By Joseph J. Schiller

May 1974

In this paper I intend to show that Dracula is indeed a myth and a modern one not only because of its relatively recent vintage but because of the issue it deals with; that issue being whether or not consciousness is a valuable and effective evolutionary experiment.

I have used as my primary source a recently written play based on the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker. If I am correct in my view that Dracula is a myth it should be interpretable symbolically and from that perspective should describe a struggle faced by all humans.

In this play the action takes place in an old castle converted into an insane asylum and located in England. Nearby is another castle owned and lived in by Count Dracula, an immigrant from Transylvania. In the opening scenes we are introduced to the physician in charge, Dr. Seward, his sister Sybil, his ward Mina Murrey, Mina’s fiancé Jonathan Harker, and two attendants.

Jonathan has come because of Mina’s health, which has deteriorated of late. She is frequently pallid and without energy – generally anemic looking and has two small wounds on her throat. Count Dracula, who exerts a strong attraction on Sybil and a kind of compulsive attraction on Mina has been invited to dinner. His arrival is marked by several irrational or magical events such as a loss of electrical power which he seems to have some control over and an apparent ability to know what people are thinking.

One of the inmates of the asylum, Renfield, makes frequent appearances because of his uncanny ability to escape the asylum and he also seems to have some sort of relationship with Dracula. At this point a new arrival on the scene is Dr. Van Helsing who has been called in as a specialist and turns out to be an expert on occult phenomena with an emphasis on vampires. He immediately diagnoses Mina's problem but has great difficulty in convincing Dr. Seward and Jonathan. He is finally successful however with the help of the case history of one of Mina’s friends who apparently died of the same malady.

As the action continues Mina becomes more like a vampire herself until in the end the men locate Dracula’s tomb, which he must occupy helplessly during daylight hours and there they drive a stake through his heart, the only effective way of bringing about his final end.

To begin the symbolic interpretation of this drama one must approach it as one would a dream. The characters of the dream are interpreted as entities within the psyche. The following cast of characters is proposed:

Dr. Seward - The father archetype

Jonathan - The hero (ego consciousness)

Renfield - The hero’s shadow

Mina - The anima (feminine side of the hero)

Sybil - The anima’s shadow

Van Helsing - The wise old man

Dracula - To be determined

These identities are chosen because the characterizations coincide with Jung’s descriptions of the archetypes. Dr. Seward is not the physical father of Mina but fulfills that role as her guardian just as the archetype is not one’s physical father but rather that which one projects onto a father. Some would call it a racial memory.

Jonathan is identified with consciousness because of his resistance to the acceptance of a superstition and his tendency to choose physical weapons to deal with Dracula (a gun and sword) rather than rely on psychological weapons such as those urged on him by Van Helsing. In addition he is cast in the hero role because he is the intended savior of Mina. Renfield, on the other hand, is the hero’s shadow because he is insane (has been consumed by the unconscious) and therefor has failed in his heroic struggle. He knows very well who and what Dracula is and in fact is under Dracula’s power.

Mina is the hero’s anima since his task, as with all hero’s, is to rescue her from the clutches and evil designs of the unconscious. She is also the fiancé and therefor a royal wedding is in the offing should the hero be successful. If he is not she will become a vampire herself and be lost to consciousness forever since the best that can be hoped for is her death. This means that if consciousness is unable to integrate the anima, she will always work against the efforts of consciousness to adapt by causing confusion between real women and her projection. Psychic wholeness is then out of the question and continuing fragmentation is likely resulting perhaps in insanity which is death for the ego.

Sybil is presented as a silly spinster, given to dizzy spells and unconsciousness. She is easily hypnotized by Dracula and used for his evil purposes. From this it is clear that while she is feminine she has all the attributes that Mina lacks and thus fills out the feminine archetype. She is the accumulation of negative feminine attributes as judged by consciousness and therefor balances Mina as her shadow. Dracula is uninterested in her though since she is already largely unconscious and in no danger of moving out of Dracula’s control.

