The Lure of The Twilight Saga and Life Beyond the Obsessive Cullen Disorder

I read recently Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and what is available of Midnight Sun. It took me about 3 days and I do confess that my Scorpio moon enjoyed it (lol!), at least until I got really really disappointed.

I like to read novels because they just make it easier to learn about our human nature which is not strictly all good or all bad. We struggle with our own negative nature to become good persons, or at least some of us do. Knowledge of manipulative behavior is needed for immunization purposes, but it requires discernment which doesn't come by gratis, it often comes by painful experience and some harsh realizations of ourselves ("know thyself"), unless we learn from other people's mistakes. The great success that the Twilight series had, also gives us information about what is going on in the human psyche of both men and women, but mostly women, as Twilight has the most appeal for them.

I initially found the story enchanting and that gave me pause for reflection, I knew that I had in my hands a powerful tool to know what was going on here, to see the unseen. I realized that for Twilight and New Moon, Stephenie Meyer was inspired in Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet. Bella Swan was also even clumsier than Anne of Green Gables. Eclipse did manage to disappoint me quite enough as Bella falls in love with Jacob Black. It just didn't fit in my view that such devoted love as the one that Bella and Edward had will give room to a love triangle. So yeah, it bothered me a lot and I do agree with most of Eclipse's 1 star amazon.com reviewers.


At the end I was cranky with Bella and most specially with Stephenie Meyer. But then, it is really not her fault. Although she is still responsible for what she has created, and here I'm referring to the whole Twilight phenomenon. Twilight made Stephenie a millionaire and she is hopefully enjoying her status, writing her fantasies into books for the rest of the world to read and get hooked on.

Obviously, after Eclipse, I already knew that I was not going to read Breaking Dawn, specially after reading the reviews and the story itself at bookspoiler.com

Yikes!

After Eclipse, all I wanted was to shake the story out of my head, it was really that bad... From the saga, I only wanted the memory of a devoted love. I would had preferred to have read only Twilight, and perhaps some parts of New Moon for that purpose, and pretend that Eclipse and Breaking Dawn didn't exist, nor the movie either for that matter!

I also agree with most of the Twilight movie's 1 star reviewers at imdb.com. Any appeal that the movie might have, pales in comparison with the book.



I won't go into the Twilight or New Moon movies, that is a whole different story. Suffice is to say, that the screen of projection that the movies are serving (and will serve), will probably generate lots of money for the usual guys and will get all fans stirred up and excited, reinforcing their fantasies and illusions. But the movies are basically just that, a devoid screen where fans can project all their fantasies and where they can get furthered programmed.


So Edward Cullen is the fascinating figure of the story and I got all stirred up with this whole Twilight/Cullen phenomenon that I finally decided to put my thoughts here so they can rest in peace. Perhaps someone out there will benefit from this, or maybe not. I certainly did!

I'm familiarized with the topic and I wanted to share a little bit of what I've learned for those who are dealing with OCD (Obessive Cullen Disorder), a term which made me chuckle even though it is so seriously appropriate!


It is the epitome of obsessive love. But it is clear that in the end it is an impossible illusion, unless you can actualize it into this reality. Now can you? I hope this post will shine some light for those are trying to make sense of their lives after the Twilight Saga, or are trying to find their own personal Edward Cullen in their lives. Fear not, this "love story" has a happy ending, although there is always a price to pay. But a price which can make the Twilight adventure quite boring! First, some refresher from Twilight and New Moon. Here are some of Bella and Edward's quotes:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second,
there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

"Bring on the shackles — I'm your prisoner." But his long hands formed manacles around my wrists as he spoke. He laughed his quiet, musical laugh. He'd laughed more tonight than I'd ever heard in all the time I'd spent with him. "You seem more… optimistic than usual," I observed. "I haven't seen you like this before." "Isn't it supposed to be like this?" He smiled. "The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?" "Very different," I agreed. "More forceful than I'd imagined."

"You were mad," I insisted.
"Yes."
"But you just said —"
"That I wasn't mad at you. Can't you see that, Bella?" He was suddenly intense, all trace of teasing gone. "Don't you understand?"
"See what?" I demanded, confused by his sudden mood swing as much as his words.
"I'm never angry with you — how could I be? Brave, trusting… warm as you are."
"Then why?" I whispered, remembering the black moods that pulled him away from
me, that I'd always interpreted as well-justified frustration — frustration at my weakness, my slowness, my unruly human reactions…
He put his hands carefully on both sides of my face. "I infuriate myself," he said gently.
"The way I can't seem to keep from putting you in danger. My very existence puts you at risk. Sometimes I truly hate myself. I should be stronger, I should be able to —"
I placed my hand over his mouth. "Don't."
He took my hand, moving it from his lips, but holding it to his face.
"I love you," he said. "It's a poor excuse for what I'm doing, but it's still true."
It was the first time he'd said he loved me — in so many words. He might not realize it, but I certainly did.

"I miss you," I whispered.
"I know, Bella. Believe me, I know. It's like you've taken half my self away with you."
"Come and get it, then," I challenged. "Soon, as soon as I possibly can. I will make you safe first." His voice was hard.
"I love you," I reminded him.
"Could you believe that, despite everything I've put you through, I love you, too?"
"Yes, I can, actually."
"I'll come for you soon."
"I'll be waiting."

"How bad am I?" I asked.
"You have a broken leg, four broken ribs, some cracks in your skull, bruises covering
every inch of your skin, and you've lost a lot of blood. They gave you a few transfusions.
I didn't like it — it made you smell all wrong for a while."
"That must have been a nice change for you."
"No, I like how you smell."
"How did you do it?" I asked quietly. He knew what I meant at once.
"I'm not sure." He looked away from my wondering eyes, lifting my gauze-wrapped
hand from the bed and holding it gently in his, careful not to disrupt the wire connecting me to one of the monitors.
I waited patiently for the rest.
He sighed without returning my gaze. "It was impossible… to stop," he whispered.
"Impossible. But I did." He looked up finally, with half a smile. "I must love you."
"Don't I taste as good as I smell?" I smiled in response. That hurt my face.
"Even better — better than I'd imagined." "I'm sorry," I apologized.
He raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Of all the things to apologize for."
"What should I apologize for?"
"For very nearly taking yourself away from me forever."

I touched his face. "Look," I said. "I love you more than everything else in the world
combined. Isn't that enough?"
"Yes, it is enough," he answered, smiling. "Enough for forever.

You weren’t going to let go. I could see that. I didn’t want to do it—it felt like it would kill me to do it—but I knew that if I couldn’t convince you that I didn’t love you anymore, it would just take you that much longer to get on with your life. I hoped that, if you thought I’d moved on, so would you.-Edward

You’re not asleep, and you’re not dead. I’m here, and I love you. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. I was thinking of you, seeing your face in my mind, every second that I was away. When I told you that I didn’t want you, it was the very blackest kind of blasphemy.-Edward

Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars—points of light and reason… And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.-Edward Cullen

My heart hasn’t beat in almost ninety years, but this was different. It was like my heart was gone—like I was hollow. Like I’d left everything that was inside me here with you.-Edward

I cannot be without you, but I will not destroy your soul.-Edward Cullen.

You will always be the most beautiful thing in my world. Of course… If you outgrew me—if you wanted something more—I would understand that, Bella. I promise I wouldn’t stand in your way if you wanted to leave me.-Edward Cullen

I’ll earn your trust back somehow. It’s my final act.-Edward Cullen.

Your hold is permanent and unbreakable. Never doubt that.-Edward Cullen

If there was only some way to make you see that I can’t leave you. Time, I suppose, will be the way to convince you.-Edward

The odds are always stacked against us. Mistake after mistake. I’ll never criticize Romeo again.-Edward

Laura Miller wrote a controversial Twilight review, Touched by a Vampire, which left the whole thing quite hopeless and meaningless, even though it doesn't necessarily have to be that way! Here are the relevant parts of the review:

"Preteen girls -- and their grown-up moms -- are sinking their teeth into Stephenie Meyer's gothic "Twilight" books by the millions. Move over, J.K. Rowling. [...]

Bookstores have been known to shelve the Twilight books in both the children's and the science fiction/fantasy sections, but they are -- in essence and most particulars -- romance novels, and despite their gothic trappings represent a resurrection of the most old-fashioned incarnation of the genre. They summon a world in which love is passionate, yet (relatively) chaste, girls need be nothing more than fetchingly vulnerable, and masterful men can be depended upon to protect and worship them for it.

The series' heroine, Bella Swan, a 16-year-old with divorced parents, goes to live with her father in the small town of Forks, Wash. (a real place, and now a destination for fans). At school, she observes four members of a fabulously good-looking and wealthy but standoffish family, the Cullens; later she finds herself seated next to Edward Cullen in biology lab and is rendered nearly speechless by his spectacular beauty. At first, he appears to loathe her, but after a protracted period of bewilderment and dithering she discovers the truth. Edward and his clan are vampires who have committed themselves to sparing human life; they call themselves "vegetarians." The scent of Bella's blood is excruciatingly appetizing to Edward, testing his ethical limits and eventually his emotional ones, too. The pair fall in love, and the three books detail the ups and downs of this interspecies romance, which is complicated by Bella's friendship with Jacob Black, a member of a pack of Native American werewolves who are the sworn enemies of all vampires. [...]

By contrast, Bella, once smitten by Edward, lives only for him. When he leaves her (for her own good) at the beginning of "New Moon," she becomes so disconsolate that she resorts to risking her own life, seeking extreme situations that cause her to hallucinate his voice. This practice culminates in a quasi-suicidal high dive into the ocean, after which, on the brink of drowning, she savors visions of her undead boyfriend: "I thought briefly of the clichés, about how you're supposed to see your life flash before your eyes. I was so much luckier. Who wanted to see a rerun, anyway? I saw him, and I had no will to fight ... Why would I fight when I was so happy where I was?" After Edward returns, the only obstacle she can see to her eternal happiness as a member of the glamorous Cullen family is his stubborn refusal to turn her into a vampire: He's worried that she'll lose her soul.

Otherwise directionless and unsure of herself, Bella's only distinguishing trait is her clumsiness, about which she makes frequent self-deprecating jokes. But Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she's more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in order to render her a vacant, flexible skin into which the reader can insert herself and thereby vicariously enjoy Edward's chilly charms. [...] Edward, not Bella, is the key to the Twilight franchise, the thing that fans talk about when explaining their fascination with the books. "Perfect" is the word most often used to describe him; besides looking like a male model, Edward plays and composes classical music, has two degrees from Harvard and drives several hot cars very, very fast. And he can read minds (except, mysteriously, for Bella's). "You're good at everything," Bella sighs dreamily.

