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Clinical vampirism
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Clinical vampirism, more commonly called Renfield's syndrome or Renfield syndrome, is an obsession with drinking blood. The earliest formal presentation of clinical vampirism to appear in the psychiatric literature, with the psychoanalytic interpretation of two cases, was contributed by Richard L. Vanden Bergh and John F. Kelley in 1964.[1] As the authors point out, brief and sporadic reports of blood-drinking behaviors associated with sexual pleasure have appeared in the psychiatric literature at least since 1892 with the work of Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Many medical publications concerning clinical vampirism can be found in the literature of forensic psychiatry, with the unusual behavior reported as one of many aspect of extraordinary violent crimes.[2][3][4] The behavior has never gained official recognition by the psychiatric profession and is not found in any edition of the International Classification of Diseases or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, in the more colorful era in the history of psychiatry that predated the 1980s rise of the coded categories of (supposedly) theory-neutral mental disorders in DSM and ICD, the psychiatric literature was fertile ground for the flourishing of case history reports of "uncommon psychiatric syndromes"[5] or "extraordinary disorders of human behavior"[6] that included not only clinical vampirism, but also lycanthropy, possession, stigmata and other unusual phenomena.[7]