Contemporary Consciousness as Reflected in Images of the Vampire

Author(s): Yoshitaka Inoue

Source: Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche , Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2011), pp. 83-99
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
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Contemporary Consciousness as
Reflected in Images of the Vampire
yoshitaka inoue

Jung, while searching for rich images from all ages worldwide, said the following:
The individual is the only reality. The further we move away from the individual toward
abstract ideas about Homo sapiens, the more likely we are to fall into error . . . But
if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man
as well as his present. That is why an understanding of myths and symbols is of essential
importance. ( Jung 1968, 45)

An image expressed by an individual person is related to individual consciousness,

the collective unconscious, and the consciousness of the time. Although Jung often
mentioned the problems of contemporary consciousness, he focused on the ahistor-
ical aspects of images rather than on their historical context. As Jungian studies con-
tinue to develop, one avenue of study is the examination of the historicity of certain
imaginal themes, which can help us to see modern consciousness both as relative and
as a whole.
I have chosen to focus on “vampire” images, especially those of the twentieth
century, because of the following qualities:

• Vampires are among the most famous and universal monsters and may be
viewed as representing the relationship between consciousness and the
unconscious.
• The images of vampires not only are universal but also have characteristics
that change throughout history and cultures, corresponding to time and
place.

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 83–99, ISSN 1934-2039, ­e-ISSN 1934-2047.
© 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the ­University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI:
10.1525/jung.2011.5.4.83.

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84 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

Premodern and Folkloric Vampires

A vampire is usually understood to be an immortal demon that leaves its coffin at night
to drink the blood of the living by biting their necks with long pointed teeth. Accord-
ing to Summers (1928/2003, 1929/2003), prototypes appeared in the ancients’ myth-
ological world. However, vampires began to make their most frequent appearances in
southeastern Europe, particularly in the Balkans in the eighteenth century, when this
area was in a continuous state of war with countries such as Austria, Turkey, and Rus-
sia. Subjected to a cruel fate, the people of the Balkans produced folkloric vampires
that were markedly different from modern vampires. The folkloric vampires were not
noble, sublime, and metaphysical, but popular, concrete, and physical. A typical folk-
loric vampire was a fat, rubicund, heavy-bearded country man who made a surprise visit
to his widow. A vampire was thought to be an actual dead person and living corpse.
As belief in vampires spread into Eastern and Western Europe (Summers
1929/2003), people feared vampires would harm their relatives after death and infect
victims with evil and sin, turning them into vampires themselves. People had a mortal
fear of vampires because they believed God would not save the soul of a person who
was attacked by a vampire.
The eighteenth century was also the time of the Enlightenment. The concreteness
and physical features of the folkloric vampires were observed, described, and analyzed
objectively. They were discussed scientifically from the viewpoint of their relevance
to the plague, abnormal decomposition, and premature burial. The belief in their lit-
eral reality gradually disappeared, but the public became fascinated with fictional vam-
pires, who came to occupy a much more psychological/internal locus.

The Birth of Dracula

During the nineteenth century, doubt and reaction to rationalism increased. The
authors of Gothic novels, influenced by Romanticism, created fictional vampires who
were completely different from the vampires in Slavic folklore. Dracula (1897/1994)
by Bram Stoker is best remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and introduced
many traits that have been incorporated into later vampire fiction.
The story begins with Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, journeying from the London
megalopolis to Count Dracula’s remote castle situated in the Carpathian Mountains
on the border of Transylvania and Moldavia. The purpose of his mission is to pro-
vide legal support for a real estate transaction undertaken by Count Dracula. Instead,
Harker becomes a prisoner in the castle and begins to see disquieting facets of Dracula’s
nocturnal life. He barely escapes from the castle. Not long afterward, Dracula travels to
London by ship. The ship’s cargo is boxes of earth from Transylvania for Dracula’s bed.

