archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Post-Jungian · an archetype

Demon Lover

The lover who comes at night and leaves you a little thinner by morning.

Linda Schierse Leonard’s name, in On the Way to the Wedding (1986), for an inner figure that seduces, possesses and drains the life from love and creative work. She read it through Count Dracula and called it an archetype.

The Demon Lover, in Linda Schierse Leonard’s usage, is an inner figure that promises ecstasy and takes life. It seduces rather than loves, possesses rather than relates, and feeds on the energy of whoever gives in to it, until that person begins to feed on others in turn. Leonard places it last among the obstacles in the first part of her book, after the Ghostly Lover, Prince Charming and the Special Princess, and the Bewitchment: it is the final figure at the edge of the wood, before the clearing where a committed relationship can begin. She names its forms as addiction, obsessive jealousy, the habit of being a willing victim, a morbid self-doubt that refuses love, and the handing over of one’s creative work or lifeblood to another person. Her image for all of these is Count Dracula, whose story she retells at length and reads as one psyche’s drama, with each character standing for a capacity of the same person.

Go deeper

At the threshold

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Public domain · Coleridge, Kubla Khan (1816)

The phrase arrives in English as a Gothic aside, a cry heard by moonlight in a holy and savage place, long before anyone called it an archetype.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Count Dracula

    Leonard, L. S. (1986). On the Way to the Wedding, chapter 5, “The Demon Lover”, pp. 77–92 and 99, 1897

    Leonard’s defining image: Stoker’s count, retold and read as the Demon Lover in the psyche, the last and hardest obstacle before the wedding.

  2. Jung’s example

    Lucy Westenra

    Leonard, L. S. (1986). On the Way to the Wedding, chapter 5, p. 89, 1897

    Read by Leonard as the sweet, unguarded side that wanders off in its sleep, is bitten, and goes on to feed on others.

  3. Jung’s example

    Renfield

    Leonard, L. S. (1986). On the Way to the Wedding, chapter 5, p. 89, 1897

    The asylum inmate who wants ever larger living things to eat; Leonard makes him the craving that lets the demon in.

  4. Jung’s example

    Dracula’s Daughter

    Leonard, L. S. (1986). On the Way to the Wedding, chapter 6, p. 114, 1986

    A witchlike vampire from Leonard’s own visions, born of the Witch and Dracula together, which she speared in active imagination.

  5. a later reading

    Heathcliff

    Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection, chapter 7, “Rape and the Demon Lover”, p. 136, 1847

    Woodman’s example, four years before Leonard: a lover readers adore most when he holds the dead Catherine, a marriage with death.

  6. a later reading

    Eros, in “Eros and Psyche”

    Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma, chapter 8, “Psyche and her daimon-lover”, 2nd century

    Kalsched reads Apuleius’s unseen husband, who keeps Psyche in a palace in the dark, as the daimon-lover who protects and imprisons.

The wider sky

Where the Demon Lover has been seen

28 exemplars across 10 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it.I said, "Is it good, friend?""It is bitter--bitter," he answered;"But I like itBecause it is bitter,And because it is my heart."

Public domain · Crane, In the desert (The Black Riders, III) (1895)

Leonard quotes this poem in her Demon Lover chapter for a client who saw that her own heart was being eaten and so could not be given to anyone.

He is courteous, attentive, and never eats in front of you.

Each visit costs a little more blood and feels like a little more love.

He cannot cross the threshold unless someone asks him in.

The deep layer · what was written

Demon Lover: the entry

Definition

The Demon Lover, in Linda Schierse Leonard’s usage, is an inner figure that promises ecstasy and takes life. It seduces rather than loves, possesses rather than relates, and feeds on the energy of whoever gives in to it, until that person begins to feed on others in turn. Leonard places it last among the obstacles in the first part of her book, after the Ghostly Lover, Prince Charming and the Special Princess, and the Bewitchment: it is the final figure at the edge of the wood, before the clearing where a committed relationship can begin. She names its forms as addiction, obsessive jealousy, the habit of being a willing victim, a morbid self-doubt that refuses love, and the handing over of one’s creative work or lifeblood to another person. Her image for all of these is Count Dracula, whose story she retells at length and reads as one psyche’s drama, with each character standing for a capacity of the same person.

