The Silence of the Lambs contains at least four forms of the masculine psychic vampire, all of which are reminiscent of the male-female vampirism in Dracula. Let's discuss each of these vampiric duets, along with some ways in which these kinds of psychic vampires can be deactivated.
First, there is the obvious vampire of Demme's film, Hannibal Lecter. It is easy to see a modern incarnation of Dracula in Lecter's superhuman power, sexual magnetism, feline grace, blinding genius, cosmopolitan tastes, and of course, taste for human flesh and blood. It is interesting to note that for all his unbridled bloodlust and psychological rapacity, Hannibal Lecter's allure was sufficient to transform a middle-aged Anthony Hopkins into an international sex symbol. How we love the sensual, overwhelming power of the vampiric dominator! We will risk everything to bask in his glow and earn his acceptance (even as prey), as we seek to share in his omnipotence. From this kind of empowered vampire, Clarice Starling seeks a murderer's name and a springboard into a successful career, just as Jonathan Harker seeks from Dracula professional success and Mina Harker (I would suggest) unconsciously seeks transcendent union.
The Draculan vampire seduces us with an implicit promise of protection. Under his omnipotent wing, who would dare challenge us? 1 have heard many people say that as they shivered through the scene in which Clarice is trapped in the basement with Jame Gumb, they half expected Hannibal Lecter to suddenly appear and rescue her. We dream of a benefactor with Lecter's enormous power, a Draculan vampire who will protect us from the vicissitudes of life and share with us his immortal potency. This, in fact, is what Dracula promises Mina in his pledge of matrimony and what Lecter promises Clarice in his pledge of mercy. Mina's belief in the promise is almost her undoing, but Clarice is not so vulnerable to this form of the vampire. When we last see the young FBI agent, she is huddled against the wall, looking about in fear and calling with increasing agitation into the now dead phone, "Dr. Lecter? Dr. Lecter? DR. LECTER?" She is smart, our brave Clarice. She knows that "mercy" is only a relative term with a vampire like Lecter. What if he becomes bored someday and decides to find that special someone who is interesting enough to spice up his diet of blandly normal victims?
In this scene, and indeed throughout the film, Clarice keeps a death grip on her awareness of Lecter's extremely dangerous potential. Similarly, it is essential to our survival to maintain our awareness of the psychic vampire's predatory core. Mina's failure to maintain this awareness about Dracula nearly leads to her demise. The notion of maintaining one's consciousness as a means of deactivating the psychic vampire has a parallel in vampire lore: one instrument of death to the vampire, who operates at night, in our moments of unconscious oblivion, is the radiant light of day. What does daylight look like in psychological reality? When you first see the word vampire, the dawn of
consciousness glimmers on the horizon of your mind. When you read about the vampire's essence and tactics, your consciousness ignites and sunlight pierces the morning mist. As you look to your life and recognize the vampire in yourself and others, your
consciousness is blazing bright as the midday sun. It penetrates into the darkest corners of your psychic reality, shriveling the creatures of the night that feed on your life force. The more you become aware of the vampire's presence in your life, the brighter the sun of
your consciousness will shine, and the safer you will be from the vampire.
Of course, it is easy to see how we might fail to remain conscious of the vampiric core in men like Lecter and Dracula, for such vampires are creatures of mesmerizing charisma and sophistication. The sheen of refinement that veils their bloodlust lends power to Shakespear’s observation that “the prince of darkness is a gentleman.” Nor are Lector and Dracula simply fictional monsters-both are characters based on real men. Indeed,
charismatic vampires are disturbingly common in the world, and their superhuman allure is matched only by their superhuman potential for destruction. As Maschetti has
observed, the vampire
is often an intellectual. His extremely long life, after all, permits him a considerable knowledge of the world around him, of culture, literature, art, and even music. . . . having trespassed the curtain of death, the vampire is endowed with a heightened sense of reality. This would make sense, for the vampire is also more "animal" than an ordinary human being; he is predator, he must kill in order to survive, and therefore he must listen and eye everything around him keenly and attentively in order to fulfill his purpose. He has become, furthermore, a supernatural being, and as such he possesses powers that go far beyond the human capacities we rely on for survival. (1992,62,92) Maschetti makes another observation that is particularly appropriate to the depiction of Lecter, Dracula, and their psychic counterparts in the external world:
Some vampires gloat in the limelight and in high society-their game of hide-and-seek with victims and vampire hunters providing a pleasant diversion to their eternity. The titillation and excitement of being swifter in movement, governed by laws outside those of the human world. . . [the] hypnotic powers that paralyze victims, the power to become invisible, to be, in other words, quite different from us mortals, all this must be an amusing distraction when moving amid human circles. . . . Evil is perhaps still more terrifying when met in a recognizable world. (153)
Whenever I see a man or woman of extraordinary power-be it financial, sexual, political, intellectual, or spiritual-I feel around for the vampiric potential in that person's psyche.