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 85

Soon Dracula threatens Harker’s fiancée, Mina, and her friend Lucy. As Lucy begins
to waste away, Professor Van Helsing, an authority in psychiatry, tries multiple blood
transfusions. Lucy has become Dracula’s prey, however, and dies soon after. Van Hels-
ing, knowing that Lucy has become a vampire, with the help of others, drives a stake
into her heart and beheads her. Harker returns to London. Dracula visits and bites
Mina. He also has Mina drink his blood, creating a spiritual bond between them that
allows him to control her. Dracula then flees to his castle in Transylvania, followed by
Van Helsing’s group. Catching him just before sundown, they destroy Dracula by stab-
bing him in the heart with a knife and beheading him. As Dracula crumbles to dust,
Mina is freed from his control.
Count Dracula is the prototype of the vampire who empties his victims’ life force
and condemns them to eternal hunger and loneliness. Dracula was written in the late
nineteenth century, which, together with the early twentieth century, can be thought
of as the boundary between the early modern age (starting in the seventeenth century)
and the current age and as the time of “the discovery of the unconscious.”
Dracula was characterized by an epistolary style. Each character, except for Count
Dracula, conveyed his or her thoughts in a sort of diary. The vampire was always the
enemy. In the story, there are many contrasts between Harker and Dracula, London
and Transylvania, friends and enemies, victory and defeat, inside and outside, light and
shadow, consciousness and the dark side of the unconscious. Nina Auerbach, who has
written many articles about nineteenth-century literature, theater, and culture, sug-
gests that, according to Stoker’s notes, Dracula’s main theme is ownership (1995, 71).
In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud (1933) wrote about the
purpose of psychoanalysis: “its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it
more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its
organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id . . . where id was, there
ego shall be” (22). This psychoanalytic thesis appears as if the light of consciousness
conquered the shadow of the unconscious.
The early modern scientist and philosopher made the distinction between ration­
ality and affect, humanity and nature, subjectivity and objectivity. An orientation to
certainty characterized modernity (Toulmin 1990). Clearly the paradigm of moder-
nity formed the background of the psychoanalytical thesis. However, such distinc-
tions between rationality and affect are, in fact, not certain and stable. For example,
in physics and psychology we know that the observer and the observed are not clearly
distinct.
In Slavic folklore, the main repository of vampire tales before the Romantics
began to write about them, the vampires never ventured beyond their birthplace
(Auerbach 1995). However, Bram Stoker’s Dracula wanted to expand his real estate

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86 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

to an unfamiliar place. Thus the vampire image evolved throughout the next century,
with Dracula as the trigger of change:
The Blob, the Thing, Jason, Freddie,1 vanish into nostalgia like once-popular songs,
while . . . Dracula is not limited to an age . . . Of course, Dracula does change, all the
time . . . More than our heroes or pundits, our Draculas tell us who we were. (Auerbach
1995, 112)

Psychoanalysts have interpreted vampire fantasies in terms of perverse sexuality,

oedipal dynamics, and early developmental issues (Almond 2007). Timothy Zeddies,
however, suggests that the quality of timelessness that Freud described as an essen-
tial feature of the unconscious can be understood to include not only the historical
realities and fantasies of an individual life, but also, much more generally, the experi-
ences, events, and happenings of that individual’s cultural history, which stretch back
long before the individual’s physical birth. Horror provides a “royal road” to the under-
standing of the “shadow side” of our culture and to the possibility of an increase in con-
sciousness (Connolly 2008).

Historicity of Consciousness
The image of the vampire may be considered in terms of the historicity of consciousness
(Giegerich 2005; Kawai 2006; Zeddies 2002). Zeddies offers that a particular historical
context provides an experiential and interpretive template that conditions the boundary
between the conscious and unconscious (2002, 211). The relationship between inside
and outside, which are strongly connected to the vampire image, go deep into the heart
of the historical change of consciousness. In this context, “inside” and “outside” are not
used literally, but as psychological concepts.2 Likewise, references to historical trends do
not reflect the universal consciousness of an age because some people in this age display
premodern consciousness and vice versa.3 Therefore, the viewpoint of historicity in this
paper is neither developmental nor progressive, but rather relative. To emphasize this rel-
ativity, I will focus on differences rather than similarities.
In a premodern cultural context, human beings lived in a mythological world and
could not interpret experience as objective observers. This does not deny that ancient
or archaic man or woman had a rich mental world: the world was experienced as being
full of Gods and animated by mythical beings, linking human beings to the depth, the
inner essence of each event—the God in it (Giegerich 2005, 243). Life maintained an
intimacy with the soul that surrounded them.
With the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the basis of human existence
came to depend not on God, the mythological world, or the outside, but on human
subjectivity and internality. According to Kant (1784/2009), the Enlightenment was
the time when human beings emerged from their immature state, reflecting an attitude

