Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad

In the early summer of 1895, Bram Stocker, the author of DRACULA, had a nightmare which he attributed to eating too much dressed crab at supper one night. He dreamed about a vampire king rising from the tomb to go about his ghastly business (Ludlam, 1962). Inspired by this dream, he set to work writing the novel, DRACULA. By the fall of 1895, he was writing his first draft. Since it first appeared in London in 1897, DRACULA has not been out of print. I would like to present one key answer, summarized from a wider study, to the question of what enabled and forced Stocker to write DRACULA. The answer is based on an analysis of two autobiographical stories from an earlier book for children that can be considered as associations to his dream novel. The material of DRACULA, and these stories, lend themselves to the application of Lewin's concept of the oral triad—i. e., the wish to eat, be eaten and sleep.

Stoker's distinctive early childhood is mirrored in both DRACULA and one of these short stories. The distinction is that Stoker was expected to die from the moment of birth on. He himself says: “In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death. Certainly, until I was about seven years old, I never knew what it was to stand upright (Stoker, 1906).” Bram Stoker, whose given name was Abraham, was born in 1847 in Clontarf, a small seaside suburb of Dublin. He was the third child of Abraham and Charlotte Stoker. Abraham Sr. was a Civil Servant who worked in Dublin Castle. By the time young Stoker was able to walk at age seven, the Stokers had had their four additional children. The nature of this very long illness is unknown, and is made all the more puzzling by the fact that recovery was so complete that Stoker was to become the Athletic Champion of Dublin University.

DRACULA mirrors Stoker's early childhood in that it is essentially a tale of medical detection of puzzling illnesses, of