Even the most timorous teenage girl couldn't conceive of Bella as intimidating; it's hard to imagine a person more insecure, or a situation better set up to magnify her insecurities. Bella's vampire and werewolf friends are all fantastically strong and fierce as well as nearly indestructible, and she spends the better part of every novel alternately cowering in their protective arms or groveling before their magnificence. "How well I knew that I wasn't good enough for him" is a typical musing on her part. Despite Edward's many protestations and demonstrations of his utter devotion, she persists in believing that he doesn't mean it, and will soon tire of her. In a way, the two are ideally suited to each other: Her insipidity is the counterpart to his flawlessness. Neither of them has much personality to speak of.

But to say this is to criticize fantasy according to the standards of literature, and Meyer -- a Mormon housewife and mother of three -- has always been frank about the origins of her novels in her own dreams. Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.[...]

What this sloughing off permits is the return, again and again, to the delight of marveling at Edward's beauty, being cherished in his impermeable arms, thrilling to his caresses and, above all, hearing him profess, over and over, his absolute, unfailing, exclusive, eternal and worshipful adoration. A tiny sample:

"Bella, I couldn't live with myself if I ever hurt you. You don't know how it's tortured me ... you are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever."
"I could see it in your eyes, that you honestly believed that I didn't want you anymore. The most absurd, ridiculous concept -- as if there were any way that I could exist without needing you!"
"For this one night, could we try to forget everything besides just you and me?" He pleaded, unleashing the full force of his eyes on me. "It seems like I can never get enough time like that. I need to be with you. Just you."

Need I add that such statements rarely issue from the lips of mortal men, except perhaps when they're looking for sex? Edward, however, doesn't even insist on that -- in fact, he refuses to consummate his love for Bella because he's afraid he might accidentally harm her. "If I was too hasty," he says, "if for one second I wasn't paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I'm with you." As a result, their time together is spent in protracted courtship: make-out sessions and sweet nothings galore, every shy girl's dream.

Yet it's not only shy girls who crush mightily on Edward Cullen. One of the series' most avid fan sites is Twilight Moms, created by and for grown women, many with families of their own. There, as in other forums, readers describe the effects of Meyer's books using words like "obsession" and "addiction." Chores, husbands and children go neglected, and the hours that aren't spent reading and rereading the three novels are squandered on forums and fan fiction. "I have no desires to be part of the real world right now," posted one woman. "Nothing I was doing before holds any interest to me. I do what I have to do, what I need to do to get by and that's it. Someone please tell me it will ease up, even if just a little? My entire world is consumed and in a tailspin."

The likeness to drug addiction is striking, especially when you consider that literary vampirism has often served as a metaphor for that form of enthrallment. [...] Although the connection between the bloodsucking undead and romance fiction might seem obscure to the casual observer, they do share an ancestor. Blame it all on George Gordon, aka Lord Byron, the original dangerous, seductive bad boy with an artist's wounded soul and in his own time the object of as much feminine yearning as Edward Cullen has been in the early 21st. Not only did Byron inspire such prototypical romantic heroes as Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester (a character Meyer has listed as among her favorites), he was the original pattern for the vampire as handsome, predatory nobleman. [...]

Bram Stoker's Count Dracula was the English bourgeoisie's nightmare vision of Old World aristocracy: decadent, parasitic, yet possessed of a primitive charisma. Though we members of the respectable middle class know they intend to eat us alive, we can't help being dazzled by dukes and princes. Aristocrats imperiously exercise the desires we repress and are the objects of our own secret infatuation with hereditary hierarchies. Anne Rice, in the hugely popular Vampire Chronicles, made her vampire Lestat a bisexual rock star -- Byron has also been called the first of those -- cementing the connection between vampire noblemen and modern celebrities. In recent years, in the flourishing subgenre known as paranormal romance, vampires play the role of leading man more often than any other creature of the night, whether the mode is noir, as in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series of detective novels or chick-lit-ish, as in MaryJanice Davidson's Queen Betsy series.

The YA angle on vampires, evident in the Twilight books and in many other popular series as well, is that they're high school's aristocracy, the coolest kids on campus, the clique that everyone wants to get into. Many women apparently never get over the allure of such groups; as one reader posted on Twilight Moms, "Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love," a mix of adolescent social aspirations with what are ostensibly adult longings.

The "underdog strange girl" who gets plucked from obscurity by "the best guy in school" is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join. Unlike Buffy, Bella is no hero. "There are so many girls out there who do not know kung fu, and if a guy jumps in the alley they're not going to turn around with a roundhouse kick," Meyer once told a journalist. "There's a lot of people who are just quieter and aren't having the Prada lifestyle and going to a special school in New York where everyone's rich and fabulous. There's normal people out there and I think that's one of the reasons Bella has become so popular."

Yet the Cullens, although they don't live in New York, are rich and fabulous. Twilight would be a lot more persuasive as an argument that an "amazing heart" counts for more than appearances if it didn't harp so incessantly on Edward's superficial splendors. If the series is supposed to be championing the worth of "normal" people, then why make Edward so exceptional? If his wealth, status, strength, beauty and accomplishments make him the "best" among all the boys at school, why shouldn't the same standard be applied to the girls, leaving Bella by the wayside? Sometimes Edward seems to subscribe to that standard, complaining about having to read the thoughts of one of Bella's classmates because "her mind isn't very original." But then, neither is Bella's. In a sense, Bella is absolutely right: She's not "good enough" for Edward -- at least, not according to the same measurements that make Edward "perfect." Yet by some miracle she -- unremarkable in every way -- is exempt from his customary contempt for the ordinary. Then again, by choosing her he proves that she's better than all the average people at school.

Such are the tortured internal contradictions of romance, as nonsensical as its masculine counterpart, pornography, and every bit as habit forming. Search a little deeper on the Internet and you can find women readers both objecting to the antifeminist aspects of Twilight and admitting that they found the books irresistible. "Sappy romance, amateurish writing, etc.," complained one. Still, "when I read it, I just couldn't put it down. It was like an unhealthy addiction for me ... I'm not sure how I could read through it, seeing how I dislike romances immensely. But I did, and when I couldn't get 'New Moon' I almost had a heart attack. That book was hypnotizing."

Some things, it seems, are even harder to kill than vampires. The traditional feminine fantasy of being delivered from obscurity by a dazzling, powerful man, of needing to do no more to prove or find yourself than win his devotion, of being guarded from all life's vicissitudes by his boundless strength and wealth -- all this turns out to be a difficult dream to leave behind. Vampires have long served to remind us of the parts of our own psyches that seduce us, sapping our will and autonomy, dragging us back into the past. And they walk among us to this day.

Ouch! Miller is not very sensitive as a Love's Executioner. Indeed, she doesn't leave much hope or meaning either!

But sometimes you have to be that way when dealing with obsessive compulsive love. It does remind me of Irvin Yalom's book, The Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. The first tale is about Obsessive Love, hence the name Love's Executioner. Yalom is definitely more sensitive and very transparent with his own shortcomings, and he does provide some insightful comments:

A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not “handling” anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep.

Twilight does seem to be very successful among some people as a guardian of sleep. Hmm, lets see what else does Yalom says about what he has learned.

“Effort, too, is needed. You have to try, you know. There's a time for thinking and analyzing but there's also a time for action.” And when direct exhortation fails, the therapist is reduced, [to] employing any known means by which one person can influence another. Thus, I may advise, argue, badger, cajole, goad, implore, or simply endure, hoping that the patient's neurotic world view will crumble away from sheer fatigue."

"It is through willing, the mainspring of action, that our freedom is enacted. I see willing as having two stages: a person initiates through wishing and then enacts through deciding."

"Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others. Such people tend to be tiresome."

"One of the greatest paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion-by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself.

This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a patient who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts."

"Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love-feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others-is destined to cave in on itself. Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a “falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person."

"I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit."

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”-Thomas Hardy.

"From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It's never worked for me when I've been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one's bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about “responsibility assumption”, but it's all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change."

"Analysts seem more certain of everything than I am of anything. How comforting it would be to feel, just once, that I know exactly what I'm doing in my psychotherapeutic work-for example, that I'm dutifully traversing, in proper sequence, the precise stages of the therapeutic process."

"Like a drifting boat torn loose from its mooring, I thought-but a sentient boat desperately searching for a berth, any berth. Now, between obsessions, Thelma was in a rare free-floating state. This was the time I had been waiting for. Such states don't last long: the unbonded obsessional, like nascent oxygen, quickly melds with some mental image or idea. This moment, this brief interval between obsessions, was the crucial times for us to work-before Thelma re-established her equilibrium by latching onto something or someone. Most likely she would reconstruct the hour with Mathew so that her vision of reality could once again support her fusion fantasy."

"One of the most important principles of groups is that the group is a miniature world – whatever environment we create in the group reflects the way we have chosen to live. Each of us establishes in the group the same kind of social world we have in our real life."

"I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit."

"A therapist helps a patient not by sifting through the past but by being lovingly present with that person; by being trustworthy, interested; and by believing that their joint activity will ultimately be redemptive and healing."

Perhaps this last quote from Love's Executioner provides a hint as to why the Twilight Romance is so appealing. All wounded women cherish to be loved unconditionally by a "perfect figure", a parental figure or someone great, a Knight in a shining armor as it were. The process of being loved unconditionally for what we are doesn't mean we have to be manipulative, or that we can't aim towards improving our imperfect behaviors to become better persons. We can be called out for acting our negative behaviors or self-destructive thoughts, it is after all a re-parenting healing process. This last concept is very clear in Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland. It is an amazing story about a wounded girl and we all are in a way wounded to some extent or another. Get Me Out of Here has more to do with everybody's stories than a story about a personality disorder per se. It portrays unconditional love in a relationship which allows for a re-parenting healing process and she indeed heals at the end.

People hold positive illusions about the world and about other people in general, which are reinforced by culture and by stories like Twilight. These positive illusions leaves us susceptible to predators and to the impact of reality, which sometimes shatters the illusion, leaving a bleak world in its wake. Sooner or later, illusions are shattered, whether it is reality holding you accountable for spending your life in an obsession with a non-existent person or illusion (any obsession for that matter) or whether you are prey of a real vampire -for instance a malignant narcissist or psychopath.