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 87

that there was historical progress in the development of consciousness. Kant also empha-
sized the freedom and responsibility of rationalism. Thus, the Enlightenment promised
a movement from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge, destroying the
exteriorized mythological faith. The old yoke based on the traditional worldview changed
into a new yoke based on determinism and mechanism. According to Jung,
The whole invisible inner world seems to have become the visible outer world, and no
value exists unless founded on a so-called fact . . . To allow the soul or psyche a substanti-
ality of its own is repugnant to the spirit of the age. (1931/1969, CW 8 ¶¶651–653)

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, although the Enlightenment view and
scientific attitude continued to hold sway, a new but partial reversal was taking place.
The outside, which had been projected upon the literal exteriorized world, moved
deeply inside. This interiorized outside was named the unconscious. Freud’s “the dis-
covery of the unconscious” (Ellenberger 1970) might be seen as the foundation of the
internal outside. Freud defined the unconscious as something repressed and unaccept-
able for consciousness. This “discovery of the unconscious” changed the relationship
between the inside and outside.
From a modern psychological standpoint, ideas or emotions are regarded as
coming from inside ourselves, with an assumption that each of us is a unity of intellect,
emotion, and volition. In short, the idea of internality, or the boundary of the inside,
is assumed. A scientific style of thinking differentiated subject from object. Thus, our
experience consisted of objects that were observed and classified. “Civilized” individ-
uals strove to dominate nature and devoted their greatest energies to the discovery of
natural causes ( Jung 1931/1968, CW10 ¶134).
The psychoanalytic paradigm of “making the unconscious conscious” looked like
a battle to take the enemy’s camp from one side to the other, as in the original story of
Dracula. This paradigm expanded along with the development of science in the twen­
tieth century, therefore, a modern schema of an increasing internal focus or of a putting
the outside into the inside. The paradigm of “making the unconscious conscious” went
along with the consciousness of the twentieth century, which strongly emphasized the
internal psychological world. At its core, the ethos of the modern world, from Descartes
to Freud, was rooted in expectations of self-command (Toulmin 1990). Modern con-
sciousness was characterized by conflicts between ego as self-command and the internal
outside. As Giegerich points out, human existence began to shoulder an enormous bur-
den of inner suffering and conflict (2005). On the other hand, he also suggests:
This transformation in the history of the soul is truly tremendous, because it amounts to
an inversion of being, a turning inside out (or rather outside in). Formerly, man existen-
tially stood in the middle of the earth, surrounded by a primal stream, and knew himself
to be encircled by it on all sides; today he carries the stream of pulsating life in himself !
It is obvious that this fact gave man an enormous charge or boost. (2005, 238)

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88 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

Reflecting another viewpoint, Stephen Toulmin points out that every individual
saw himself or herself as unique and inimitable. In the old days, people shared the val-
ues of community and family. “Now [in this period], the moral fabric of family and
society have fallen apart so completely that people think—and behave—as though
they are merely social ‘atoms’”(Toulmin 1990, 65–66).
Many modern individuals suffer from deep isolation and internal conflicts, and, as
a result, they carry an enormous burden. One person has difficulty connecting to oth-
ers, and another may have difficulty letting go. Yet, for others, conflicts are external-
ized and there is little sense of interiority. We have lost a traditional community that
is bound together and awareness of the mythological world and transcendent forms of
being. Without this knowledge, we cannot contact the collective consciousness and
unconscious in this age. From this viewpoint of the historicity of consciousness, how
should we view the image of the modern vampire? How are we related to the internal
outside as the collective depth in the twentieth century?

The Vampire Image Throughout the Twentieth Century

Vampires and Dracula became popular film and book characters during the twen­tieth
century. The image of the vampire or Dracula underwent major changes that can be
divided into three stages4: First, the vampire was a grotesque monster that frightened
people and was excluded from human contact; later, he became a fascinating and noble
character with a closer relationship with people; and most recently, the vampire has
been represented as an emotional and introspective personality.5

