[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.
In a web interview with psychology professor Katherine Ramsland, Noll explained how he invented the term and its purported diagnostic criteria as a whimsical parody of 1980's psychiatry and "new DSM-speak".
[6] In a public lecture hosted by Penn State University's Institute for the Arts and Humanities on 7 October 2013, Noll traced the 20-year trajectory of his unintentionally created "monster" from the moment of its creation to the cultural popularity of Renfield's syndrome today.
The 20-year evolution of a 3-page book section that spread through mass media and then into pages of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal should serve as a cautionary tale about the purported validity of other, similar syndromes.
[9][10] Philosopher of science Ian Hacking refers to this process as "making up people" and critiques medical and psychiatric elites for the untoward effects of their "dynamic nominalism" on individual lives.
Such arbitrary categories create new natural "kinds" of people (e.g., perverts, multiple personalities and so on) that serve larger political, cultural and moral purposes and change with historical contingencies.
[9][10] In an NBC pre-Halloween special hosted by actor Peter Graves entitled "The Unexplained: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires" that aired on 23 October 1994, pages from Noll's book were shown on camera as Canadian psychologist Leonard George summarized Renfield's syndrome.