A case of Lycanthropy
A 49-year-old married woman presented on an urgent basis for psychiatric evalution because of delusions of being a wolf and "feeling like an animal with claws." She suffered from extreme apprehension and felt that she was no longer in control of her own fate: she said, "A voice was coming out of me." Throughout her 20-year marriage she experienced compulsive urges towards bestiality, lesbianism, and adultery.
The patient chronically ruminated and dreamed about wolves. One week before her admission, she acted on these ruminations for the first time. At a family gathering, she disrobed, assumed the female sexual posture of a wolf, and offered herself to her mother. This episode lasted for approximately 20 minutes. The following night, after coitus with her husband, the patient suffered a 2-hour episode, during which time she growled, scratched, and gnawed at the bed. She stated that the devil came into her body and she became an animal. Simultaneously, she experienced auditory hallucinations. There was no drug involvement or alcoholic intoxication.
Hospital course. The patient was treated in a structured inpatient program. She was seen daily for individual psychotherapy and was placed on neuroleptic medication. During the first 3 weeks, she suffered relapses when she said such things as "I am a wolf of the night; I am a wolf woman of the day...I have claws, teeth, fangs, hair... and anguish is my prey at night...the gnashing and snarling of teeth...powerless is my cause, I am what I am and will always roam the earth long after death...I will continue to search for perfection and salvation.
She would peer into a mirror and look frightened because her eyes looked different: "One is frightened and the other is like the wolf--it was dark, deep, and full of evil, and full of revenge of the other eye. This creature of the dark wanted to kill." During these periods, she felt sexually aroused and tormented. She experienced strong homosexual urges, almost irresistable zoophilic drives, and masturbatory compulsions--culminating in the delusion of a wolflike metamorphosis. She would gaze into the mirror and see "the head of a wolf in place of a face on my own body--just a long-nosed wolf with teeth, groaning, snarling, growling...with fangs and claws, calling out "I am the devil." Others around her noticed the unintelligible, animal-like noises she made.
By the fourth week she had stabilized considerably, reporting, "I went and looked into a mirror and the wolf eye was gone." There was only other short-lived relapse, which responded to reassurance by experienced personnel. With the termination of that episode, which occurred on the night of a full moon, she wrote what she experienced: "I don't intend to give up my search for (what) I lack...in my present marriage...my search for such a hairy creature. I will haunt the graveyards...for a tall, dark man that I intend to find." She was discharged during the ninth week of hospitalization on neuroleptic medication.
Psychological data. On the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the patients performance showed normal intellect; the subscale configuration was devoid of behavioral correlates associated with organicity, as was the Bender Motor Gestalt Test. On the Holtzman Ink Blot Technique, the performance was indicative of an acutely psychotic schizophrenic with distorted body image and gross sexual preoccupation. The Lovinger Sentence Completion Blank was corroborative. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was interpreted as showing an acute schizophrenic reaction with evidence of obsessional thinking, marked feelings of inferiority, and excessive needs for attention and affection.
Harvey Rostenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D.
The American Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 134, No. 10. October 1977
Lycanthropy comes from the Greek word lukos meaning wolf and the Greek word anthropos meaning man and translates into wolfman. So lycanthropy is the transformation of a human into a wolf. Usually it is a man but occasionally it can be a woman or a child. There are two kinds of lycanthropy one exhibited as a mania in which the person believes himself to be a wolf and roams the country side to feed his craving for blood by killing and eating its victims. The second type is accomplished through the use of ointments or charms, which have the magical power to turn a human into a werewolf. The term werewolf comes from the old English word wer or man plus wolf, which becomes manwolf. There are many theories as to how a person becomes a werewolf. One is that the person controls the animal with his mind and makes the animal do what he commands. Another is that a person can deliberately transforms himself into the animal, as a sorcerer would do so as to do evil or kill his enemies. Not only can sorcerers change into wolfs but other animals as well, but also prefer the wolf the best as it is the most feared of any animal. Throughout the world there has been many a belief in lycanthropy, the Navajo Indians believed that witches could turn themselves into the animals by just wearing the skin of the animal on their back. In medieval times the European countries were in fear of werewolves and they thought that these werewolves were servants of the devil. Throughout centuries there have been many stories of werewolf and cannibalism in the courts. Many men were convicted of killing and eating their victims. Even in modern day there have been cases of men believing that they are werewolves. These modern day werewolves are thought to be possessed by the spirit of a wolf rather than being bitten by a werewolf as portrayed in Hollywood movies.
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