Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Dracula, Bram Stoker - Seymour Shuster (essay date September 1973)

Seymour Shuster (essay date September 1973)

SOURCE: Shuster, Seymour. “Dracula and Surgically Induced Trauma in Children.” The British Journal of Medical Psychology 46 (September 1973): 259-70.

[In the following essay, Shuster claims that Dracula is a result of Stoker's long-repressed anxiety stemming from the author's childhood experience with doctors.]

The first portion of this paper is intended to show that a connection probably exists between the horror story Dracula and surgically induced trauma experienced by its author as a child. In the second portion of this paper I will try to draw some practical inferences from the work I have done.

In a personal communication with Anna Freud, the author expressed his belief that a connexion existed between the creation of monsters like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and Dr Jekyll's evil counterpart, Mr Hyde, and surgically induced trauma. In her reply, Miss Freud...

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