Clinical Vamprism, or Renfield's Syndrome: People Who Believe They Must Drink Blood to Live

Intelligent discourse that relocates vampires from the mythos associated with Bram Stoker, Bel a Lugosi, Lestat and Spike has become much more commonplace in contemporary society. Society is just a few decades removed from placing under psychiatric care anyone who raised the specter of vampirism in reference to reality. Not to be confused with those lost souls desperately in search of the identity they were unfortunately born without—those goths who believe that wearing only black and who labor under the delusion that drinking another person's blood somehow endows them with a personality—is the very real medical disorder that is typically labeled clinical vampirism.

Clinical vampirism is also frequently referred to by the name Renfield's Syndrome. This name derives from the bizarre supporting character found in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula; he was the Count's little toady and is best remembered for his propensity for eating spiders and flies Just Freud looked back to literature for a name to give his theory that became known as the Oedipus Complex, so too is Renfield's Syndrome only tangentially related to Renfield's problems in Dracula. Renfield had been institutionalized because he honestly believed that his very existence was dependent upon consuming the blood of those insects and bugs upon which he feasted. Clinical vampirism is a disorder based upon the belief of sufferers that without the ingestion of blood they will die. Among the strange aspects of clinical vampirism is that almost all documented cases have been male. What may actually case clinical vampirism remains an even bigger mystery.

What is common to most sufferers of Renfield's Syndrome is that the men have almost universally been capable of discovering a catalytic episode in his past that has created his delusion that continued existence is dependent upon the consumption of blood. As might be expected, this turning point usually is an event during which the patient got their first real taste of blood and the result was a deviant experience, quite often one that created an intensely sexual excitement.