Zombies, vampires, werewolves: an adolescent's developmental system for the undead and their ambivalent dependence on the living, and technical implications.

While vampires haunt contemporary American pop culture, the undead have populated psychoanalytic literature from Abraham's March 15, 1915 letter to Freud to today. PEP lists 439 psychoanalytic references to the undead (99 on zombies; 288 on vampires; 52 on werewolves). A selection of papers are cited, focusing on clinical cases, ethnography media and literature, even breast-feeding fantasized as blood sucking, associated with primitive dynamics. Previous works' libidinal, object relations, and dynamic perspectives on various "undeads" are summarized. This paper's contribution to the psychoanalytic literature is to examine the relationship of the three categories of undead both among each other and in their relation to the living. This paper presents a young adolescent's extensive play and fantasies about the undead, and his sophisticated intrapsychic model for the undead, developed prior to treatment, that kept him in psychical equilibrium, yet also kept him from feeling alive. This model has developmental implications for handling three types of transferences. Also, we may shed light on both contemporary preoccupation with the undead in contemporary American popular culture, and its endurance over time in Western culture.