Early Twentieth Century: Dracula as a Grotesque Monster

The first vampire film was the German silent film Nosferatu (1922) directed by
F. W. Murnau. Murnau could not obtain permission from Stoker’s widow to use Dracula’s
name and character, so many aspects of the original story had to be altered. For exam-
ple, Count Orlok was a substitute for Count Dracula. He had a skeleton-like white
face, pointed ears, and over-long fingers and nails, and his looks were nothing but those
of a grotesque monster. In Nosferatu, there was “a radical split between the victim and
the monster,” evoking primitive and archaic fears (Connolly 2008). People had never
seen these images before and felt actual fear of the grotesque vampire. Some people
were said to have fainted.
The ending of Nosferatu differed from that of the original story in Dracula. While
the vampire is distracted by a beautiful woman, he is reduced to ashes in sunlight. This
ending, the light conquering the darkness, suggests a consciousness based on absolute
trust in the light. It is appropriate for a time in which people valued the developments
of science and believed in increasing human consciousness, with the accompanying fear

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 89

of darkness and the unconscious. Seen from another viewpoint, the style of this ending
is similar to that in which a man matches his wits against an animal in a fairy tale and is
helped by supernatural forces; it is not a story of a human hero who defeats an enemy
but, in this case, of a protagonist who is helped by the light of consciousness.

Mid-twentieth Century: Dracula as a Fascinating Character

Dracula would soon become a top box office attraction, along with the werewolf and
Frankenstein. In Horror of Dracula (1958), Count Dracula appears in color for the first
time. The impressive vampire image was made with the glaringly vivid contrast of red
and black; it both fascinated and frightened people:
Even before the story begins, the postcredit sequence announced a brave new world for
vampires . . . Suddenly, bright red blood . . . splashes . . . It doesn’t finally matter whose
blood we are watching, since it looks so good . . . His element is modernity, speed, and
above all, color. (Auerbach 1995, 119–120)

The impression of color is a remarkable feature in a vampire compared with

other monsters. The red of blood is the color that symbolizes life itself, and black
following red is inevitably associated with death and the end of a life. Red and
black are essential to the life-and-death image of the vampire. Both colors are mys-
terious because red and black have ambiguity (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1982).
Bright red indicates life, vigor, excitement, provocation. On the other hand, dark
red implies death, warning, and anxiety. Blood running inside reflects the condition
of life. Blood flowing outside indicates the end of life. Internality plays the impor-
tant role here. Glossy black indicates the union of colors, but matte black implies
denial or the absence of color. Generally, black indicates death, mourning, and
shadow. However, it also suggests potential life, as the extreme shadow changes into
light. Therefore, the union of black and red implies circulation from death to life
and vice versa. The common vampire image became that of a gentleman who wore
black clothes with red lining.
In addition to the differences in sensory perception through sounds and colors
between Nosferatu and Horror of Dracula, the vampire changed from a grotesque mon-
ster to a fascinating and noble character. His figure was close to human and expressive;
his smile, however, was fiendish. The plot involved a relationship and confrontation
between the vampire and humans. In the climax of the film, Dracula and Professor Van
Helsing fight a fierce battle, and the vampire is finally defeated by the professor’s hand.
The monster and human start to penetrate each other. In a story of “sublime terror,” the
borderline between monsters and ourselves is ambiguous through sympathy or empa-
thy (Connolly 2003). With this extension, the vampire has arrived as an entity that
speaks to the origin and root theme of the modern human.

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90 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

Late Twentieth Century: Dracula as an Introspective Character

By the end of the twentieth century, the vampire became an entity with internality and
humanity. In the version of Dracula (1992) directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Count
Dracula is portrayed not as an enemy but as the main character of the story. Coppola
also added the background story of why Dracula was forced to become an immortal
demon. More than 400 years earlier, he had been a pious lord who had defended Chris-
tian countries against invaders of a different religion. When he returned to his castle
after a victory over the enemy, however, his wife, whom he loved deeply, had thrown
herself into a river because she had been told of his death in the battle. He could not
accept her death as a result of his loyalty to God. Moreover, he heard from priests that
people who committed suicide were not forgiven by God. Therefore, he put a curse on
God and became a vampire because of his eternal hate and sorrow. Through the story,
the vampire shows his love for his wife and another woman, Mina, who is Harker’s
wife and who looks exactly like Dracula’s wife. The viewer empathizes with Dracula,
for Dracula expresses his feelings. He is full of emotion and intention; in other words,
he has subjectivity.
This version is a love story. However, what is important for us is that the image of
the vampire has changed. In Nosferatu and Horror of Dracula, human beings were the
narrators and/or the subjects, and the vampire was still the monster and/or the object.
By the end of the twentieth century, the vampire is not an object of fear, but a main
character who has an internal world and a human story. Also, in this recent version of
Dracula, just as Count Dracula was going to turn Mina into an immortal vampire, he
stopped himself, saying that he loved her so deeply he could not do so. His action indi-
cates that he reflects and has internal conflicts.
Modern consciousness is characterized by conflicts that often create a neurotic
structure (Kawai 2006). Conflict is circumstantial evidence for establishment of psy-
chological interiority. With the passage of time, we have subjectivized the vampire
image. If we can see through the images and negate the image itself, we realize that intro-
spective vampires are not only literal images but also psychological concepts in mod-
ern times. As Auerbach suggests, modern vampires are mirrors of ourselves (1995).