Stephenie Meyer portrays the vampire as the Knight in shiny armor, the savior. If you think about it, it is pretty twisted and it seems she does something similar (but inverse) with The Host where Souls and Seekers are the ones who invaded the Earth a la "body-snatchers". It just makes the lines even blurrier, and they are already most blurry without her help! Is she trying to make sense of her experiences? Can we say that, symbolically speaking, this reflects her spiritual views and archetypal energies? Is she trying to make sense of her religion by portraying it as a savior? When you strip the illusion off -because that is what it is, an illusion- what remains is reality. In reality, vampires – pathological people like malignant narcissists and psychopaths - really suck our life force and creativity. Monotheistic religions -a psychopathic system- does the same thing but with billions of people. A blood thirsty God, a blood thirsty vampire. So as far fetched as it may sound, perhaps she is projecting her inner self and Soul into a blood thirsty archetype, trying to make sense of it by making it the savior, so the bad guys become the good guys? It happens quite often than it seems, actually and unfortunately, it is the general rule rather than the exception.

In human relationships, love for the other and others can help us overcome our shortcomings and wounds so we can really be there for the the one we love. We end up learning more about ourselves and others, our yearnings and our negative personality programs.

Of course, Twilight is really a romance. But passionate obsessive love is like a powerful drug, which tries to mimic the real thing but at the end it turns out to be the entire opposite. It is a trap that lures you in, it doesn't give you emotional freedom, it enslaves you. It draws you in and at that moment, you're not living in reality anymore. You're bitten by the vampire, you are its slave, forced to feed from others in order to survive.

Twilight tries to soothe a very deep wound indeed, but it really doesn't give you any real means to actualize your needs and dreams within your reality and daily life. The more you need the soothing fantasy, the more out of touch with reality you are and the more susceptible you are. It can give you an idea of what your needs and wounds are, and how deep they run, but it can only go so far. You still don't have anyone to pull you out of this one. You've got to be your savior if you ever aspire to grow as a person.

Stephenie Meyer brings some elements of the Knight archetype and merges it dangerously with the Vampire archetype. The Knight fights and slays the dragon which represents our negative personality programs in order to rescue the Damsel in distress which symbolizes our Soul. The Knight who gives us what we never had but yearned for all our eternities: Unconditional Love. No matter how idiotic, insecure and imperfect we are, the Knight, the "Perfect Knight" will love us for who we are. Our own imperfections are perfect for him and we feel truly loved, thus we are re-parented. Courtly love is true unconditional love that sees and knows and understands and yet loves. The Knight and his courtly love can stand as a metaphor which can exist and be nurtured within ourselves. It is not necessarily an external metaphor, although that can certainly be the case when we are healed through a relationship with a boyfriend or husband who loves us unconditionally. Another example of external metaphor applies when we are in an environment who truly supports us for who we are, allowing thus for a healing re-parenting process.



Conditional love on the other hand, is truly damaging for the Self, whether it is conditional love by wounded parents or a toxic society, religion, culture, government, etc. It leaves you feeling like you must be or do something in order to earn other people's love. Conditional love offers no support for the inner self. It creates people who have no personal sense of substance or worth. Nourished on conditional love, they find themselves un-real. As Elan Golomb tells us in Trapped in the Mirror:

The child's inner self, which requires unconditional love, is treated as identical with his external behavior and his products. The child is subjected to a barrage of criticism which he eventually comes to believe. It isn't that his paper is well written—he is a genius. It isn't that he didn't understand a certain theorem in geometry—he is an idiot. The [parent] frames his comments in such a way that the child's inner self is implicated As a result, the child cannot be objective about what he does and cannot utilize criticism effectively. It hurts too much to take it in.

Consequently, he often has serious problems with performance. There are many ways of hiding. Some choose inarticulateness. Their thinking cannot be evaluated through the murk. Others cultivate the "fudge factor," a messy way of writing so that the teacher cannot read responses. The child can later argue that he meant something else. As an adult, he may act superior and throw out esoteric references as a smoke screen, counting on the fact that people tend to revere as su­perior that which they cannot understand.

He grows up feeling unlovable, since he has been taught that not having been loved is his fault. At best, his acceptance was conditional. A straight-A student whose grades are boasted about at a party by his [mother] feels like a gilded bird in a gilded cage. It is not he who is appreciated.

Now let us look closer to a concrete representation in our world of the Vampire archetype. Some psychopathy material will help us in that regard.

The Psychopath – The Mask of Sanity

"The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth."

""Likeable," "Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring," and "A great success with the ladies": These are the sorts of descriptions repeatedly used by Cleckley in his famous case-studies of psychopaths."

"Psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The untroubled self-confidence of the psychopath seems almost like an impossible dream and is generally what "normal" people seek to acquire when they attend assertiveness training classes. In many instances, the magnetic attraction of the psychopath for members of the opposite sex seems almost supernatural."

"Cleckley's seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a very real mental illness indeed: a profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. "

"The study of "ambulatory" psychopaths - what we call "The Garden Variety Psychopath" - has, however, hardly begun. Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. However, some researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is important to study psychopathy not as an artificial clinical category but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human."

"One very interesting aspect of the psychopath is his "hidden life" that is sometimes not too well hidden. It seems that the psychopath has a regular need to take a "vacation into filth and degradation" the same way normal people may take a vacation to a resort where they enjoy beautiful surroundings and culture. To get a full feeling for this strange "need" of the psychopath - a need that seems to be evidence that "acting human" is very stressful to the psychopath - read more of The Mask of Sanity, chapters 25 and 26."

"Also, read Cleckley's speculations on what was "really wrong" with these people. He comes very close to suggesting that they are human in every respect - but that they lack a soul. This lack of "soul quality" makes them very efficient "machines." They can be brilliant, write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions."

"Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from others support for what they want. In this way, many psychopaths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only over time that their associates become aware of the fact that their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating the rights of others."Even when they are indifferent to the rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings of trust and confidence."

"The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change."

"Oh, indeed, they can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have - the thing that drives them and causes them to act out different dramas for effect - is a sort of "predatorial hunger" for what they want. That is to say, they "feel" need/want as love, and not having their needs/wants met is described as "not being loved" by them. What is more, this "need/want" perspective posits that only the "hunger" of the psychopath is valid, and anything and everything "out there," outside of the psychopath, is not real except insofar as it has the capability of being assimilated to the psychopath as a sort of "food." "Can it be used or can it provide something?" is the only issue about which the psychopath seems to be concerned. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive."

"In short, the psychopath - and the narcissist to a lesser extent - is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them out of the herd, get close to them and reduce their resistance, so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camouflage composed of words and appearances - lies and manipulations - in order to "assimilate" their prey."

"This leads us to an important question: what does the psychopath REALLY get from their victims? It's easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances, such as love relationships or faked friendships, it is not so easy to see what the psychopath is after. Without wandering too far afield into spiritual speculations - a problem Cleckley also faced - we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath ENJOYS making others suffer. Just as normal humans enjoy seeing other people happy, or doing things that make other people smile, the psychopath enjoys the exact opposite.

Anyone who has ever observed a cat playing with a mouse before killing and eating it has probably explained to themselves that the cat is just "entertained" by the antics of the mouse and is unable to conceive of the terror and pain being experienced by the mouse, and the cat, therefore, is innocent of any evil intent. The mouse dies, the cat is fed, and that is nature. Psychopaths don't generally eat their victims.

Yes, in extreme cases the entire cat and mouse dynamic is carried out and cannibalism has a long history wherein it was assumed that certain powers of the victim could be assimilated by eating some particular part of them. But in ordinary life, psychopaths and narcissists don't go all the way, so to say. This causes us to look at the cat and mouse scenarios again with different eyes. Now we ask: is it too simplistic to think that the innocent cat is merely entertained by the mouse running about and frantically trying to escape? Is there something more to this dynamic than meets the eye? Is there something more than being "entertained" by the antics of the mouse trying to flee? After all, in terms of evolution, why would such behavior be hard-wired into the cat? Is the mouse tastier because of the chemicals of fear that flood his little body? Is a mouse frozen with terror more of a "gourmet" meal?

This suggests that we ought to revisit our ideas about psychopaths with a slightly different perspective. One thing we do know is this: many people who experience interactions with psychopaths and narcissists report feeling "drained" and confused and often subsequently experience deteriorating health. Does this mean that part of the dynamic, part of the explanation for why psychopaths will pursue "love relationships" and "friendships" that ostensibly can result in no observable material gain, is because there is an actual energy consumption?"

"Conscience seems to depend on the ability to imagine consequences. But most "consequences" relate to pain in some way, and psychopaths really don't understand pain in the emotional sense. They understand frustration of not getting what they want, and to them, that is pain. But the fact seems to be that they act based solely on a sort of Game Theory evaluation of a situation: what will they get out of it, and what will it cost? And these "costs" have nothing to do with being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging the future, or any of the other possibilities that normal people consider when making a choice. In short, it is almost impossible for normal people to even imagine the inner life of the psychopath.

This leads us to what psychopaths DO have that is truly outstanding: an ability to give their undivided attention to something that interests them intensely. Some clinicians have compared this to the concentration with which a predator stalks his prey. This is useful if one is in an environment with few variables, but most real life situations require us to pay attention to a number of things at once. Psychopaths often pay so much attention to getting what they want that they fail to notice danger signals."

"It should be emphasized that psychopaths are interesting as all get out - even exciting! They exude a captivating energy that keeps their listeners on the edge of their seats. Even if some part of the normal person is shocked or repelled by what the psychopath says, they are like the mouse hypnotized by the torturing cat. Even if they have the chance to run away, they don't. Many Psychopaths "make their living" by using charm, deceit, and manipulation to gain the confidence of their victims. Many of them can be found in white collar professions where they are aided in their evil by the fact that most people expect certain classes of people to be trustworthy because of their social or professional credentials. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, generally do not have to earn our trust because they have it by virtue of their positions. But the fact is: psychopaths are found in such lofty spheres also!"

"Manipulation is the key to the psychopath's conquests. Initially, the psychopath will feign false emotions to create empathy, and many of them study the tricks that can be employed by the empathy technique. Psychopaths are often able to incite pity from people because they seem like "lost souls" as Guggenbuhl-Craig writes. So the pity factor is one reason why victims often fall for these "poor" people."

"In the book Violent Attachments, women and men have noted the particular stare of the psychopath - it is an intense, relentless gaze that seems to preclude his destruction of his victim or target. Women, in particular, have reported this stare, which is related to the "predatorial" (reptilian) gaze; it is as if the psychopath is directing all of his intensity toward you through his eyes, a sensation that one woman reported as a feeling of "being eaten." They tend to invade peoples' space either by their sudden intrusions or intimidating look-overs (which some women confuse for sexuality.)"

"Sadly, as we see, psychopaths have no lack of victims because so many people are ready and willing to play the role. And in many, many cases, the victim simply refuses to believe the evidence that they are being victimized. Psychological denial screens out knowledge that is painful, and persons with large investments in their fantasies are often unable to acknowledge that they are being deceived because it it too painful. Most often, these are women who rigidly adhere to the traditional role of the female with a strong sense of duty to be a "good wife." She will believe that if she tries harder or simply waits it out, her husband will reform. When he ignores her, abuses her, cheats on her, or uses her, she can simply just decide to "try harder, put more energy into the relationship, and take better care of him." She believes that if she does this, eventually he will notice and will see how valuable she is, and then he will fall on his knees in gratitude and treat her like a queen.

