(🔖Wattys nominated 2021) (🍋slow burn) An American student named Gabriel Steiger and her college friends meet a mysterious man at London nightclub. The tall, dark stranger says he has a game called Crimson Chess. Gabriel needs to explain what a...
🛡️Ignorance is a man's worst enemy. Ignorance makes slaves of men. - Dracula
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(Vlad &Radu)
Psycho-biographical considerations about Vlad the Impaler also known as Dracula
Dr. Peter Dan
Abstract
The formative years of the historical character Vlad III Dracula are analyzed from the perspective of dynamic psychology, moral psychology, developmental psychology and psychopathology in order to create a framework for diagnostic hypotheses about his personality and psychological functioning.
Vlad III Draculea, later alliterated to Dracula, from the latin draco, meaning the son of the dragon but also possibly the son of the devil, was born at the end of 1431 in the Transylvanian city of Sighisoara. His father, also named Vlad was a member of the chivalric order of the dragon, hence the genesis of the son's name. Vlad the son was the ruler of Principate of Wallachia (the southern part of today's Romania, extending roughly from the Carpathian mountains to the Danube River to the South and the Black Sea to the East) on three different occasions: in 1448, between 1456-1462, and again in 1476. He died at the end of 1476 or the beginning of 1477.
Vlad was a complex and controversial character: a great military strategist, a fighter for national independence, a tyrannical ruler, a pillar of Europe's defense against the Ottoman onslaught, an able politician and a sadist renowned for his cruelty. Even in the context of the unspeakable cruelty considered "acceptable" in the 14th and 15th centuries (see the details of the execution of Fra Dolcino in 1307 and Gheorghe Doja in 1514 to name a few, or the towers of skulls left in the wake of Tamerlane's campaigns) his deeds stood out and his reputation has been preserved through the ages. Part of the reason is that a significant number of his victims have been Saxons and a new medium for distributing information, namely the print had been invented. In 1463 the minstrel Michael Beheim has written a poem about the bloodthirsty prince Dracula.
By 1499 Ambrosius Huber of Nuremberg had printed a pamphlet whose frontispiece reads: "Here begins the very cruel frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man Prince Dracula". In other pamphlets, Vlad is called "Prince Dracula, the Great Berserker". Such popular literature appeared with some regularity (we know of about 50) keeping the specter of Dracula , the bloodthirsty and the connection to Vlad the Impaler alive for several centuries.
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