Modern Consciousness from the Viewpoint of the Modern Vampire

The relationship between the inside and outside was a very important development in
the historicity of mentality. The inside world of human beings penetrated the outside
world; the outside world was the exteriorized inside. Historically, however, such a view-
point came to be integrated and internalized as “consciousness” in its encounter with
the outside. On the other hand, the world was still mythological and full of meaning.
Later, individuals became independent from their traditional communities or

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 91

mythological worlds. Our subjectivity was separated from our objectivity through
the scientific revolution. The mythological outside disappeared and, as a result, was
partly internalized. The internal world of the individual is continuously increasing
through the dominance of the scientific attitude and development of technology. What
problems are caused when the inside enlarges to an unlimited extent in this way?
An introspective vampire like Coppola’s Dracula reflects the contemporary con-
sciousness of an increasing inside. Many vampires today are “psychic vampire[s]” as
Auerbach has pointed out (1995, 109). They are more pervasive and less obviously
monstrous than their progenitors, and they have taken on the color of their time so
well that they make the original Dracula appear quaintly obsolete.

Introspective Vampires as a Worldwide Phenomenon

The best-known vampire of this type may be the one in the Hollywood film Interview
with the Vampire (1994), based on the original story by Anne Rice (1976). The main
character, a vampire named Louis, begins to tell his history to a young journalist.6
Louis says, “I would like to tell you the story of my life, then. I would like to do that
very much . . . I want this opportunity. It’s more important to me than you can realize
now. I want you to begin” (Rice 1976, 5–7). The whole of the story is Louis’ narration
in the interview. Louis suffers from his existence or actions as a vampire, and he is con-
trasted with a vampire named Lestat, who has no concerns about the way in which a
vampire should behave. The vampire in this story becomes more complex as he moves
into the foreground, acquiring a conscience, a history (rather than merely a past), and
both depth of character and richness of experience. I will now look at this very inter-
esting story in detail, using quotes from the film and the original novel.
Louis lives in New Orleans at the end of the eighteenth century as a plantation
owner who holds many slaves. When Louis losses his wife and child,7 he comes to
wish for his own death because of his sadness and guilt. He is then attacked by Lestat,
becoming a vampire.
Although Lestat and Louis begin a strange communal life, Louis has difficulty
accepting his life as a vampire who feeds on human life for his own existence. At that
time, Louis meets a girl named Claudia who has lost her mother. Claudia seems to be
sick and dying. Lestat turns her into a vampire for Louis.
Claudia becomes attached to Louis. She realizes that she can never grow older.
However, despite her body remaining only five years old, she asks questions regard-
ing her existence and intense emotions. Louis responds, “My mind seemed as muddled
and tortured as that of any human” (Rice 1976, 158).
Louis tells of an experience in which he enters a cathedral. One day, when he is
walking the streets, he finds himself at the cathedral. A priest urges him into the
confessional. Once there, he confesses to killing people and to being a vampire.

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92 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