Dream on.

The fact is, such a woman, with her fierce commitment to such a man, her dedication to being a proper wife, has allowed such fairy tales to distort her sense of reality. The reality is that she is doomed to a lifetime of abuse and disappointment until "death do us part."

Psychopaths are not "fragile" individuals, as Robert Hare says after years of research. What they think and do is produced from a "rock solid personality structure that is extremely resistant to outside influences." Many of them are protected for years from the consequences of their behavior by well-meaning family and friends. As long as their behavior remains unchecked or unpunished, they continue to go through life without too much inconvenience."

"Some researchers think that psychopathy is the result of some attachment or bonding difficulty as an infant. Dr. Hare has turned the idea around, after all his years digging into the background of psychopaths. He says:

In some children the very failure to bond is a symptom of psychopathy. It is likely that these children lack the capacity to bond readily, and that their lack of attachment is largely the result, not the cause, of psychopathy. [Hare]

In other words: they are born that way and you can't fix them."

"To many people, the idea of a child psychopath is almost unthinkable. But the fact is, true psychopaths are born, not made. Oh, indeed, there is the psychopath that is "made," [sociopaths] but they are generally different from the born psychopath in a number of ways."

"The fact is, clinical research clearly demonstrates that psychopathy does not spring unannounced into existence in adulthood. The symptoms reveal themselves in early life. It seems to be true that parents of psychopaths KNOW something is dreadfully wrong even before the child starts school. Such children are stubbornly immune to socializing pressures. They are "different" from other children in inexplicable ways. They are more "difficult," or "willful," or aggressive, or hard to "relate to." They are difficult to get close to, cold and distant and self-sufficient."

"For normal people, such movies [about psychopaths] may serve to remind them of the danger and destructiveness of the psychopath. They will shiver with the sense of something cold and dark having breathed on their neck. For others, people with poorly developed inner selves, such movies and glorification of psychopathic behavior only serves as a role model for serious acts of violence and predation against others."

"Over and over again we come up against that little problem: religion and belief systems that have to be defended against objective evidence or the beliefs of others. We have to ask ourselves "where did these belief systems come from that so evidentially are catastrophic?" And then, we have to think about the fact that now, in the present day, when many of these systems are breaking down and being replaced by others that similarly divert our attention away from what IS, it becomes necessary to "enforce" a certain mode of thinking. And that is what Psychopaths do best.

Psychopaths dominate and set the standard for behavior in our society. We live in a world based on a psychopathic, energy stealing food chain, because that's just the way things are. Most people are so damaged they no longer have the capacity to even imagine a different system based on a symbiotic network."

"One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. [Georges Gurdjieff]

"If you are a good person you will meet many evil people in your life, you need to recognize them and their actions. More importantly you need to recognize which evil behaviors you have been conned into accepting as reasonable and to reject those behaviors - both in yourself and in others - as unacceptable."

"[...] a diagnosis of psychopathy cannot be made on the basis of visible behavioral symptoms to the exclusion of interpersonal and affective symptoms because such a procedure essentially makes psychopaths of many people who are simply injured by life or society, and allows the true psychopaths who have a well-constructed "mask of sanity" to escape detection."

I hope this puts into perspective the reality of why the psychopath/vampire will never be the Perfect Knight. The psychopath/vampire "steals" the concept of courtly love and corrupts it for his own devious purposes. This is why positive illusions and lack of knowledge of psychopathy leaves us susceptible to their predations, as we wish for a happy ending with such devious and charming creatures that live among us in the highlight of society. This is where Stephenie Meyer makes her greatest disservice as well, she sustains and enhances to its maximum degree this illusion, leaving people (specially women, as psychopathy is more prevalent among the male population) susceptible to the predatory schemes of psychopaths. In real life, you will NEVER see such courtly love by a devoted "Edward Cullen" personified as a charming vampire. Don't delude yourself, a psychopath is not capable of loving you and science plus people's real accounts in our millennial history supports this. Let me say this again, a psychopath will never change his nature, he is not capable of a love that will help him transcend his own predatory nature, it is basically not hard-wired into his genes and nature. You and your own specialness or lack of specialness will never change a psychopath. A psychopath will never truly love you or anybody for that matter. It will not make him a better person nor will make it want to practice self control in order to spare your life as source of food. I can't emphasize this enough.

If there is hope for any REAL love, you'll have to look somewhere else, very far away of the vampire archetype. Like in the opposite direction! And although it is true that most of us are wounded by vampires – narcissistic and psychopathic individuals or society- we are certainly not beyond hope as psychopaths are. By virtue of our conscience and empathy, we can transcend our wounds and "vampire" programming, with unconditional love, re-parenting ourselves and our relationships, making real true happiness within our reach. There is real life and love which is worth much much more than any illusion that might temporary sooth you. Illusions don't really exist. Real love transcends all boundaries and limitations, making us feel whole and truly real.

Some shocking examples of obsessive love which was triggered by psychopaths in competent, caring, loving and successful women can be found in Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationship of Inevitable Harm by Sandra Brown. You'll definitely get the idea of how psychopaths ruin the lives of wonderful women.


Stephenie Meyer touches indeed a very deep wound in our psyches. She portrays a scenario where the Vampire, the Psychopath, will love us unconditionally, where he has a Soul, where he is a Knight. She really hasn't done anything extraordinary, as people usually project their conscience and empathy into the Psychopath who lacks capacity of both. Twilight can be even a symbol of the result of projected higher emotions and conscience into a Psychopath, a truly impossible scenario. This does not exists within the Psychopath, he is not capable of such higher emotions. Therefore it is useless and counterproductive to imagine that it can be the case, as it only reinforces the illusion that this is so.

People can't go on projecting their "Inner-Beloved" into something and someone who will never have such love as per nature. He is the predator, he doesn't have such potential. Qualities of charm, perfection and hypnotizing abilities towards woman are only for predatory purposes. Even emotional displays are only for predatory purposes. The "falling in love" frenzy is all about chemicals, with feel good hormones like serotonin, dopamine, etc which can make you feel that you found your soul mate, when it is strictly purely chemical. And with oxytocin you can feel protective and intimately bonded towards your "loved one", even if that loved one turns out to be a predator. Its all chemicals.

Finally, I will like to share here the concept of "Inner-Beloved" and other material of Unholy Hungers by Barbara Hort. It is truly an astonishing reading which gives us the tools to put ourselves back together. Even though it seems that I might quoting Hort extensively, I'm actually only extracting the quintessential quotes. It might seem a lot to read and digest, but then, most people seem to read the whole Twilight Saga in 3 days or so, so it really isn't much at all. The book is about the Vampire archetype and I highly recommend it for a full understanding of whats being explained. Even though it seems to describe psychopathy, the actual term psychopath isn't really referenced in a direct way. This is when it is important to read and get familiarized with the material referenced here, so you can understand the distinction between a psychopath and a truly wounded individual with a healing potential. Sometimes a wounded soul can behave quite erratically.

Why are we so fascinated by the vampire?

We find the vampire mesmerizing because, even though we lack literal experience with the undead, we have all met vampires in the course of our lives. It may seem outlandish to assert that every reader of this book has encountered a vampire, but a brief detour into the realm of psychology will help to justify my sensational claim. For this discussion, I will use the model of the human psyche developed by the Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung. In Jung's model, every human psyche is composed of basic elements called archetypes. We can define archetypes as the constellations of energies or traits that make up our personalities; they are what we obtain when we carve the rich complexity of our internal experience at its natural joints. Thus, the images we use to symbolize archetypes can help us comprehend the whirling kaleidoscope of our psychic energies.

When our archetypal energies are activated, we feel as if we are moved by internal characters who are acting out gripping stories on the stages of our lives. Sometimes we feel that we possess these powerful psychic energies, and at other times it feels as if they have possessed us. When we contemplate the archetypal energies that move us, it seems as if each archetype has a distinct personality with positive and negative aspects, just like any other personality. Thus, as the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman has observed, the energies of our archetypes "can fill us with radiant light, or overwhelm us with destruction and despair. They are our gods within, spiritually and instinctually. Without access to them, life becomes a boring two-dimensional existence. Relating to them [consciously] allows us to work at incarnating our angels." I would add that relating to an archetype unconsciously leads us to incarnate our demons as well, which is consistent with Woodman's later observation that archetypes "are like hidden magnets [that] attract and repel. Gods and vampires, goddesses and witches are alarmingly close in this domain. They make us or break us, depending on our conscious relationship to them" (1992, 13).

Archetypal energies can be activated in a variety of ways. A specific archetype can be activated in the psyche of one individual, but it can also be activated in the collective psyche of a group or a culture. Jung argued that when an archetype is activated in a group's collective psyche, the images of its energy will appear in the group's stories, myths, and folktales. He further believed that any story that has spread across the oceans and the millennia has done so only because it speaks to a psychological experience that is common to us all....

Stories bestow enlightenment. They clarify our internal lives in the same way that the sun illuminates our external lives. Stories can bring a slow dawn of awakening, a fierce blaze of recognition, a dusky glow of wisdom. No corner of the mind is so dark, twisted, or well defended that a story cannot shine its beacon of consciousness into the musty hole. The storyteller's light is a dangerous tool in the telling of the vampire's story, because vampires hate the light. ...

My portrayal of the vampire's essential nature will probably be offensive to those who are enamored of the charismatic vampires that proliferate in modern literature, most notably Anne Rice's Lestat and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Comte de Saint-Germain. Certainly, these literary vampires are like the real people in whom the vampire archetype is active: they are capable of periods in which they display compassion, altruism, and a social conscience. There comes a time, however, when even the most endearing vampire must revert to its essence. Its fangs must be bared to puncture innocent necks, it must suck the precious lifeblood out of its enchanted victims, and then it must either kill its lovestruck paramours or transform them into undead predators like itself. The predatory essence of the vampire is as inarguable as its capacity for charisma.

The vampire's charisma is important to note because the beast has a special ability to captivate our imagination with its hollow charm:

The vampire appears empty, like a shadow, and we, the human observers, may project whatever form will grip our imagination most, truly believing that this is the vampire. In this complex and disturbing fashion the process of depletion begins, and through this balance of fantasy and reality the vampire sucks not only blood, but the psychic energy which controls our mental and physical functions, slowly but surely becoming a perfect projection of our desires. (Maschetti 1992,46)

The vampire, like many predators in nature, is capable of appearing in a variety of alluring aspects, some of which we obligingly invent by means of our projected desires. We must, however, look beyond the beast's appearances and allures to its essential truth: the vampire is, at its core, a feeding thing. No matter how comfortable it may be to deny that truth, we must remember that when faced with a psychic vampire, we will pay for every comfy little denial with the blood of our life force.

