[Status of vampirism and autovampirism]

Any interpretation of the perversion called vampirism ought to take into consideration the myths in which the relations between living and dead people (vampires, incubi, succubi, etc...) are represented, myths through which the persons alive project onto the dead ones to ambivalent, sexual and agressive, wishes they had toward the dead when they were still alive. Clinically the word vampirism should be used to name all sexual or agressive acts, whether blood-sucking happens or not, committed on a dead or dying person. In one third of the cases the act has both a sexual and an agressive components (mutilation of the dead body); in the other two thirds the act seems to have only a sexual component (sexual pleasure in the presence of or in contact with the dead body). The origin and the meaning of this exceptional perversion are discussed. Auto-vampirism, even more exceptional than vampirism, differs from the latter by the fact that blood succion is the essential symptom and by the fact that it is not on the side of sadism but on the side of masochism. In the light of two case-histories, one of which never published before, and on the basis of the Freudian theory of masochism, an interpretation of the data is propounded.