Van Helsing is the wise old man since he brings the tools needed by the hero to fight off this invasion from the unconscious. He is a professor and has studied many years to acquire his capacity to fight Dracula so his implicit recommendation is that awareness is the only route to success against a foe from the unconscious. Predictably he has difficulty convincing the hero of the existence of his foe since the hero in the past has taken pains to blind himself to this very fact. Van Helsing’s weapons are also unfamiliar to the hero because they seem as irrational as his foe.

That brings one to Dracula, whose role is central and is the point of the drama. The approach to be followed will be to examine Dracula’s attributes one by one, thereby building up as complete a picture of him as possible.

To begin, Dracula is described before his appearance as a foreigner from Transylvania, wealthy but living alone in his decaying castle. He is handsome, mysterious, and seen only at night. Since he is not to be identified with ego consciousness, he must be a denizen of the unconscious and this may be taken as the foreign country alluded too. It is named Transylvania since this country is remote from western consciousness and had a historical character that supplied the inspiration for Dracula. He is only seen at night, that is to say when the sun is not up – in fact he speaks about how he hates the sun and longs for continuous night. The sun here represents the light of consciousness and Dracula cannot exist in it; he is therefor opposed to consciousness and struggles for his life, such as it is, against it. He lives in a decaying castle. This would seem to imply a connection to objective reality, but a cast off portion of it. He may therefor once have been a part of the ego complex but have been rejected as undesirable or not useful.

He is extremely masculine one suspects, since he attracts females and repels males and we know from physics that opposites attract while likes repel. This also leads to the conclusion that all of our characters are sexual extremes since nobody seems to have an ambivalent reaction to Dracula. This is no surprise since we are dealing with archetypes rather than people.

One assumes from the analysis so far that Dracula’s real goal is Jonathon but that for some reason he must approach that goal indirectly through the anima. Finally, he is wealthy, meaning that he has at his command all the resources of the unconscious, which means all resources except those already won by ego consciousness, making the ego a pauper by comparison.

In his attacks on the anima, Dracula causes her to show signs of anemia. She becomes listless, weak, sleepy, unable to concentrate. That is, she comes closer to unconsciousness. Concentration is one of the capacities of the ego and is the factor that produces consciousness. Mina thus loses this capacity through her loss of blood which is sucked out by Dracula. Blood therefor represents and perhaps is the source of the ego’s strength and Dracula apparently desires it to prolong his tenuous connection with life. He is therefor referred to as undead and one presumes that he is a resident of the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious. He is apparently unable to produce his own blood though and must steal it in order to avoid real death. Dracula does not desire to steal consciousness for himself, rather he wishes to destroy consciousness outright – as he says, he has been here for many long centuries and will be here for a good many more.

Dracula is able to control physical realities (electricity) and since the workings of these things are totally beyond man’s ability to control – we can only use them by arranging to get their own laws to work for us – they must be identified with the unconscious. He is also adept in the use of extra sensory perception since he is able to read minds and foretell the future. This means that since he is a resident of the unconscious this is his avenue to these facts, unconsciousness not being subject to boundaries as is the ego complex.

Dracula must sleep during the day for reasons previously mentioned but at night he is invincible, changing himself to a mist or bat at will. He lights a sulfurous smelling cigarette with no apparent match and sucks blood through retractable fangs like those of a snake. Here one sees that Dracula is largely a projection. What else could change into a mist at will? That being the case, one presumes it must be a projection of the ego since that is the only entity with the capacity to project, since projection is a byproduct of the light of consciousness. Dracula is identified with the bat, which is a night creature that inhabits caves and has very poor vision. Caves are entries to the interior of the earth which is feminine and identified with the unconscious. This leads to the idea of Dracula as a subject of the great mother in her negative aspect as the uncommonly attractive and all consuming ouroboros and the arch enemy of the hero since she is what he struggles against, unconsciousness.