There are two ways to tell that we have been in the presence of a vampire. The first is a feeling of shameful insufficiency. We should look around for a psychic vampire whenever we feel that we are somehow flawed-not because of what we've done, but because of who we inherently are (or are not). In this state, we feel that our flaws make us unworthy of life, love, and simple human respect. We feel we are not good enough, or thin or smart or sexy enough.

We feel, broadly or specifically and always inescapably, less than.

Our feeling of insufficiency is valid, not because we are inherently insufficient, but because some of our life force-the stuff that enables us to perceive our own beauty, talent, and worth has been bled out of us by the vampire, and we now have an insufficient amount to maintain a healthy self-perception. Sometimes the vampire who has drained us is activated in an external person, and sometimes it is the vampire we carry around in our own psyches. We may experience our insufficiency as a physical fatigue or a psychic depletion, but what we do not experience is the subjective feeling of ourselves as "green and juicy," full of vital, abundant, flowing psychic health. The vampire's ravenous sucking transforms our green juiciness into gray dessication which is simply another way of describing less than. Whenever we experience this feeling of shameful insufficiency, we have been the victim of a psychic vampire.

Anyone who has experienced this state of psychic bloodlessness knows that it is extremely unpleasant. When we are in it, we frantically seek to replenish what we have lost. But if we are not clear about what exactly we have lost, then we are likely to go about replenishing ourselves in any old way that occurs to us. The yearning for replenishment is the second symptom of having encountered a psychic vampire, and it usually is experienced as a hunger for more.

More. No matter how much we have, it's never enough. Since we've been bled of what really counts, our hunger for everything else is bottomless. We feel driven to consume goods, experiences, and people as if we were starving, as if those substitutes for life force would somehow fill the void.

It is not born of finite ambition, but of the bottomless, shame driven hunger that alerts us to the vampire's presence. When we feel we must fill our pit of shameful inadequacy and cannot articulate what will constitute enough to fill it, when the only quantity that seems capable of redeeming us is the indefinite more, then we have been victimized by a psychic vampire.

The vampire usually slides in beside us during the night, when we are sleepily unaware of its lethal purpose. Nighttime is not only the classic symbol of unconsciousness but also the time when we are most subject to fearful despair, when we undergo our "dark nights of the soul." The psychic vampire chooses these moments to approach us with its offer of exploitation as a substitute for love because it knows that its "protection" will seem to be our only means of surviving in the dark, loveless place.

Even with such willing victims as we, the vampire proceeds gently-promising us immortality and eternal love, sighing over its solitude, and yearning for a true companion. We hear the vampire's sweet words in the midst of our anguish, and we are reborn with hope. We offer warmth, companionship, and most of all, love, love, love to this beacon of rescue in our black despair. Love and more love for the vampire, who lures us ever closer with gestures of affection, words of respect, and other such baubles as desperate souls crave. Many of us spend a lifetime caught in this dance. We gush with love, and the psychic vampire tosses us bait for more loving. ...

The psychic vampire, with its unconscious invasion, its inverted ethic of exploitation, and its contagious capacity for snarling our thoughts and sucking out our life force. ...

Although the vampire takes from his victim to feed his hunger, it is as if he is satisfying a hunger in his audience - a hunger for sexuality and sensuality, a desire to live forever, a yearning to be both empowered and powerless and thus completely without any responsibility for one's own actions. (Dresser I989, I68)

[The vampire is] our eidolon. . . . He is huge, and we admire size; strong, and we admire strength. He moves with the confidence of a creature that has energy, power, and will.

In our moments of weakness, self-doubt, and desperation, which of us could resist the invitation of such a godly creature? And as if godliness were not alluring enough, we find that this superhuman entity is lonely: lonely for a special companion-somebody just like us. We are wooed by the vampire's enchanting disguise of loneliness that yearns for transcendent union.

Another piece of common vampire lore states that "the draining of another's energy is particularly likely to happen in a marriage, family, or other close emotional relationship traditionally the vampire's favorite feeding ground" (Farson 1976, 37). In other words, the first vampire archetypes we meet are likely to be active in our parents' psyches. Later in our lives, we will probably encounter these energies again in the people who most resemble our parents on the psychic level. For most of us, these new bearers of the vampire archetype will be our friends, our colleagues, and our mates.

Before you fall back in revulsion and denial, remember that the psychic vampire is an archetype, which means that it is one of many forms of energy that are active in a given individual's psyche. Persons who are vampiric in one situation will usually have many nonvampiric energetic fields in their psyches as well.

In most people, the vampire archetype operates like a mild or moderate infection. It may compromise the healthy aspects of the person's psyche, but it does not overwhelm them, and the method for deactivating the vampiric energy is rarely severe. Moreover, just as an infection can remain relatively localized, so the vampire archetype in most people is active only in certain situations and with certain people. This is why a parent may feel great love for his children when he is experiencing professional success, but abuses them unmercifully when he fears professional failure or disgrace. And it is why he may abuse his children, but never his co-workers, friends, or spouse. The vampire archetype, like any archetype, can be activated and deactivated in a very localized way....

[As] the great social psychologist Else Frenkl-Brunswick discovered, we are highly intolerant of ambiguity, particularly when the ambiguity occurs in other people. We like to keep our people neatly categorized: right and wrong, good and bad. We love to hate heinous criminals because they permit us to put the bad "out there"in another person. Once all of the bad has been projected onto the Really Bad Person, we can reassure ourselves that there is no bad in ourselves. Nonetheless, the truth is that our inner lives are far more complex than we realize. "Good" people do inhuman things, and "bad" people do humane things-it just depends on the circumstances.....

The psychic vampire may think nothing of her vampiric behavior, or may even label it as "love." Indeed, one of the most frightening aspects of psychic vampirism is that it often travels, even in the mind of the vampire, under the name of love. A vampire's "love" is usually based on a conditional approval that masks its ethic of exploitation. Think of the parent who "loves" us only when we are clean, obedient, or apt. This kind of "love," which is the only kind a psychic vampire can offer, masks a profound emotional hunger, which makes the vampire incapable of offering to our love-seeking heart anything more than a sucking hole of need disguised as the solicitude of love. It is as if some deep part of the vampire cries, "I will not feed another unless I am fed first! Now. . . who will be willing to feed me? Ah! Here is a tasty morsel! And since it looks to me for love, it will be happy to be exploited if I promise it 'love' in return!"

Maschetti eloquently describes this vicious cycle, in which people wishing for escape
from their painful humanity seek shelter under the inhuman cape of the vampire:

The longing for oblivion. . . must surely be the door through which the victim is invited into the potential victim's life; to take it, annihilate it, and transform it into something supernatural, into a strange sort of existence that runs parallel to human life and yet is irredeemably separate from it, since it feeds on it as its main purpose. In a sense, therefore, the wish for eternal life endowed with superhuman power becomes the greatest sin of the ego. And vampirism then, the punishment of such sin. (1992, 58)

...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)

...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. ...

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 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. ...

Far more dangerous (particularly for the most conscious of feminine victims), are the noble vampires, who operate under the cloak of valor, integrity, and social approbation. ...The person who slaughters the lambs gives more attention to feeding his charges than to the ax in his hand. Who is to say that the pimp doesn't focus on the bounty of opportunity he extends to his exploited subordinate? Who is to say that the pimp doesn't focus on the roof he puts over the heads of the women whom he bleeds of money and self-esteem? In each of these cases, the vampire may experience actual feelings of care for his victim, as well he should if he is to maximize her nutritional value. Although the vampire is a predator, his actions are not unilaterally predatory; often he behaves with genuine concern for the victim he is about to exploit. And why not? His survival is dependent on the lamb he is fattening for slaughter....

A strong relationship with all of our positive energies, masculine and feminine, is integral to our safety when vampires skulking nearby. ...

Every vampire story is really about the dark shadow that falls across our path as we seek our perfect Beloved. Ah... the Beloved! We all seek that divine entity who will bring our dreams to life and lift us into a state of transcendent bliss. We feel the essence of the archetypal Beloved in every myth, every fairy tale, and every celluloid concoction that shines before us in the perpetual night of the movie theater. For most of us, the search for a loved one is the most compelling pursuit of our lives-the only pursuit that can drive us beyond ourselves as we journey to hell and back. But here's the bad news: the path we walk on our search for our true love makes a perfect hunting ground or hungry vampires....

In its simplest form, the search for the Beloved is born of our human drive to commune with an entity whom we love; who will love us in return. Love, in this sense, is more than a conglomeration of respect, honor, affection, and devotion. These qualities proceed from love, but they are not its essence. This kind love is what we experience when we connect with a being that is greater than ourselves. And here is born a dangerous illusion-we believe that something larger than life can be incarnated in a single person. This is only natural, since we must use the finite shapes of our external experience to comprehend an infinite internal experience. But true love is really much more complex, profound, and transcendent than the repertoire of any mere mortal.

The essence of the archetypal Beloved is as sacred, as vast, and intimate as the soul, which means that our relationship to the loved is most potent when it is not distorted by the human limitations of an external person. In other words, we are most likely to commune with the true Beloved when we turn within and touch that in ourselves which resonates with all that is sacred. This is the part of us that Jung called the Self, but we may also it the soul or the divine. Ecstatic mystics regularly enjoy this kind of intrapsychic soul love, but it is more difficult for the rest of us to achieve because we pay more attention to finite external reality, which is full of compelling sensory distractions. Most of us are not inclined to maintain the mystic's internal focus and spiritual discipline, which are requirements for communing with the Self, so we spend the greater part (if not all) of our lives looking to other people, rather than to our own souls, for our sense of ecstatic communion. This is why most of us come to expect and demand perfect love from the imperfect human mortals on whom we've projected the image of our divine Beloved.

This is not to say that an interpersonal love between two people cannot approximate the potency of communion with the true Beloved. In fact, our feelings of interpersonal love are the experiences that teach most of us how to recognize and nurture, when it finally appears, the small green shoot of intrapsychic love with our true Beloved. We also have a great opportunity to encounter the perfect Beloved during the lonely spaces between our interpersonal love relationships, since these are the periods when we are least distracted by the illusion that some finite human being is our sacred Beloved. Thus, our feelings of interpersonal love can teach us, both by their presence and absence, invaluable lessons about how to commune with the inner Beloved, and therefore it seems appropriate and eve necessary for us to devote some energy to seeking our Beloved in external reality. Unfortunately, when we embark on an external quest for someone to incarnate our Beloved, our path is fraught with several kinds of peril, much of which is vampiric. When we look outside ourselves for a love that will make us whole, we are likely to see our chosen loved one as stronger and healthier than is humanly possible and thus, as capable of rescuing us and making us whole. Psychic vampires adore this setup because they see in it our vulnerability to vampiric seduction....

