J. Gordon Melton

J. Gordon Melton is director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Evanston, Illinois. He has written widely on the subject of religions and religious freedom, issues of morality, and on the subject of the occult. The following essay is taken from Melton's The Vampire Book, a thoroughly researched encyclopedia on the vampire in history, literature, film, music, science, and culture. In this essay, Melton provides a readable overview of psychological theories involving the vampire myth. Beginning with Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century, psychologists turned their efforts to the study of the unconscious mind and the ways in which humans deal with emotional and sexual desires. Many of these desires are repressed, buried in the mind, out of a fear that the individual who tries to fulfill...