The association with sulfur establishes Dracula’s connection with the Devil. This connection is also made when a masculine triumvirate is needed to overcome him. The correspondence with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is inescapable. He is also associated with the snake, a very powerful symbol for masculinity and evil among other things.

Van Helsing as the wise old man, brings the tools of Dracula’s undoing. These are religious symbols: the cross, holy water, and unusual plants: batswort, hawkweed, aconite, etc. The religious symbols are useful because of their association with Christ who is here taken as a symbol of the self and thus favors psychic integration, unity, and wholeness. What leads to a more developed consciousness is necessarily antithetical to Dracula’s purposes since he opposes consciousness. The plants represent the positive aspect of the great mother in her role as that which feeds and clothes and thus makes life possible.

Finally, we are informed in the course of the play that Sybil was the one that first invited Dracula into the home of Dr. Seward and this leads to a remark by Van Helsing that one of the vampires weaknesses is that he must initially be invited into a home, only then acquiring the power to make other visits at will. From this one can begin to come to a conclusion about Dracula.

Generally speaking, it is true that one is in no danger of a regression until he sees regression as a possible course of action and therefor becomes acquainted with it. When one takes this step, the attraction of regression becomes immediately apparent and from then on that behavior has power over consciousness. As an example, consider marijuana. The use of this drug is, in the view of the author, regressive under ordinary circumstances because it reduces the power of the ego complex and therefor allows the unconscious, because of its relatively higher energetic level, to effect consciousness without interference. Before the drug is first used it has no power because it is unknown, but after use it represents an attraction that the ego will be forced to expend energy to combat or else it must continuously find satisfaction through use of the drug.

Thus far then, Dracula has been found to be: a) an unconscious content, b) closely related to the personal unconscious, c) related to the negative aspect of the great mother, d) a powerful regressive attraction for the ego, e) projected by the ego. From this one can come to the tentative conclusion that, while Renfield is undoubtedly one aspect of the hero’s shadow, he is altogether too benign to be a complete representation of it. Therefor he and Dracula taken together represent the complete entity. Renfield is necessary in order to have someplace to put the ineffective childish and in some ways even lovable attributes of one’s shadow, leaving Dracula as unalloyed evil.

It remains then to explain why the shadow uses the backdoor technique of approaching the hero through the anima. This is not too difficult when one considers that the shadow is largely the creation of the ego through the act of repression of those aspects of the personality that are judged to be negative and that the ego finds repugnant. The ego thus knows the shadow from the side that he has repressed and maintains a guard against. He has not made the connection between the shadow and anima and is thus vulnerable when the shadow uses that route as his entrée. The anima is less a creation of repression in that only those aspects of the ego personality which are feminine and have been realized by the ego have been accumulated in this way (these are also shadow characteristics and establish the connection between Dracula and Mina). The rest of the anima personality has never been realized at all and thus is unguarded against. This dichotomy is clearly presented in the play when, as the anima comes nearer and nearer complete domination by Dracula she becomes less demure and angelic on the one hand and more erotic and aggressive on the other.

The answer to the dilemma of the ego is no less clearly delineated. First, he has created his own problem through the essentially passive approach he has taken in the past to the negative aspects of his personality. Choosing repression, which is essentially a denial of the existence of those attributes, he has placed himself at their mercy and they have none. Instead he must become as conscious as possible of these entities as urged by Van Helsing and in the end take a positive and conscious stand against them. Only in this way does the ego maintain conscious control of the situation and thereby retain the capacity to choose.

To answer the question raised in the first paragraph of this paper then, the myth, which corresponds to experience thus far gained by the species, leads to a positive conclusion since while the ego is responsible for the state of disintegration of the personality, it is also capable of reintegration.

Tiller, Ted. Count Dracula, New York, 1972.

Jung, C. G. The Collected Works, New York, 1953.