The most magical traits of any loved one are always the traits, good or bad, that we don't acknowledge in ourselves- in other words, our shadows. Think for a moment. Didn't it ever strike you as odd that some of the people we most adore at one instant are those whom we most detest at another? It is a wry joke of the psyche that our loved ones frequently embody our unacknowledged darkness as well as our unacknowledged light....

As long as some of [our] energies [are] projected on someone else, [we do] not have access to the whole of [our] hearts, which leave [us] in a weakened and yearning state. Second, as long as [we are] desperate to find an external loved one, [we] are inclined to project [our] power onto any warm body that would hold the projection (even if the body was only warmed by stolen blood). And third, once [we have] securely clamped [our] projection onto a new loved one, [we feel] as if [we are] psychically welded to this [loved one] (who, after all, seemed to be our only means of connecting with the energies that we have hidden from ourselves). In this enmeshed state, [we] open wide [our] psychic windows to anyone who could hold our projection of the archetypal Beloved.

This bundle of circumstances is the perfect setup for the vampiric attack. To begin with, all predators target the vulnerable members of the herd, and when we are projecting a portion of our strength onto any external person, we are vulnerable. Moreover, the most lethal predators are those who can make themselves attractive to the intended prey; posing as the perfect Beloved is the best disguise of all. Finally, a predator can do the most damage when the prey has dropped its defenses and admitted the predator into its inner sanctum. Thus, a psychic vampire had only to detect the architect's fervent search for a screen onto whom she could project her inner Beloved. Once he had smelled her desperate yearning, the man could easily metamorphose himself into the kind of man who would meet her criteria for a projection screen. This is easy work for vampires, both mythic and psychic, since all vampires have the predator's keen senses and a talent for shape shifting. And psychic vampires are especially adept at masquerading as the Beloved. Since the vampire appears empty, like a shadow, and we, the human observers, may project whatever form will grip our imagination most. . . . In this complex and disturbing fashion the process of depletion begins, and through this balance of fantasy and reality the vampire sucks not only blood, but the psychic energy 'which controls our mental and physical functions, slowly but surely becoming a perfect projection of our desires. (Maschetti I992, 46)

In the beginning of this relationship, as in the beginning of most relationships with a loved one, the dreaming up was much more pleasant. At first, our loved one seems larger than life in so many delightful ways, and we feel equally transcendent. Both of us experience our capacities to be more compassionate, insightful, and creative than we thought two people could be, freed as we are of our normal capacities to be irritated, demanding, or petty. Our mutual dreaming up elevates us both to be our best selves. It is a blissful exchange of mutual adoration, exaltation, and gratification. ... Pure symbiosis, pure consummation, pure bliss-these are the hallmarks that distinguish both a relationship with an external beloved... The encounter seems impossibly fortunate, impossibly marvelous, impossibly gratifying.

It seems impossible because it is impossible; no one can really be the divinity that we project on our various loved ones. Eventually the person's underlying reality must leak past the projection screen. No matter how much we yearn to believe in our loved 's perfection, or how much we would like to be the paragons of humanity that our beloved projects onto us, no mere mortal can maintain the perfection inherent in a projection. A projection reflects an archetypal energy in the projector's psyche, and while it may resemble a piece of the screenholder's psyche, it is more like a deity than a real person and therefore impossible for a mere mortal to sustain.

A partner who is a psychic vampire will do whatever must be done to maintain the projective exchange, for if we victims see the vampire who stands, like the great and powerful Oz, behind the curtain of our projection, then the spell of interdependent fantasy will be broken. But most of the time, relationship vampires needn't worry that they will be unmasked. We are so convinced our gold lies outside ourselves that we resolutely maintain our projection of Belovedness unless the screen collapses beneath its weight. Of course, simply being the screen for our projections doesn't make someone a vampire. It's just that a vampire's nose is exquisitely attuned to the scent of a projection trying to happen. When vampires sniff one out, they fly to its source, shifting their shapes en route to fit the budding projection. The vampire arrives, on time and on target, as the perfect loved one for whom we have yearned. That is why it is important for us to identify and deactivate the psychic vampires who feed on our love, no matter how reluctant we may be to engage in the task of vampire killing.

Whenever we contemplate killing the psychic vampire, we must remember that "killing" any aspect of the psyche only means that we are transforming its energy into another, preferably healthier, incarnation. For example, through inner work, we can transform what was once an easily provoked, killing rage into a manageable anger that is actually helpful and constructive. Thus, the goal of psychic vampire killing is not really to eradicate the vampirically infected traits in ourselves or someone else, but rather to "kill" their old, contaminated form and give birth to their more healthful incarnations. And whether we find the contaminated trait in ourselves or someone we love, killing a psychic vampire always involves reliving old emotions, acknowledging all of what we seek and fear, grieving our losses, and rejoicing in our gains. It requires us to make an ongoing series of ethical decisions that ask us to choose between working toward transformation or surrendering to the vampire. Vampire killing requires us to go back to the moment when we couldn't find love and settled for exploitation, it challenges us to make the choice again, and again, and again. As Linda Leonard has astutely observed, we can prevail against: the vampire archetype only if "we are willing to consciously fight this battle, not just once but daily" (1986, 107).

Several factors make killing the psychic vampire a particularly difficult kind of transformative work. First, pulling back our projection of the archetypal Beloved usually feels like we are losing the external loved one. Under the weight of this depressing illusion, we usually do whatever we can to preserve the relationship, however vampiric it may be. Second, our psychic vampires usually have infected parts of our own or our loved one's psyche, and it feels as if we will kill off those vital parts when we kill the vampire who infects them. But when we kill an infection in our finger, it means, not that the finger will die, but that the finger can now resume its normal and proper function. Likewise, the vampire's death permits the infected traits to regain their health.

We face a third problem when the amount of vampirism in our past has been extreme. We whose childhoods have been haunted by psychic vampires have been the target, not of well-meaning people who hurt us primarily through ignorance, but of people who reduced us to objects and exploited our life force simply to serve their own needs. Consequently, we may have little experience of positive, loving energy to use now as a source of hope and guidance. Our work of searching our adult experience for a model of redemptive love is made difficult because people we trusted in our early years tried to exploit us, and the wounded part of us is now loathe ever to trust anyone again.

A fourth element that deters us from vampire-killing is the fact that our early encounters with vampiric energy were packaged as a lie, and we felt that our survival was dependent on playing along with the vampire. The vampire promised us power as a superior alternative to love, using the words of love to draw us in. Feeling obliged to believe the vampire's deceit, we fashioned a beautiful mask for the monster so we wouldn’t have to see its bloodsucking truth. The mask may bear the image of the Beloved Mother or Father or Child or Lover or Leader, all of whom we carry in our hearts and seek in the external world. In order to destroy the vampire, we must focus on the vampiric truth that lies underneath whatever mask we have created. This means giving up our belief that the mask reflected the vampire's essence and that the vampire's truth was a loving truth. In other words, we must give up something we never really had.

In one sense, giving up something we never had is much like giving up something we actually had in the first place. We make the rounds of loss that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has so insightfully identified. We must rage and grieve and deny and rage and accept and grieve some more, until the loss has been psychically metabolized. But when we give up something we never had, we must also embrace the painful truth that led us to create the lovely mask of illusion in the first place. This is terribly difficult work. At first it seems like a task without recompense (aside from the death of the vampire, which in the moment may feel more like a loss than a liberation). However, there are two huge benefits from the bitter task of killing our comforting but dangerously deceptive illusions about the vampire.

First, the illusions themselves tell us precisely what we need in the way of mothering, fathering, friendship, or love. What we thought we had in the external mother, father, friend, or lover is the image of the energy we need to find in reality-both in our external relationships and activities, and in our internal experience of image and feeling. Thus, when we find ourselves bitterly disappointed in a person, a pursuit, or ourselves, we can use whatever it was we were expecting as a map home to the inner Beloved, who can give us the love we truly want and need. To perform this task, we must bring our idealized images to life by alternately being them and relating to them. For example, if your mother was vampiric and your mask for her was nourishing, then nourish yourself as you thought she was nourishing you. If your father was vampiric and your mask for him was instructive, then instruct yourself as you thought he was instructing you. If your lover was vampiric and your mask for your lover was comforting, then comfort yourself as you thought he or she was comforting you. The ideals that inspire our masks in the first place are part of what Jung called the collective unconscious, the deep part of our psyche that holds the elemental shapes of all human experience, including the Beloved Mother, Father, Child, Lover, and Leader. While it is a bitter disappointment to find that our projection of these sacred entities has served as a mask for the vampire, it also can be profoundly comforting to learn that, no matter what, we carry each Beloved entity's true essence inside ourselves.

The second benefit of tearing off the vampire's mask is that it encourages the loving soul of the vampiric person to be reanimated. Because the vampire archetype is rarely activated all the time, the vampiric person's soul occasionally shines through. Often, that soul has inspired us to project the Beloved mask in the first place. But any projection actually muzzles the screenholder's soul, since no one's idiosyncratic humanity can live up to our impossibly perfect projection. When we tear the mask off the vampire, we also tear the muzzle off the person's soul, which may then sing through in its own unique glory, liberated from both its vampiric invader and our impossible ideals. ... When we pull back our projections and cherish some one's truth (including our own) rather than defending our comforting illusions, we invoke the innate healing power of that person's psyche.

...Placing the onus of vampire killing on those whom the vampire has most depleted may seem unjust, but the very task of deactivating our vampiric predators and reclaiming our own power is integral to healing our wounds.

If, for example, we feel that the pain of our incest experiences will only be healed by compensatory acts by the abuser, then we are continuing to give the perpetrator an unhealthy amount of power over us. Where is the healing retrieval of power in that scenario? Or if we feel that the pain of a parent's rejection can only be healed by the parent's acceptance, then the power still lies with the parent, and not where it belongs-in ourselves. Of course, we can't invoke the appropriate healing force unless we understand the wound we are healing, but if we probe the wound endlessly and wait for someone else to fix the damage, then we are only cooperating with the vampire. As we linger and probe, we only bleed more profusely, and eventually we may be desperate enough to seek "rescue" from the very entity who desires to lap up our blood. Our wounding may be the vampire's fault, but the wound is inevitably ours, and so is the responsibility for killing the vampire.