Certainly, there are many gifted people who are not predominantly ruled by the vampire archetype. It is difficult, however, to wield exceptional power without being subjected to the requests and manipulations of power-hungry supplicants. A charismatic person who is drained too low (even as a result of voluntary generosity) will be tempted to activate the vampire archetype in order to retrieve the lost power. Thus, many powerful people resort to vampirism in order to survive. And of course, some exceptionally powerful people, such as the psychic vampire I described in the first chapter, clearly owe their
empowerment to vampirism. At the very least, every person who achieves a position of power in our narcissistic society risks activating the vampire archetype in order to survive.
We who serve as food for such charismatic psychic vampires contribute to the problem, for we are inclined to rationalize and even revere their behavior. Both Lecter and Dracula are explicitly identified in their tales as empowered persons of extreme danger, and yet both of them have become cultural sex symbols. Each of their adoring fans seems to float along in the belief that, should she encounter such a demigod, she would woo him out of
his predatory ways and inspire him to pursue with her a life filled with love and
transcendent fulfillment. What a rich resource these worshipers offer the vampire! What a plethora of prey! And the greatest irony of this game is that it is often the noblest of victims, like Mina, who fall most definitively into the charismatic vampire's jaws. It may be that the charismatic vampire, with his apparently godlike power, seems to the noble victim to be someone who can finally match her larger-than-average psychic force.
The chilling irony of this deception reminds me of a woman I knew who married a charismatic vampire because "he was the first man who could stand up to my personal power and meet it with his own." She did not realize that the charismatic vampire had embezzled his impressive life force from less exploitive creatures and that she would be plundered in her turn. She only perceived in him a mate whose force could match hers, and thus she believed she had found true love. After she had bled her life into the charismatic vampire's jaws, after she had descended from a dream of self-actualization into a reality of self-loathing, after she had sacrificed her every resource in the vain hope of obtaining the loving protection of her "mate," the woman awakened from her illusion into a depleted despair. I imagine this to be the dark fate of every smart, ambitious sorority woman who marries a wealthy barracuda, no less than it is the fate of every smart, ambitious gang girl who dons her boyfriend's colors. Enchanted, aspiring, and noble, they all rush optimistically into the swirl of the vampire's cape. There they remain, cherished and protected as all food resources must be, until they no longer have the energy to qualify as food.
Of course, in order to be a vampire with the drawing power of Lecter and Dracula, one must be a person of unusual force and charisma. Unusual, yes, but it is all too easy to cite real-life examples. Think for a moment of the infamous gurus of our time. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Jim Jones, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians - these are all men who held their victims captive with personal charisma and promises of transcendence over pain and death. And these are only the vampires whose plans have gone awry, the ones whose abortive predation has swept the headlines. For every one of these deposed vampires, there are many more who continue to feed on the energy of their adoring flocks. Their messages may differ, but their strategies are the same. They all offer their followers morsels of divine dispensation, in exchange for the followers' gushingly reverential attitude toward the vampiric guru.