Two features set Leonard’s figure apart from its neighbours. She does not tie it to one sex: Dracula, she says, is in all human beings, and her cases include a jealous man, a woman who played vampire and victim with her lover, and a mother who lived off her daughters. And unlike the Beast of the fairy tale, who can be loved into a prince because he lets the woman go, the Demon Lover in her account cannot be redeemed. It has to be recognised, refused and, in her image, staked.

History

The name is much older than the archetype. A broadside entered in 1657 as “A Warning for Married Women” tells of a dead sailor who returns to carry off his former sweetheart, by then a wife and mother; Francis James Child collected its descendants as ballad 243, “James Harris (The Daemon Lover)”. Coleridge’s “woman wailing for her demon-lover” in “Kubla Khan” (1816) belongs to the same Gothic vocabulary, and Toni Reed (1988) traced the seducer and his innocent victim as a structural motif through British fiction. None of these is a psychological claim, and Leonard does not cite the ballad.

The Jungian line begins with M. Esther Harding. The second chapter of The Way of All Women (1933), “The Ghostly Lover”, describes a figure who lures a woman away from reality with promises of bliss elsewhere. Harding presents it as the destructive aspect of the animus and the counterpart of the Siren in a man (pp. 41–45). Jung’s own case material has a darker relative. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962, chapter “Psychiatric Activities”) he recounts a catatonic young woman, abused as a girl, who said she had lived on the moon and had waited on a tower to kill a winged vampire. Jung calls the figure a winged demon and notes that she projected it onto him during treatment. He does not speak of a demon lover; the identification is Donald Kalsched’s, made in 1996.

The phrase entered the Jungian literature as the name of a complex. Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection (1982) has a chapter titled “Rape and the Demon Lover”, which describes an inner lover-god formed in “fathers’ daughters”: women bound to an idealised father, perfectionist, often anorexic or bulimic, who give the strength they need for their own lives to a fantasy of the perfect man. Woodman names Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath as writers especially prone to it (p. 136), and a dream husband appears in the same chapter as Dracula (p. 133).

Leonard made the figure an archetype and gave it a face. Her preface says she met it during her own analysis in Zurich and while writing The Wounded Woman (1982), but could not deal with it until this book. Chapter 5 opens on Stoker’s novel and its film versions and closes on the cast as an inner household: Lucy as the naive, unguarded side that becomes a vampire, Renfield as craving, Van Helsing as the healing consciousness that knows the power of symbols, and Mina as the one who must refuse.

As such, Dracula, the Demon Lover in the psyche, is the epitome of the ultimate obstacle on the way to the wedding. — Linda Schierse Leonard, On the Way to the Wedding (1986), p. 88

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The archetype claim comes in a case history: behind a client’s critical, alcoholic father and the “perverted old man” of her dreams stood “the archetype of Dracula, the Demon Lover” (p. 99). In the next chapter the figure joins the others as a form of the will to power (pp. 112–113). In her later books on addiction, Witness to the Fire (1989) and Meeting the Madwoman (1993), Leonard turned to other figures, above all the Trickster, as Kalsched (1996) notes.

The debate

The first question is whether there is an archetype here at all. Leonard calls it one, but every case she gives traces the figure to a particular history: an absent father, a martyred mother, an alcoholic household. Woodman called it a complex, rooted in the father–daughter bond and in a failed early bond with the mother. Susan Kavaler-Adler (1993), writing from object-relations theory, describes a “demon lover” complex in women artists, an archaic internal father kept alive by unmourned early trauma; she needs no archetype. John Haule (1992) treats the demon lover as a failure to tell the anima or animus apart from the shadow, which makes it a contamination of two existing figures rather than a third.

Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma (1996) gives the fullest reading. In a section on “popularized versions” of his theory he groups Woodman’s daimon-lover, Leonard’s Dracula and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s innate predator as three portraits of one archetypal defence: a self-care system that the psyche sets up after early trauma, which protects what is left of the personal spirit by persecuting the rest of the personality. On his account the figure is double, protector as well as jailer, and has to be understood before it can be dissolved. That cuts against Leonard’s conclusion that Dracula must simply be destroyed.