This is not to say that we must do all this vampire killing alone. Indeed, we are advised, both in lore and in psyche, to seek stalwart allies. Loyal friends, wise teachers, skillful bodyworkers, and insightful therapists can be valuable allies on our journey. But it is up to us, the vampire's victims, to lead the charge, if only in spirit and intent.

One rule always applies when psychic vampires haunt our personal relationships: we protect ourselves against vampirism in our relationships whenever we pull back our projections of the inner Beloved and become aware of how our projection reflects the parts of ourselves that we have denied. ...

Let me describe this process by telling you about what a friend of mine did when she finally grew tired of the vampirism she suffered as a result of projecting her inner Beloved onto external men. First of all, this gracious woman accepted some advice from a nosy friend (ahem) and decided to pull back her projections and seek the Beloved within. This meant that whenever she was caught in the throes of passion, particularly when the passion could not be lived out, my friend reminded herself that she was, in fact, brushing up against a sweet projection of her inner Beloved. In order to get to know her inner Beloved better (and, incidentally, ease the pain of her impossible passion), my friend attempted to become the person by whom she was mesmerized. Usually, this meant manifesting in herself the traits which she found most admirable in the object of her affections. Of course, when her obsession was one of hatred, she grudgingly recognized that she had to identify in herself some manifestation, however subtle, of the traits that she detested in the other person. Either way, the purpose of my friend's exercise was to reclaim as her own the traits that she had projected onto an external person. Not only did this resolve her obsession and give her access to the full power of her psyche, but she found it a powerful way to ward off psychic vampires. The more she pulled back her projections and mined her own psychic gold, the less likely she was to select vampiric men in her desperation to find a projection screen.

Although mining her psychic gold was highly rewarding, my friend found that, like the mining of literal gold, it entailed a lot of difficult, unpleasant work in the dark. In plumbing the depths of her psyche for traits that she had previously denied in herself, she had to brave the reasons that she denied those traits in the first place. Because rejected traits are usually stuffed into unconsciousness along with one's earliest, most painful emotions, my friend's trait-reclaiming exercises were often dreary little picnics. What's more, once she had redeemed her intrinsic power, my friend had to see her external projections for what they were smoke and mirrors that disguised her lovers' imperfect human reality. Initially, this new perspective dropped my friend into despair, since it forced her give up her illusion of a Perfect Lover in exchange for a simple, flawed mortal. Her awakening was no easier when her projection had been a negative one, for she had to give up her illusion of a Detestable Fiend for a simple, blundering human being. When we are in a vampiric relationship, we are usually ravenous for love (which is why we are being vampiric in the first place), and unfamiliar with love's reality (since it's hard to be familiar with something we have never known). Thus, when we pull back our projections, we are likely to feel as if we have been dropped to a pit of oblivion, for there is seldom more than mutual feeding behind the projections. This is exactly how my friend felt. And since her socialization (like so many of ours) had taught her to view the outer reality as the only reality, the realization that her images of her external lovers were mostly composed of her projections made my friend feel as if she would never meet another man she could love. At all. Ever. The truth was that her inner Beloved was, in many ways, more present for her than the men onto whom she had projected Belovedness (though it took her a while to believe that truth). What's more, once my friend had discovered her inner Beloved, she found that she could savor his reflection (not projection) in real men, whom she no longer felt compelled to love vampirically. My friend's initial contact with her inner Beloved came in a dream about an enchanting stranger, and later, in her fantasies about a variety of external men. But the source of her images of the Beloved was not the important part. What was important that becoming familiar with the shape of her inner Beloved enhanced the "reality" of his gifts to her; his words and gestures took on more and more weight as she came to believe in him, which in turn enabled him to show her what it is on the inside that she had been seeking on the outside.

The inner Beloved is an archetypal energy that usually appears to us in the form of a person. We may sense the inner Beloved in a dream or a story or a film or an individual, but the archetype's essence is usually a composite of several images. If we want to know the shape of our inner Beloved, we must first do what my friend did-pull together and contemplate several images of the Beloved that we have projected. Not all such images are the romantic kind; they may be parental, professional, even political. For any type of projection, we should focus on the images of all the people whom we have felt could fill us with self-respect and self-love. Although they may seem unrelated at first, the energies we perceive in them will eventually coalesce into a coherent, though complex, entity who will symbolize our personal archetype of the Beloved.

For my friend, this work of getting acquainted with her inner Beloved initially felt like an exercise in pure fantasy. As her Beloved eventually assumed a more concrete shape, he came to offer her a wealth of information and support. My friend found that all his input was extremely important and lovingly framed, though some of it was initially difficult for her to accept-sometimes because it showed her something negative that she didn't want to see, and sometimes because it showed her something positive that she was afraid to believe was real. In every case, however, my friend's inner Beloved presented his truth with unswerving love and deep compassion. In the end, he became her constant companion-the lover who would never desert or betray her, who would never deceive or use her, who would never dominate or exploit her. (When any of these ugly behaviors seemed to be creeping into her Beloved fantasies, she quickly checked for vampires.) And the more "real" my friend's inner Beloved became to her, the more he was able to guide her to external men who resembled him, while his love for her kept her from clinging projectively to the men she found. Of course, this process was a bit trickier than it sounds. For example, my friend initially tried to find her inner Beloved without any outside input, and she was seduced by her inner vampire into believing that he, a demon lover, was her Beloved. My friend found that she was less likely to go astray once she solicited the help of a therapist, which makes sense, since outside observers can often give us a clearer view of our inner Beloved, just as they can for an outer loved one. Because vampires always try to isolate their prey, a third person can help break their hypnotic spell. This may be why vampiric people like to isolate themselves with their victims away from the intruding eyes of the victim's friends.

Once my friend became acquainted with her true inner Beloved-that is, once he seemed more solid and "real"-she began the second stage of their relationship. She now took a bit of time each day to become her inner Beloved, and another bit of time to commune with her inner Beloved. Again this initially felt to her like an exercise in perpetual fantasizing, but then she said to herself, "Isn't this what I do anyway when I am smitten with an external lover? I'm constantly thinking, 'What would he say, think, do, feel, or advise in any given situation, about any given topic? And how would I respond?' " Only this time, my friend was not imagining how an external person might respond. This time, her Beloved actually was all she imagined.

Because our inner Beloveds usually look like a person of the same sex as the people onto whom we have been projecting Belovedness, the inner Beloved of my friend appeared to her as a man. Although these human forms are common images of the Beloved, they are by no means its only forms. I have seen clients in whom the Beloved initially appeared in the form of an animal, or a tree or a geological structure. And our inner Beloved may be reflected in political, religious, professional, or familial relationships, as well as in our love relationships with a mate. To find our personal forms of the inner Beloved, we must first identify the ways in which we expect our lovers, parents, bosses, or leaders to fix or complete us-the ways in which they seem to be more divine than we feel we are ourselves. Seeking those qualities in our own psyches, we then weave our new recognition of our own divinity into a coherent shape of the inner Beloved, using our projective fantasies about our external lovers, parents, bosses, or leaders.

In whatever form or venue our inner Beloved is reflected, he or she bears the same attitude toward us. The Beloved is a being who honors our sacredness, inspires and protects us, offers us dignity and devotion, and helps us to transform ourselves into the people we were born to be. No wonder we seek the Beloved so fiercely, projecting Belovedness onto any serviceable screen in the external reality. No wonder, too, that anyone who attempts to hold our Beloved projection will inevitably fail at the task. And yet, we wonder, must we forgo all projective love so that we and our loved ones will be safe from psychic vampirism? Must we utterly abandon our search for a Beloved in the external world?

We can begin to form an answer by remembering that no external person can be the true Beloved-the inner reason for our being and our external loves are not the whole story but echoes of a larger, deeper experience. And when we become captivated by our projections and blind to the psychic vampirism in our relationships, we must remember above all that the divinity we perceive is actually our own. This is what I think the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson means when he says, "Romance must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism. . . the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies. In a very real sense, it is a love not of another person, but of ourselves" (1983, 193).

Johnson's words reflect a core truth for those of us who are able to honor the humanity of people who reflect some aspect of our Beloved only after we have reclaimed the Beloved within ourselves. The relationship that we finally achieve in this case, in which we engage with the other person in a profound exchange of respect and affection, but not projective love, is what Johnson describes as "stirring-the-oatmeal-love." "Oatmeal love" is usually not as thrilling or enchanting as projective love, but it is a most sacred form of relationship, for as Johnson observes, it "affirms the person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds" (191). Oatmeal love and projective love, Johnson concludes, "are utterly opposed energetically, natural enemies with completely opposing motives" (I97). Certainly, Johnson's words reflect a deep truth about human love, but they do not address the role of love as a facilitator of psychic growth. As much as we may wish to minimize the psychic vampirism in our relationships, it is not always possible or appropriate to eradicate every archetypal dance of projected Belovedness and snuggle into the comfortable simplicity of oatmeal love. For one thing, our inner psychic processes often require some mirroring external manifestation in order for us to work with them. For example, we sometimes need to have an external argument with another person that mirrors an internal conflict in our psyches in order to fully grasp and resolve the nature of that inner conflict. In the same way, some of us can find our way home to the inner Beloved only through the echoes of Belovedness in our external relationships. These external mirrors of our internal reality are particularly important for those of us who are extroverted-that is, for those of us who more easily find meaning in the events of external reality. We who are extroverts by nature or training are more inclined to become acquainted with our inner Beloved when the aspects of that archetype are reflected in our external loves.

In addition, all of us may need to do some projecting in our relationships for spiritual reasons. Communing with our inner Beloved is much like communing with the divine. In contemporary Western society, many of us no longer pursue this transcendent spiritual goal primarily through religious practices. Rather than kneeling at the altar of orthodox religion, as our ancestors did, we kneel at the altar of love, and we practice our new form of ecstatic, mystical worship in our external relationships. We look to our loved ones for our images of a loving divinity, and when we see our projected divinity reflected in their faces, we blissfully commune with its energy until the projection fails. Robert Johnson deplores this development and exhorts us to turn within, back to the altar of our loving souls. In other words, Johnson would have us all seek the inner Beloved, invariably and constantly, thereby forgoing the very real dangers of projective love. This is great work if you can do it, but it is not a path that everyone can take. Some of us must manifest some of our worshipful loving and our spiritual growth-in the mirror of our external loves before we can experience them within ourselves.

