“Loss of meaning” is a very broad term, and perhaps a little grandiose at times, but generally the argument of this paper holds up well.
This is certainly the academic paper I have been involved with which has garnered the most media attention. Brendan Kelly and myself intended to write a nuanced paper on how psychiatry conceptualised vampirism, when it occurred as a clinical presentation, and how this changed over time. This reflected wider changes in psychiatry (and probably, though this wasn’t part of the paper, society itself) in that the meaning ascribed to symptoms was increasingly devalued in favour of a “checklisting” approach. Something similar has happened to dreams, in the psychiatric context.
Did we succeed in this? Here is the abstract :
Vampirism, as a clinical presentation, was formerly much discussed in psychiatric literature. In recent years this has not been the case. This article begins by exploring the history of vampiric phenomena and the various medical theories of vampirism. It discusses the change in emphasis in psychiatry from a psychotherapeutically-influenced exploration of…
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Séamus Sweeney 