Lycanthropy

Some sources derive the word from warg-wolf, where warg (or later werg and wero) is cognate with Old Norse vargr, meaning "rogue," "outlaw," or, euphemistically, "wolf".

A Vargulf was the kind of wolf that slaughtered many members of a flock or herd but ate little of the kill. This was a serious problem for herders, who had to somehow destroy the rogue wolf before it destroyed the entire flock or herd. The term Warg was used in Old English for this kind of wolf (see J. R. R. Tolkien's book The Hobbit) and for what would now be called a serial killer. Possibly related is the fact that, in Norse society, an outlaw (who could be murdered with no legal repercussions and was forbidden to receive aid) was typically called vargr, or "wolf."

There is also a mental illness called lycanthropy in which a patient believes he or she is, or has transformed into, an animal and behaves accordingly. This is sometimes referred to as clinical lycanthropy to distinguish it from its use in legends. Despite its origin as a term for man-wolf transformations only, lycanthropy is used in this sense for animals of any type.

A Case of Lycanthropy
Harvey Rostenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D.
The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 134, No. 10. October 1977

Lycanthropy, a psychosis in which the patient has delusions of being a wild animal (usually a wolf), has been recorded since antiquity. The Book of Daniel describes King Nebuchadnezzar as suffering from depression that deteriorated over a seven-year period into a frank psychosis at which time he imagined himself a wolf. Among the first medical descriptions were those of Paulus Aegineta during the later days of the Roman Empire. In his description of the symptom complex, Aegineta made reference to Greek mythology in which Zeus turned King Lycaon of Arcadia into a raging wolf. Thereafter, references to lycanthropy appeared in the ancient literature. Many medieval theologians envisioned lycanthropy as a consequence of the evil eye.

Delusions of being a wolf or some other feared animal are universal and, although rare in the industrialized countries, still occur in China, India, Africa, and Central and South America. The animals in the delusioned transformation include leopards, lions, elephants, crocodiles, sharks, buffalo, eagles, and serpents.
Not infrequently, bizarre and chaotic sexuality is expressed in a primitive way through the lycanthropic symptom complex. Patients whose internal fears exceed their coping mechanisms may externalize them via projection and constitute a serious threat to others. Throughout the ages, such individuals have been feared because of their tendencies to commit bestial acts and were themselves hunted and killed by the populace. Many of these people were paranoid schizophrenics.

Case Report:
A 49-year-old married woman presented on an urgent basis for psychiatric evaluation 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.

Discussion:
We believed that the patient suffered from chronic pseudoneurotic schizophrenia. What is of particular interest is that the delusional material was organized about a lycanthropic matrix. Her symptom complex included the following classic symptoms:

1. Delusions of werewolf transformation under extreme stress.
2. Preoccupation with religious phenomenology, including feeling victimized by the evil eye.
3. Reference to obsessive need to frequent graveyards and woods.
4. Primitive expression of aggressive and sexual urges in the form of bestiality.
5. Physiological concomitants of acute anxiety.

These symptoms occurred significantly in the absence of exposure to toxic substances. Furthermore, the patient responded to the treatment protocol used for acute schizophrenia psychosis. After reviewing ancient and modern literature, it is felt that the differential diagnosis for lycanthropy should include consideration of all of the following possibilities: 1) schizophrenia, 2) organic brain syndrome with psychosis, 3) psychotic depressive reaction, 4) hysterical neurosis of the dissociative type, 5) manic-depressive psychosis, and 6) psychomotor epilepsy. The last item is mentioned because of the reports that individuals suffering from lycanthropy have been described as being "prone to epilepsy" and suffering from intercurrent amnestic episodes.

A search of modern literature produced three cases. In two cases, the patients were ultimately diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia, facilitated by involvement with hallucinogenic drugs, and chronic brain syndrome with periodic psychoses. In the third case, described by Morrell in 1852, it seems that the patient was suffering from a deteriorating psychotic depression.

We believed that the metamorphosis undergone by the patient we have described provided temporary relief from an otherwise consuming sexual conflict that might have taken the form of a completed suicide.

Clinical lycanthropy is defined as a rare psychiatric syndrome which involves a delusion that the affected person can or has transformed into an animal, or that he or she is an anima. Its name is connected to the mythical condition of lycanthropy, a supernatural affliction in which people are said to physically shape-shift into wolves. The word zoanthropy is also sometimes used for the delusion that one has turned into an animal in general and not specifically a wolf.

Affected individuals report a delusional belief that they have transformed, or are in the process of transforming into another animal. It has been linked with the faltered states of mind that accompany psychosis (the reality-bending mental state that typically involves delusions and hallucinations) with the transformation only seeming to happen in the mind and behavior of the affected person.

A study on lycanthropy from the McLean Hospital reported on a series of cases and proposed some diagnostic criteria by which lycanthropy could be recognized:
1. A patient reports in a moment of lucidity or looking back he sometimes feels as an animal or has felt like one.
2. A patient behaves in a manner that resembles animal behavior, for example crying, grumbling, creeping, or attacking another human for food (cannibalism).

According to these criteria, either a delusional belief in current or past transformation, or behavior that suggests a person thinks of themselves as transformed, is considered evidence of clinical lycanthropy. The authors go on to note that although the condition seems to be an expression of psychosis there is no specific diagnosis of mental or neurological illness associated with its behavioral consequences.

A review of the medical literature from early 2004 lists over thirty published cases of lycanthropy, only the minority of which have wolf or dog themes. Canines are certainly not uncommon, although the experience of being transformed into hyenas, cats, horses, birds, and tigers has been reported on more than one occasion. Transformation into frogs, and even bees, has been reported in some instances. A 1989 case study described how one individual reported a serial transformation, experiencing a change from human, to dog, to horse, and then finally cat, before returning to the reality of human existence after treatment. There are also reports of people who experienced transformation into an animal only listed as 'unspecified'.

Clinical lycanthropy is a rare condition and is largely considered to be an idiosyncratic expression of a psychotic-episode caused by another condition such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or clinical depression.

One important factor may be differences or changes in parts of the brain known to be involved in representing body shape (see proprioception). A neuroimaging study of two people diagnosed with clinical lycanthropy showed that these areas display unusual activation, suggesting that when people report their bodies are changing shape, they may be genuinely perceiving those feelings. Body image distortions are not unknown in mental and neurological illness, so this may help explain at least part of the process. One further puzzle is why an affected person doesn't simply report that their body "feels like it is changing in odd ways", rather than presenting with a delusional belief that they are changing into a specific animal.