At first, the priest does not believe Louis’ confession. Louis asks sacrilegiously, “Why, if
God exists, does he suffer me to exist?” (Rice 1976, 158). Then he kills the priest. The
confession does not bring him any help. “God did not live in this church . . . I was the
supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only supernatural thing that stood conscious
under this roof ! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness” (158–159).
Soon Claudia comes to hate Lestat, who was her creator but who refuses to reply
to her ontological questions as a vampire. Claudia and Louis then burn Lestat and run
away to Europe to look for their own kind and origin.
In Europe, they first meet a living dead who is a mindless, animated corpse. Only a
putrid, leathery flesh encloses his skull, and the rank, rotting rags that cover his frame
are thick with earth, slime, and blood. Louis says, “We had met the European vampire,
the creature of the Old World. He was dead” (Rice 1976, 207).
They continue their trip, eventually meeting vampires of their own kind in
France. The most senior is Armand, who has been alive for four centuries. Of the liv-
ing dead, Armand says, “Their blood is different, vile. They increase as we do, but
without skill or care” (Rice 1976, 188). Armand says he needs Louis. “I must make
contact with the age . . . and I can do this through you . . . you are the spirit, you are
the heart . . . the very spirit of your age . . . Don’t you see that? Everyone else feels as
you feel” (224). When Louis hesitates, the vampires in Armand’s mansion kill Clau-
dia. Louis, in a rage, forgets himself, kills the other vampires, and releases fire into
Armand’s mansion. He then leaves Europe for the United States, where he finds that
civilization has advanced rapidly and times have changed. It’s now the twentieth cen-
tury. Louis finds Lestat who is close to death. But Louis, still suffering from his own
existence, leaves Lestat.
Louis’ story finishes there. He is weary from 200 years of immortality and agony
as a vampire and tells his story to the interviewer. The interviewer is unconvinced,
however, and begs to be turned into a vampire himself. He says, “I don’t accept it . . . You
talk about passion, you talk about longing! You talk about things that millions of us
won’t ever taste or come to understand . . . If you were to give me that power! . . . Give it
to me!” (Rice 1976, 364–365). Louis is intensely angry with the interviewer who can-
not understand a vampire’s suffering. At this point, Louis leaves.
After 200 years of suffering, Louis wants to find someone to listen to him. He
longs for human empathy, but the interviewer cannot maintain his own humanity.
He is not only a human being, but also, through his will and desire, a vampire. And Louis
is not only a vampire but also, as an introspective vampire, a human being. Each of
them subsumes the other psychologically. Human beings and vampires live together in
the same world. There is no otherness here. This is a symbolic situation: contemporary
consciousness lacks the outside; it is difficult to encounter the outside.
Louis’ suffering is not cured, despite his being heard by an eager listener. “A neu-
rosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 93

not cure it—it cures us” ( Jung 1934/1968, CW 10, ¶361). As Armand expresses it,
Louis is “a soul of the time,” “the consciousness of the time,” and “everyone else feels as
you feel”(Rice 1976, 224). The vampire image changed from the object that should be
eliminated to the agonized or introspective subject; from a horrible monster to a suf-
fering person. As an introspective narrator such a vampire is not eliminated but merely
leaves.

Introspective Vampires in Japan

Japan is a treasure house of introspective vampire images. The name of the vampire in
Japanese is Kyuketsu-ki, which means blood-sucking Oni. The Oni is one of the most
famous and traditional demons in Japan. In the late eighteenth century, the ukiyo-e
artist Sekien Toriyama, who was the
master of the famous ukiyo-e artist
Utamaro Kitagawa, drew a picture
in which the Oni is eating an animal
with a skull lying at his feet in a cave.
The text describes the Oni’s relation-
ship to a tiger and a cow, a fang and
a horn.
The Oni became famous in the
eighteenth century at the same time
that vampires began to appear in
Europe. The name Kyuketsu-ki was
introduced in the nineteenth cen-
tury, in the Meiji era, a time in which
Japanese and Western culture rapidly
mixed. Since then, many Japanese art-
ists have created Kyuketsu-ki novels,
movies, animations, and manga.8 The
monster image is not only an enemy
Oni drawn by Sekien Toriyama in the eighteenth century
to Japanese people, but also, begin- (from Toriyama, S. 2005. Gazu Hyakkiyako Zengasyu. Tokyo:
ning in the nineteenth century, a sub- Kadokawa-syoten. By permission of Kadokawa-syoten,
Tokyo.)
jectivized character (Kagawa 2005).

The Clan of Poe (1972–1976)

In the 1970s, the famous girls’ comic artist Moto Hagio drew manga of vampire boys.
I believe her manga, The Clan of Poe, was a pioneering work in the evolution of the
vampire image in the late twentieth century (1974–1977/1998).9 This work and her
other work are still enjoyed by many readers.

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94 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

Edgar and Allan in The Clan of Poe (Hagio 1974–1977/1998, by permission of Syogakukan, Tokyo.)

