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The vampire is a mythical being devoid of shadow or reflection. Neither living nor dead, he spends his days in the grave and his nights wandering and searching; he leaves his coffin in the moonlight and returns to it at cockcrow. In between he sucks the blood of his victims, drawing out their vital substance and making them languid and pallid so that they are themselves suspended in a state of non-life. The preferred victims are pathetic, defenceless young women, if possible close relatives of these beings who cannot die and who, unlike ghosts, return in the flesh to haunt the living and suck their blood so that they can go on with their nocturnal, destructive pseudo-lives. The vampire's innocent, fragile prey often become vampires themselves, giving rise to a monstrous line of beings—neither dead nor alive but subterranean bringers of death.
Pérel Wilgowicz, a member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, has been interested in the figure of the vampire for many years. She sees the vampire myth as highly relevant to contemporary clinical practice, which is alert to the most archaic aspects of the psyche and to the difficulties of separation, differentiation and identity. Following in the footsteps of Freud, who drew on the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus, she uses prominent figures from myth, legend, literature and art to cast light on psychoanalytic practice and theory. In keeping with present-day trends in French psychoanalysis, she is interested in narcissistic and borderline pathologies, though without on that account rejecting the notion of the Oedipus complex or detaching questions of identity from those of sexuality. By invoking the various forms and variants of the traditional culture of vampires and related figures, Wilgowicz draws our attention to forms of psychic existence displayed by patients who have never truly been born: these living-dead subjects hover or float, instead of having a proper sense of being inside their bodies; dream of frozen springs tu