A female werewolf

In 1988's October issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry tells us about a bizzare case about a 49 year old woman who thought she was a wolf and more and more started to behave like one. She revealed that during her marriage, which seemed to be normal from the outside, she got these overwelming desires to join secret, bestial activities. Her erotic day dreams often included orgies with other women in many shapes. The wolf was a constant and central figure in her fantasies; she felt its hypnotic look during the days, it's warm breath against her naked neck during the nights. Soon she started to feel "like an animal with claws". To her the message was clear - she was a wolf.

After a while she started to act her obsessional neuroses. At a family reunion she suddenly got overwelmed by the wolf-feelings. She took all her clothes off, stood on her hands and knees and moved slowly towards her mother and offered herself to her with an exciting and the sexual position, which the she-wolf uses to attract a male. The woman got worse; the following night, after she had sex with her husband, she was scratching, biting and grunting in the bed. She kept on doing this for two hours and she later explained that the Devil "came in her body and she became an animal".

She got a daily psychotherapy-programme and got medicine. During the first three weeks she often got relapses were she chanted: "I am a wolf at night, I am a wolflady during the day... I have claws, fangs, hair... the agony is my victim during the night... powerlessness is my thing. I am what I am and I will roam the earth after my death... I will continue my search for perfection and salvation." At the same time she felt an urge to kill followed by sexual excitment.

Now she saw a wolf's head rather than her own when she looked in the mirror. The nursing staff noticed the "indescribable, animal sounds she made". She got better, but had relapses during the full moon-periods. When she was writing about her experiences she established: "I wont give up on my search for what I am missing... in my marriage... my search for a hairy creature like that. I'm gonna search the graveyards after the tall, dark man I'm gonna find." After nine weeks of treatment she could go home with heaps of drug-medication, which should help her to free her from her fallacy.

On the basis of the woman's symptom her doctor got a psychological profile on the werewolf, which isn't so different, even though it's modern medical language does, from the once the doctors and thinkers in the past. They meant that the werewolf was suffering from:

1. schizophrenia

2. an organic brainsyndrome with psychosis

3. pshycotic depressive reactions

4. hysterical neurosis of dissociative character

5. manodepressive psychosis

6. psychological epilepsy

Even if these syndromes seem to fit many of the werewolf-cases from the past they don't fit all of them. The thrilling picture of the werewolf - with its red eyes, red nails, hairy body and rough skin - there are still things to explain. Another thing I think we should take a look at is that the so called werewolves were tragical victims to rabies (hydrophobia). This disease is a virus which is carried by dogs, wolves and other mammals, including the vampirebats in America, and hits the central nervous system. When a human gets this it gives the person an uncontrolable excitement and causes painful contractions of the throat, which stops the victim to drink. If the sick person doesn't get any treatment it leads to death within three to five days after the first symptoms.

Document from the past shows that rabies occured in the Medieval Europe. A dictate from the archbishop of York, dated 776, stipulates: "If wolves attacks cattle of any kind, and if the animal dies from it, may no Christian eat of this meat." If this action was made to protect against werewolves or rabies it doesn't say, but it seems to be a wise thing, especially since an event which happend four hundred years later when a wolf, probably with rabies, injured "twenty two persons, which all died shortly after".

Another physical stage which can be mixed up with the werewolf-syndrome is the porphyria, a rare genetic disease which is that the person have to little protohem, the ferriferous pigment in the red blood corpulscles hemaglobin. At a conference in year 1985 for American Association for the Advanced of Science, the biochemist David Dolphin said that the untreated symtoms of porphyria have the same characteristics that was told that the 'classical' werewolf had.

One of these is sensitivity to the light, which makes it hard to be in the daylight and therefore makes the sick person to live their life in shadows and darkness. When the state gets worse the sick person gets a more grotesque looks. Discoloration of the skin and a rare hair disease which gives the person an extreme growing of body- and facehair.

The victim can get an tendency to develope changes of wounds under the skin, which can attack the cartilage and the skeleton, and leave injuries on nose, ears, eyelids and fingers. And the teeth, as well as the nails and the skin under them, can be colored red or redbrown caused by the porphyrin. The disease often follows by mental disturbance - from mild hysteria to manodepressive psychoses.

Even if rabies, porphyria, drug abuse or pshychoses can explain the werewolf-phenomena it can't change the fact that so many people during so many centuries were willing to belive that a creature so far away from the real world's borders existed, that the "werewolf-syndrome" stroke deep down in the human phsyche. Today, when the wolf since a long time stopped to be a threat, can make it hard for us to understand our ancestors fears and the secret wishes that bounded them to the beast.

Today when we have the capasity to destroy the earth several times the wolf's strength can seem weak in compare. And yet the essense in the myths and the demoniciacal illusions maybe doesn't have anything to do with the real wolves.

Maybe they say something about that shadow's wolf who lives in us all...