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 95

The scene of the story is Europe or somewhere like Europe. The main characters,
Edgar and Allan, are vampires with the bodies of fourteen-year-old boys who can travel
beyond time and place.
A certain episode expresses their characteristics well. Edgar had a beautiful sis-
ter, Merrybell, who is a vampire girl. Edgar and Merrybell lived together as if it would
last forever. They had to be close to human society, though hiding their true form, in
order to feed themselves. One day they discovered Allan, a beautiful, suffering, and sol-
itary human boy. Although human beings were only food for vampires, they were all
attracted to each other. One day, Merrybell was killed by a man. Edgar invited Allan to
go to the eternal time of vampires. At that time, he says to Allan, “I want you to come
with me, because I’m too lonely alone”; this is the same feeling that Louis has.
In this story, the vampires are full of sorrow for their immortality and lack of
growth beyond time and place. People change and time passes; however, the vampires
live in loneliness and do not change. They have no companions who can share their
misery and fate. They are eternal observers of history.

Vampire Hunter D (1983–)

Vampire Hunter D is a series of novels written by Hideyuki Kikuchi. Since 1983,
twenty-one volumes have been published, and the series has spawned adaptations for
supplementary stories, animated movies, and manga. Some of them have been trans-
lated into English.
Vampire Hunter D takes place in the distant future, after the fall of civilization due
to nuclear war. Mankind is ruled by vampires (called “aristocrats”) and subordinated as
their “livestock.” “Vampire hunters” are those who hunt vampires using superhuman
capabilities in exchange for a large amount of remuneration. D is a beautiful man who
carries a long sword on his back, has a blue pendant on his chest, and wears black clothes
and a traveler’s hat. He is known as an expert vampire hunter with a human-faced left
hand that has mystical power. The left hand has its own mind and will and acts as D’s
guide. He is also a dhampir,10 a half vampire. Therefore, D not only hunts vampires, but
also thinks about the existence of vampires, mankind, and himself, since he was born of
both races but belongs to neither. He is feared and respected by people. His symbiotic
left hand often speaks to his taciturn and expressionless self. It is his sole companion.
D is continuously fighting, traveling alone between mankind and vampires.

Vampire Princess Miyu (1988–)

Vampire Princess Miyu is a manga series drawn by Narumi Kakinouchi and written by
Toshitaka Hirano. The series has spawned adaptations for novels and animations.
The main character is a vampire girl named Miyu.11 She is half vampire and fated
to make demons leave this world for the other world of darkness as watcher and guardian.

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96 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

She has a demonic companion named Lava. They battle against the demons in flam-
boyant attacks, using various weapons such as fire and light. The demons in this story
not only are enemies but also connected with people through romance and dependent
relationships. However, the realities of human experience are lost by the demons, as if
in a state of depersonalization.
Both Miyu and D, as half vampires, are fated to live eternally in human society,
although their exchanges with humans are temporary. While taciturn, they think and
feel about humans and have an inner life, allowing readers to empathize with their
solitary lives.

The Introspective Consciousness and Lack of the Outside

The introspective vampire’s core problem is a lack of the outside. The function of
introspection internalizes events psychologically. If we want to change, we often need
to encounter the outside, like the unconscious toward consciousness. The outside
includes the other or otherness. It brings fear and change to us. Introspective vam-
pires are unable to encounter the outside, which seems to be a fundamental problem
of modern consciousness.
Each of the introspective vampires has a strange and sole companion: Claudia,
Allan, Lava, and the human-faced left hand. These companions seem to compensate
for the vampire’s loneliness and suffering. However, the companion is a part of the
vampire himself or herself, not the other or outside psychologically. Thus, the vampires
are clearly not affected, changed, nor cured by their companion.
Of course, the otherness from the viewpoint of psychology is not the absolute
other that has no relationship with him or herself, but, so to speak, the unfamiliar fam-
ily of him or herself. As Freud pointed out, the uncanny is the return of the repressed
(1919/1955); essentially, vampires who attacked their relatives were the appropriate
image for psychological otherness—the union of familiarity and unfamiliarity. How-
ever, introspective vampires are not uncanny, unfamiliar, or “other.” Modern introspec-
tive vampires have only a half self, not otherness or outside.
Vampires are also the eternal watchers of human society and history. Imagine a
viewpoint from which an overall landscape can be drawn in perspective, but the real-
ity is never fully experienced. Introspection is able to give a certain meaning to outside
events and yet maintains distance from them. The concrete outside and otherness lose
animated meaning. As Jung points out:

The man who has attained consciousness of the present is solitary. The “modern” man has
at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from
his original, purely animal participation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a
common unconsciousness. ( Jung 1928/1931/1968, CW 10, ¶150)

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Yoshitaka Inoue, Contemporary Consciousness in Vampire Images 97

The man or woman who has modern consciousness is solitary as an individual. If this is
true, how does modern consciousness connect to the outside or other? Might we con-
sider the image of new vampires and enter more deeply into it? For if we can share the
psychological ideas of such vampire stories, we may come to know ourselves deeply.
The lack of the outside seems to define the relationship between consciousness
and the unconscious in modern people. The stories of introspective vampires explore
our modern consciousness, paradoxically allowing us to penetrate each other. Therefore
we, as modern people, feel deep sympathy with the introspective vampire. Connolly
discusses the subjectivized monster, saying that the moment in which we recognize the
other in ourselves and ourselves in the other is a sublime moment of “unlimiting of the
imagination” (2003, 420). In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung writes, “ . . . not
as my sorrow, but as the sorrow of the world; not a personal isolating pain, but a pain
without bitterness that unites all humanity. The healing effect of this needs no proof ”
( Jung 1927/1931/1969, CW 8, ¶316).
Modern consciousness has difficulty with encountering the outside and change. In
this context, we do not readily long for the outside, for example, social adaptation, rela-
tionships, and development. To tackle the problems of modern consciousness, might
we need to enter into the inside even more deeply in an exchange of subjectivities? Per-
haps we will then understand our differences and similarities and be healed by this new
aspect of otherness.

acknowledgments
I would like to thank Prof. Toshio Kawai whose comments and suggestions were of inestimable
value for my study. I am also in debt to Dr. Angela Connelly whose opinions and information
have helped me very much throughout the production of this study.

endnotes
1. The Blob, the Thing, Jason, and Freddie: famous monsters in twentieth-century horror films.
2. For example, other concepts that meant the literal outside of a person were not always the
outside psychologically of his or herself in ancient times. Such a situation can also be
observed through projection or sympathy in modern times.
3. Dodds suggested that “there are still today many primitive peoples who attribute to certain
types of dream experience a validity equal to that of waking life, though different in kind
. . . and the most highly educated of our contemporaries hasten to report their dreams to
the specialist” (1951, 102–103).
4. Of course, there are many vampire images and exceptions during these stages. However, I will
draw additional lines to these images in order to discuss the image, its representation, and
consciousness.
5. Connolly suggests three categories of horror film: abject horror, repressed horror, and sublime
horror (2003, 2008). This viewpoint of the relationship between humans and monsters
has many points of similarity to this paper.
6. This interviewer is only referred to as “the boy” in the original novel.

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98 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011

7. In the novel, he lost his younger brother.

8. Manga means comics and cartoons in Japanese. Many Japanese manga are targeted to an adult
readership, rather than to children. We should not underestimate the power of manga.
9. Her stories, which first appeared in serial form in a magazine from 1972 to 1976, were later
published as books from 1974 to 1977, earlier than Rice’s original novel (1976).
10. The name given by Slavonic Gypsies to the child of a vampire or a person possessing certain
unique powers with respect to undead sires and relatives (Bunson 1993). In short, a dham-
pir is half human and half vampire.
11. The name Mi-Yu means “beauty” and “evening” in Japanese.

note
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number,
and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK)
and Princeton University Press (USA).

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yoshitaka inoue is a clinical psychologist in the Praxis & Research Center for Clinical
Psychology and Education, Kyoto University. He was educated at the Graduate School of
Education, Kyoto University, where he studied clinical psychology and psychotherapy. In 2007
and 2008, his paper about vampire images was published in Japanese. Correspondence: Graduate
School of Education, Kyoto University, Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, JAPAN.

abstract
This paper focuses on modern consciousness through changes in the vampire image in modern
fiction and film. During the twentieth century, vampires have evolved through three stages: early
images show the vampire as a grotesque monster; later, the vampire becomes a fascinating and
noble character; and most recently, the vampire has become emotional and introspective. An
illustration of the historical change of consciousness that connects with these images is given,
and a relationship between the most recent vampire image and consciousness is proposed. From
this viewpoint, contemporary consciousness is characterized by a lack of the outside.

key words
Dracula, historicity, inside/outside, modern consciousness, vampire

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