The Soul - Mine or Yours?

Today we briefly discussed the properties of the human soul in the Buffy episode, and someone posted previously about the same thing in Harry Potter. What strikes me as rather disturbing is the transportability of the soul in both Buffy and Harry Potter. That another creature should have the ability to steal one’s soul seems blatantly wrong and totally unnatural. After all, that which is essentially ours is the part of us that does not die, but retains everything we think and feel and desire. To lose that, and to lose it to someone or something else, is repugnant. I’ve noticed that the Gothic often revolves around this idea of the tortured, soulless vampire or the stealing of another’s soul, but it doesn’t make perfect sense to me because if the soul is immortal and exists as the essence of self even without a body, then how can another usurp it? I understand the portrayal of a shell of a person with nothing behind the eyes, but honestly I think that whatever that person was that my have suffered the Dementor’s Kiss (or what have you), still exists, if elsewhere, and what’s left behind is irrelevant and not representative of a human in any sense but the purely physical. And for that matter, literature is rampant with the idea of the all-powerful self relative to the self. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” As I see it, this essentially means that the self belongs exclusively to the self, and none other may divide self from self. It’s simply not possible. But, granted, the idea of losing one’s self is certainly terrifying, though utterly confusing given that once lost, the self is no longer present to feel the despair… Thus, of course Gothic culture exploits this frightening idea to make us all think and wonder what it would be like to lie prostrate as a bad roommate sucks our souls out.