Manifesting our spiritual growth in our external loves presents us with a serious challenge. Any path of spiritual growth (which some call "redemption" or "salvation" and the Jungians call "individuation") can have a heavenly outcome, but it always entails some time in hell. When our loving relationships serve as our paths of spiritual growth, they are likely to entail some hell time as well-a reality blatantly incompatible with our culture's notions of love. As the Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbtihl-Craig has observed, our culture tells us that love is supposed to be a relationship of well-being, in which both people in the relationship feel consistently happy and satisfied. Of course, some sense of well-being is an essential component of every enduring relationship-otherwise it would only be a short-lived tempest of mutual projection. The image of love as a path of continual well-being is problematic, however, when our love relationships are also the arenas in which we must struggle toward individuation, redemption, and salvation, as they must often be, according to Guggenbtihl-Craig: For us the question is, has [love] to do with well-being or with salvation? . . . Individuation is not individualism. . . . Every single soul has a part in the collective soul. . . . An egoistic individuation of a single person as a private pastime is therefore hardly conceivable. . . . The life-long dialectical encounter between two partners. . . can be understood as a special path for discovering the soul, as a special form of individuation. . . that portion of human motivation that presses toward salvation. (1977, 34, 35, 36, 38, 4)

Guggenbtihl-Craig's provocative words combine with Johnson's views to convey a more complete sense about the role of love in our psychic health and development. Oatmeal love is like a foundation of rock on which our relationships may safely rest. Yet, even on the sturdy footing of oatmeal love, some experiences and emotions stand out in their capacity to move us. These exceptional events tell us that some of our unrecognized internal forces are attempting to express and transform themselves. Internal forces of this kind are archetypal processes that we dare not ignore, and in many cases, they can be worked through only within the context of our personal relationships. For example, one man I know had spent years reflecting, with courage and honesty, on his relationship with his vampiric mother, but it was only when he fell in love with a wise, loving woman that he was able to work through (and out of) the destructive patterns of behavior that he had developed in response to his maternal psychic vampire.

Similarly, the patterns of archetypal energy that we manifest in our relationships can be powerful teachers in our pursuit of spiritual growth. Several ways in which this can occur are presented by the Jungian analyst Verena Kast in her compelling book The Nature of Loving (1986). Kast describes six mythic couples and discusses how their relationships can be manifested in the relationships of real human beings. In particular, Kast describes ways in which her clients have used these images to comprehend the powerful psychic forces moving in their partners and themselves. Kast demonstrates how a conscious, well- monitored exchange of archetypal projection can illuminate the psyches of both participants in a way that individual reflection and therapy cannot. As you probably know from personal experience, we often find ourselves manifesting feelings and behaviors in relationship that we would never manifest in the insular state of emotional detachment. Sometimes we seem to be horrifyingly worse in relationship than we ever could have imagined being in solitude. But sometimes our, relationships evoke in us a magnificence of soul that we might never have achieved alone. As Kast observes, a secret aspect of love is its power to grant us the vision and courage to see something in a partner which that person may have sensed but perhaps may never have known had it not been lovingly suggested by another. . . . through love, we envision the best possibilities in the beloved and give that person the feeling that those possibilities can be realized. (1986, 5) ...

In other words, when we project an aspect of our divine Beloved onto another person, our projection may resonate with some aspect of the person's actual divinity-an aspect that the person couldn't have seen or manifested in solitude. As a result of our projection, the other person's divine aspect might actually be activated as a real force in his or her own psyche; that is, it might "rise to the occasion" of our projection. To whatever degree the other person can maintain the activation of that divine energy, without relying on our projection, the divine energy may serve to vanquish a vampire in that person's psyche. In this case, projection becomes a conscious gift of love, not an unconscious tool of exploitation.

The metaphorical fire that can kill a psychic vampire is the deceptively simple heat generated by the touching of two human souls. If our love can manage to touch the loving soul of the vampiric person, and if that person's soul can be induced to vibrate in resonance with ours, then her vampire archetype can possibly be neutralized. Remember that the vampiric person has settled for exploitation because she experienced a lack of human warmth and compassion. When she encounters the compassionate warmth that is kindled in the fire of connecting souls, she may perceive a new opportunity to choose between love and exploitation. And this time, she may choose differently-she may choose to seek and receive the love that was unavailable the first time she chose.

The image of human warmth as a curative force resonates with the words of Alice Miller in her book For Your Own Good. Miller argues that much of our inhuman treatment of others may be seen as a way to recreate our past victimization in the external reality, in an effort to externalize and "master" it, much as traumatized children attempt to recreate and master their trauma in their play activities. In Miller's view, when our psyches are structured by childhood abuse to perceive the world in terms of predator and victim, we will repeatedly create victims in the external reality so that we can be constantly reassured that we are no longer victims ourselves. Miller asserts that we will only reduce our inhuman behavior when we have touched the emotional memory of the victims that we once were. Integrating Miller's view with the vampire metaphor, we can say that a psychic vampire will cease to prey upon others only when he can, through the compassionate intervention of a loving force, feel his own victimization as a child and, at the same time, feel compassion for the victim that he was as a child. Once the old pain has been touched and grieved, the vampiric person can revisit his early decision to settle for exploitation over love. Of course, he may choose once more to identify with the cold power of the vampire. But then again, he may choose to recommit to the warmth of human love.

There is a second kind of fire that can kill a vampire: the blaze of a soul that is burning with the passion of its destiny. This kind of passionate flame is usually ignited by a vision of our inner nature, independent of vampiric influence. When we are moved by this vision, we feel a reverence for the energies in ourselves and others that glow with their own light, untouched by ambition or pride. As we contemplate the glow of these special energies, we become more conscious of the ways in which we and our loved ones exude coldness or warmth, which makes it easier to distinguish between the chill of vampirism and the warmth of human connection. When we choose the warmth of connectedness, we and our loved ones have the opportunity to wear the faces we had before we were conceived.

When we live as the people we were born to be, we are most truly and intensely alive. In contrast, the vampire is human anti-matter. He lives only by killing. . . He does not even die, as a man does: he is undead. He is, in other words, a pure inversion. There is no anomie, no alienation, as great as the vampire's; he is the alienation of man, and that alienation is potentially immortal. He is ultimately exploitative-a spreading center of alienation, despoiling others of their very lives and identities too. (Dresser I989, 161-62)

If the vampire is the antithesis of life, then it stands to reason that the essence of life-that which gives our lives power and meaning-is poison to the vampire. Thus, doing what we were born to do is lethal to our psychic vampires. The more we incarnate our destiny and pursue that which gives meaning to our lives-not through our acquired preoccupations, but through our innate giftedness-the more likely we will be to kill our vampires with the cremating fire of love.

Whether we generate a vampire-killing fire by touching other souls with our own (even in projective love) or by incarnating our innate gifts, the potency of our loving fire lies in its capacity to connect us to that which is greater than ourselves. When we allow ourselves to fully experience our projective love for another person, we sense that we are somehow touching a form of divinity that we cannot control or create. We wonder, Where does this enormous feeling come from? And where might it take us if we allowed it to guide us? Similarly, when we bring an inner passion into the world and retain some humility in the process, we are likely to sense that we are being guided by a vision of what is possible, more than by our notions of what is reasonable. We wonder again, Where does this vision come from? And where is it taking us?...

Now, let me say again, and most emphatically, that this journey is extremely perilous, and in order to win our way through to the divine, we must be heavily armed against the beast. But the fact remains that when the vampire lures us into the place, where visions and nightmares coexist, we may discover our vision of our divinity and thus come home to ourselves. In this sense, the fire can occasionally be, as Mephistopheles describes himself to Faust, "a living part of that power which perpetually thinks Evil and does Good," and our journey into its lethal realm can be the path to our redemption. When I contemplate this perilous journey, I am reminded (as I often have been during the writing of this book) of another perilous journey that was born in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien during the dark days of the Second War. It was a journey taken by two men, an elf, a dwarf, and four little beings called hobbits, who crawled together a perilous landscape in order to destroy the power of the Lord the Rings. In Tolkien's story, as in his world, war was being waged between exploitation and love, and in both wars, many souls were irreparably wounded or irretrievably lost. So it is along our journey through the vampire's realm. For one of us who finds our way home along the perilous path love, many others in our ranks will bleed away our lives into the maw of the bloodsucking beast. We will rush into the vampire's arms with a host of hungers-hunger for the Beloved, hunger for perfection, hunger for immortality, hunger for meaning, and hunger, hunger, hunger for the divine. In the realm of the vampire, our hungers will be rendered unholy. They will savage our souls and deplete our life force, even as we seek our living divinity. Only if we can recognize and resist the vampire's seduction only if we devote ourselves to love instead of exploitation, will our hungers be satisfied in a holy way. In the end, we must come to terms with the fact that the beast has always been with us and that it will be with us forever, plotting its next bloody feast. This is not necessarily a story without hope, nor is it a night without a dawn. But if we wish to survive the vampiric darkness savor the light of true love, we must first come to terms with vampire's unholy hunger.

Some of the information truly requires further research and reading in order to fully understand the implications involved. For example, you can't redeem a psychopath or malignant narcissist, but a very wounded person has the potential to be redeemed. A wounded person projects her or his "Inner-Beloved", as Barbara Hort calls it, into their relationships. What is more, conditional love by a pathological environment is truly damaging to the self and when this happens we recreate unconsciously that form of conditional "non-love" in our relationships and romantic lives, making us susceptible to pathological people.

I tried to synthesize here some material and I recommend further reading which is definitely useful to understand obsessive love, wounded people, and pathological personalities. Please don't hesitate to dig deeper, it can truly change your life.

Knowledge can protect you and it can be your savior if applied. Reading and digesting the psychology books like Unholy Hungers can really help you since it is about "real vampires" and about how projected romantic love can be actualized within the self. But also other recommended psychology books can be equally and even more illuminating, as well as the psychopathy material.


Further Reading

Women Who Loved Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm by Sandra Brown.

In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by George Simon

Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths by Robert Hare

Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley PDF copy.

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare

Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood

Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship by Linda Leonard

If You Had Controlling Parents by Dan Neuharth

Love's Executioner and Other Psychotherapy Tales by Irvin Yalom

Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness by Martha Stout

Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others by Barbara Hort.

Children of Trauma: Rediscovering Your Discarded Self by Jane Middelton-Moz

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman

Why Is It Always About You? by Sandy Hotchkiss

Trapped in the Mirror by Elan Golomb

How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved by Sandra Brown

Are You the One for Me?: Knowing Who's Right and Avoiding Who's Wrong by Barbara De Angelis

The Inner Landscape of the Psychopath

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron

Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder by Rachel Reiland

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain by Sue Gerhardt

Deep Therapy in the Fast Lane by Restin Wells

Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior...and Feel Great Again by Jeffrey E. Young, Ph.D. and Janet S. Klosko, Ph.D

Shame & Guilt: Masters of Disguise by Jane Middelton-Moz

Word gets around: Twilight and the trick of the psychopaths

The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others by Silvia Cattori.