How can we spot this kind of vampire? Charismatic vampirism is operating any time a leader or teacher sets himself up to be a conduit of wisdom, truth, or divinity that is not directly available to lesser mortals. I am thinking of a particular example in which the teacher of an "enlightened" community shared with his cluster of followers his personal version of truth, which, he assured them, was the core of Truth itself. And perhaps he was correct. But it seemed as if the teacher also bestowed his wisdom upon his flock as a kind of reward for their acknowledgment of his specialness (while bestowing on certain female followers some additional blessings of a sexual nature). Eventually, the teacher implied that his followers' membership in his flock had exalted them to a status above other, less
"enlightened" mortals. Thus, the teacher secured his followers' devotion by appealing to their honest desire for transcendence, their personal sense of insufficiency, and their human yen for specialness. And just as the teacher fed off his followers' subordinate status on the pyramid of "enlightenment," so his followers fed off the subordinate status
of those who (they had learned) were less "enlightened" than they.
The teacher in this story displays most of the symptoms of charismatic vampirism. But beyond these, there is one sure way to know whether someone we admire is acting as a charismatic vampire or simply a wise soul. When we approach the person, how does he respond to us? If the object of our esteem is acting non vampirically, he will greet our admiration by holding up a double-sided mirror. The mirror shows us that the power we perceive in the teacher is actually a projection of our own power, and it also invites us to look for the blemishes that attest to our own humanity. Similarly, the teacher's side of the mirror will render an honest reflection that shows the teacher, every time he teaches, to be a human blend of implicit power and explicit weakness. The vampiric guru, on the other hand, will greet our admiration by holding up a magnifying glass, with the glass
positioned such that it both magnifies (or more precisely, inflates) our perception of the vampire's glory, while it diminishes the vampire's perception of us. This mirror-or-magnifying-glass test is, in fact, a good way to spot many kinds of psychic vampire, since all vampires will want to magnify their power in our regard, while simultaneously
diminishing our power in theirs.
The mirror-or-magnifying-glass test is also consistent with the lore that vampires cast no reflection in a mirror and, in fact, that they detest all reflective surfaces. In Stoker's novel, Dracula snatches up a little shaving mirror and smashes it in a frenzy of rage. This scene tells us that we can break through the poised assurance of most psychic vampires by confronting them with a mirror of their vampiric behavior. Although the myth doesn't say so, however, it is only a certain type of mirroring that the vampire detests. Vampires seek to exploit others, and anything that feeds their sense of power, particularly in comparison to others, will be perceived as a good thing. A mirror full of compliments is ambrosia to most vampires.
What charismatic vampires loathe is a mirror that casts a true reflection, one that includes both strength and weakness, both light and shadow. The nonvampiric teacher, in contrast, knows what Heraclitus knew: the mirror is essential to true teaching, because the real teacher is truth itself, both dark and light, and truth is always hidden in our midst and in ourselves. Thus, the nonvampiric teacher will want all students to look in the mirror for their inner truth, both dark and light, so they won't project it outward onto the teacher.
This is the only way that true teaching can occur, because the teacher is not burdened with inflationary projections, and the students are not disabled or deluded by projecting away their own power. What's more, when the students refrain from viewing the teacher as a source of truth, the teacher's vampire archetype is less likely to be activated by the
students' projection of super-humanity. A charismatic vampire can don the guru mantle in many settings, not necessarily religious. He can work his "guru whammy" in any
corporation where he has accumulated sufficient power to set himself up as a demideity.
And charismatic vampires have historically plagued the political arena; Caesar,
Napoleon, Hitler, and Joe McCarthy were all leaders whose psyches were driven by the charismatic vampire. And the field of fine arts has been rife with charismatic vampires, such as Rodin and Picasso, who fueled their work with the creative energy of their families, lovers, and protégés.
But beyond these notorious examples, some of the most nefarious cases of charismatic
vampirism occur in the healing professions-particularly in my own field of psychology.
As the Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig has observed in his landmark book Power in the Helping Professions, we who are in the business of healing the psyche are haunted by the vampiric shadows of our quasi-medical, quasi-spiritual profession.
Specifically, because we can easily be misled by the projections of our clients or by our ignorance of ourselves, we are in constant danger of becoming charlatans who peddle spurious treatments for purely personal gain or false prophets who spout facetious dogma for purely personal aggrandizement. This is why we who achieve some expertise in matters of the psyche should pay close attention to the story of Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. Darth is a powerful leader whose darkness is all the more dangerous for his having been a Jedi knight. In a similar way, any healer or teacher of the psyche can become all the more vampiric for being knowledgeable about psychic processes.