The second question is placement. The roster alternative is to fold the Demon Lover into the animus as a negative-animus figure. Harding’s Ghostly Lover was an animus figure, and Woodman’s demon lover lives in women; Kalsched reads Leonard’s earlier “perverted old man” as Jung’s negative animus. Leonard herself declines the restriction to women, which is the strongest reason to give the figure its own entry rather than a paragraph under animus.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the Demon Lover as a psychological construct, and no instrument measures it. Leonard’s evidence is her own analysis, her clients’ dreams and active imagination, and the practice of Alcoholics Anonymous, which she offers as a model of the fight against the figure. Addiction and coercive relationships are studied in mainstream psychology, but that research neither uses nor tests the figure.

Appearances

Leonard’s own example is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its adaptations, which she lists: Nosferatu, the Bela Lugosi film, the stage version filmed with Frank Langella, and Andy Warhol’s version; she also draws on Richard Geer’s 1985 San Francisco staging. She quotes poems by Stephen Crane, Rupert Brooke and D. H. Lawrence that a client chose to chart her stages of love. Woodman’s examples are literary: Heathcliff, whom readers still love most when he holds the dead Catherine, and the poems of Dickinson and Plath. Kalsched reads the Eros of Apuleius’s “Eros and Psyche” and the serpent prince of “Prince Lindworm” as daimon-lovers. Outside the Jungian line the name runs on in fiction: Elizabeth Bowen’s story “The Demon Lover” (1945) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover” (1949) both work from the ballad, and Robin Morgan borrowed the name for a feminist study of terrorism and sexuality, The Demon Lover (1989). Every case here is a reading made with the term in hand. Only Leonard calls the figure an archetype.

Sources

  • Leonard, L. S. (1986). On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-349-2. Preface; chapter 3, “The Ghostly Lover”, and note 1 on Harding; chapter 5, “The Demon Lover”, pp. 77–107; chapter 6, pp. 112–113; chapter 9, pp. 183–184.
  • Leonard, L. S. (1982). The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship. Swallow Press. ISBN 978-0-8040-0398-8.
  • Leonard, L. S. (1989). Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-393-5.
  • Harding, M. E. (1933). The Way of All Women: A Psychological Interpretation. Longmans, Green. Chapter II, “The Ghostly Lover”, pp. 41–45. https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.924
  • Jung, C. G. (1962). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Chapter “Psychiatric Activities”, pp. 128–130 of the Vintage edition. ISBN 978-0-679-72395-0.
  • Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-11-3. Chapter 7, “Rape and the Demon Lover”, pp. 131–155.
  • Haule, J. R. (1992). Pilgrimage of the Heart: The Path of Romantic Love. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-669-1. As quoted in Kalsched (1996).
  • Kavaler-Adler, S. (1993). The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-90710-1. As quoted in Kalsched (1996).
  • Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Chapter 3 on Jung’s moon-lady case; chapter 5, “Popularized versions”; chapters 8 and 10.
  • Reed, T. (1988). Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-9290-1. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/21
  • Child, F. J. (Ed.). (1882–1898). The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. IV, no. 243, “James Harris (The Daemon Lover)”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daemon_Lover
  • Coleridge, S. T. (1816). Kubla Khan. In Poems of Coleridge. Project Gutenberg #8208.
  • Stoker, B. (1897). Dracula. Project Gutenberg #345.
  • Bowen, E. (1945). The Demon Lover and Other Stories. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60061-3.
  • Jackson, S. (1949). The daemon lover. In The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris. Farrar, Straus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_and_Other_Stories
  • Morgan, R. (1989). The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-02642-9.

Leaving

Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted, I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted) I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;Women with child, content; and old men sleeping; And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping; And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;And evening hush, broken by homing wings; And Song's nobility, and Wisdom holy,That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things, Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,One after one, like tasting a sweet food.I have need to busy my heart with quietude.

Public domain · Brooke, The Busy Heart (1915)

The same client chose this sonnet for the stage after the ecstasy and its shadow, alone and tending the heart, as Leonard records at the close of the chapter.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☉ AnimusThe inner court of opinion.Return to the void