Vampirism an allegory for nacrissism?

[Alan C.]

Narcissits are often referred to as emotional or energy vampires for good reason. I can't recall where I read it, but it was suggested that the legend of vampires may have been an allegory for narcissists.

 

Here are some characteristics from the legend of vampires with similarities to narcissists:Blood drinking (sucking the life out of somebody).Aversion to sunlight (aversion to exposure).Mind control (manipulation).Menacing gaze (angry look/stare of disapproval).No reflection in mirror (inability to see themselves).Superficial charm, vanity (inflated opinion of oneself).Appear normal to everyone, but monsterous to victim (two-faced).I haven't been able to figure out the symbolic meaning of the following, and was hoping that others might have some ideas:Sleeping in a coffin.Aversion to garlic.Aversion to holy symbols.Stake through the heart.

Can't enter home without permission.

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[Lians]

Sleeping in a coffin is an easy one. We put in coffins the bodies of dead people. When we sleep, we dream; and the dreams are an expression of our unconscious. Sleeping in a coffin is a metaphor for being dead inside.

[Wesley]

Sleeping in a coffin is saying that they are dead inside.

 

Garlic was considered to have healing properties (and still does) in a per-scientific era, just as the religions of the time made money casting out demons and curing peoples. I think it is just a hold over from that. People would use mirrors, garlic, and holy symbols as protection from evil and disease.

 

Stake through the heart partially came from Vlad the Impaler, who Dracula was based on and who had a propensity for killing and torturing tens of thousands of people, which his favorite method being impaling. The other part of it had to do with the fact with impaling was how accused vampires were killed (though decapitation was also a common method in other regions). Considering these methods also killed humans, it was rather silly and a self-confirming theory that they were vampires in a similar way to how witches should be burned at the stake or drowned.

 

Can't enter home without permission I think comes from the religious belief that demons are invited in and will trick you or manipulate you in order to "sell your soul" for money or fame or something and then it would always end badly for you. Looking at the entire idea of demon possession, pacts with the devil, etc might fall into a similar category.

 

Here are a couple other sections from the wiki on vampires that might apply:

 

Political interpretation

The reinvention of the vampire myth in the modern era is not without political overtones.^[130] The aristocratic Count Dracula, alone in his castle apart from a few demented retainers, appearing only at night to feed on his peasantry, is symbolic of the parasitic Ancien regime. In his entry for "Vampires" in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Voltaire notices how the end of the 18th century coincided with the decline of the folkloric belief in the existence of vampires but that now "there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces".^[131] Marx similarly famously defined capital as "dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".^[132] In Das Kapital Marx repeatedly refers to capital as a vampire, because of its monstrous metabolism: according to the German philosopher and revolutionary, in fact, capital is capable at once to suck living labour out of the workers and to transform them in an integral part of itself (variable capital).^[133]Werner Herzog, in his Nosferatu the Vampyre, gives this political interpretation an extra ironic twist when protagonist Jonathon Harker, a middle-class solicitor, becomes the next vampire; in this way the capitalist bourgeois becomes the next parasitic class.^[134]

 

 

Psychopathology

A number of murderers have performed seemingly vampiric rituals upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kürten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered. Similarly, in 1932, an unsolved murder case in Stockholm, Sweden was nicknamed the "Vampire murder", because of the circumstances of the victim's death.^[135] The late-16th-century Hungarian countess and mass murderer Elizabeth Báthory became particularly infamous in later centuries' works, which depicted her bathing in her victims' blood in order to retain beauty or youth.^[136]

[Wuzzums]

There's also the vampire myth of how they can get others to easily open up to them.

[Stoic_Dreamer]

Narcissits are often referred to as emotional or energy vampires for good reason. I can't recall where I read it, but it was suggested that the legend of vampires may have been an allegory for narcissists.

 

Here are some characteristics from the legend of vampires with similarities to narcissists:Blood drinking (sucking the life out of somebody).Aversion to sunlight (aversion to exposure).Mind control (manipulation).Menacing gaze (angry look/stare of disapproval).No reflection in mirror (inability to see themselves).Superficial charm, vanity (inflated opinion of oneself).Appear normal to everyone, but monsterous to victim (two-faced).I haven't been able to figure out the symbolic meaning of the following, and was hoping that others might have some ideas:Sleeping in a coffin.Aversion to garlic.Aversion to holy symbols.Stake through the heart.

Can't enter home without permission.

 

 

Have you read Michael W. Dean's book "A User's Manual for the Human Experience"?  He categorizes problematic people into several different groups, one of which he refers to as 'serenity vampires'.  I think you would find it interesting. here is a link to the pdf/mp3/info:

 

http://michaelwdean.com/UMFTHE/

[thelizardking52]

aversion to garlic - garlic causes a foul odor so when it is expelled from the narcissists mouth is foul and hideous.

 

aversion to holy symbols - they are the opposite of that which is sacred and holy.

 

can't enter home without permission - the victim of a narcissist must accept or welcome them by allowing the verbal abuse and believing in their facade of authority.  Another way to see this is the victim allowing the intruder entrance due to the facade of authority the narcissist presents them. It only works if the victim believes the narcissist's bullshit and allows it to continue. 

 

Just a side note: I really like this discussion. I've been bullied much of my life by narcissist and will no longer permit their crap to spew onto me! If you don't participate in the conversation they lose their power over you.