An Adolescent’s Developmental System for the Undead and Their Ambivalent Dependence on the Living and Technical Implications
Nathan Moses Szajnberg, MD
This article is in the recent issue of Psychoanalytic Review.
to read it, click on the link at the end of the abstract
N. Szajnberg, MD, Managing Editor.
Abstract:
While vampires haunt contemporary American pop culture, the undead have populated psychoanalytic literature from Abraham’s letter to Freud (1915) to today. PEP lists 439 psychoanalytic references to the undead (99 on Zombies; 288 on Vampires; 52 on Werewolves). We can cite only a selection of papers focusing on clinical cases (Kayton, 1972; Szajnberg, 1993; Olesker, 1999), ethnography media and literature, (Roheim, 1953; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984), even breast-feeding fantasized as blood sucking, associated with primitive dynamics (Almond, 2007). We summarize the previous works’ libidinal, object relations and dynamic perspectives on various undeads. Intriguingly, popular culture recognizes what is common to the undead: they can’t “not-live” without humans. In the U.S., the undead have a “rampaging presence on best-seller lists and movie and television….” (Isherwood, New York Times, 2011)
But no psychoanalytic paper has looked at the relationship of the three categories of undead both among each other and their relation to the living. This paper presents a young adolescent’s extensive play and fantasies about the undead, and ultimately, his explanation of how zombies, vampires and werewolves are developmentally related to each other and consequently have different relationships to the living. Prior to treatment, this boy developed a sophisticated intrapsychic model for the undead that both kept him in psychical equilibrium, yet also kept him from feeling alive.
This boy’s insights about the undead and the dead has developmental implications for handling three types of transferences. Also, we may shed light on both contemporary preoccupation with the undead in contemporary American popular culture, and its endurance over time in Western culture.
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