179), and …show more content…

For these reasons, vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula can be interpreted as metaphor representing the basic human drives, contained in the id of Freud's model of the psyche. However, to insinuate a deliberate implication of the Freudian id by Stoker would be a misconception, since Dracula was written thirty-six years prior to the publication of Freud's structural model. Their correspondence in this matter should rather be understood as a depiction of a universal truth about the human nature, executed in different literary

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