ABSTRACT
In Dracula the unholy triad of death, sexuality, and oral greed, reveals its origins in the passions of childhood. The female ideal belongs to that area of the psyche which also pertains to the mother-child relationship. The fundamental attacks made by Western culture upon this area are revealed in the deep unreality which is slowly tightening its grip on the Western individual. Count Dracula, more than any other figure of the type, operates through a kind of physical contact which is a parody of love and sexuality, and which creates a chain of contamination and addiction. A culture of ‘virtual reality’ which finds it difficult to distinguish between the living and the inanimate has been created—a culture of the undead. Although the ‘emancipation of woman’ has been a Western phenomenon, it has been achieved only on condition that the woman accepts the ‘murder of the mother’ and joins in a masculine culture.
