When Darkness Draws Us In: What Crime Stories Reveal About Us

There is something profoundly human in our fascination with crime novels, true‑crime series, and stories that venture into the darkest corners of the mind. We watch them late at night, sometimes to distract ourselves, sometimes to soothe ourselves, sometimes without knowing what we are really seeking. As if, by observing the unthinkable in another, we were trying to tame what remains opaque within us.

Freud noted that crime, even in fiction, awakens archaic echoes. He wrote that human beings carry aggressive impulses they prefer not to acknowledge, and that fiction offers a safe space to approach them. Lacan later insisted that acting out emerges where speech fails, where the subject can no longer find an address for their suffering. Perhaps this is what fascinates us: the attempt to understand what, in another, broke the symbolic thread.

In crime stories, the act is never just an act. It is an enigma. An enigma that reassures us because it promises resolution. An enigma that soothes us because it stages what we fear without forcing us to live it. An enigma that allows us to look at human violence from a distance, as if through glass.

Reality is never so clear. During my work contributing to psychiatric assessments at the Infirmerie Psychiatrique de la Préfecture de Police at Sainte‑Anne in Paris, I encountered acts that arrived raw, unfiltered, sometimes terrifying. And yet, even there, something was trying to speak.

It is in such places that the legacy of De Clérambault becomes strikingly alive. Working at Sainte‑Anne himself, he described with almost surgical precision the mechanisms of delusion, mental automatisms, and inner compulsions. He showed that behind even the most bewildering act lies a logic, an internal coherence, a psychic necessity. This is not justification. It is an attempt to understand what, in the subject’s economy, made the unthinkable possible.

The role of the psychiatric or psychological expert is not to judge. It is to illuminate. To understand what, in a subject’s history, in their psychic structure, in their collapses, made an unthinkable act possible. Bénézech, in his work on forensic psychiatry, reminded us that expertise is neither defense nor accusation, but perspective. It situates the act within a trajectory, a delusion, a disorganization, a fracture.

In several trials, expert testimony has been decisive. It has distinguished a psychotic break from deliberate intent. It has revealed the mental disorganization of someone who, at the time of the act, no longer had access to reality. It has shown that a violent gesture was sometimes the last attempt to escape an internal collapse. Where the press speaks of monsters, expertise speaks of structure, delusion, fragmentation, desubjectivation. Where media narratives simplify, expertise complicates.

Irvin Yalom wrote that understanding is not forgiving, but understanding soothes. Perhaps this is what we seek in crime stories: a form of soothing. A way to look at human violence without being swallowed by it. A way to believe that the enigma can be solved, that chaos can be ordered, that meaning can be found.

In real life, meaning is never given. It is built. It is searched for. It is worked through. The expert does not deliver an absolute truth. They offer a reading, a hypothesis, a perspective. They attempt to restore to the subject a part of their humanity, even where the act seems to have erased it.

Perhaps we love crime stories because they offer a bearable version of this work. A version where the investigation ends, where the culprit is identified, where truth can be grasped. A version where we can close the book or turn off the screen believing order has been restored.

Life is never so simple. But that is precisely why clinical work exists: to welcome what cannot be resolved in forty‑five minutes, to hear what cannot be said, to illuminate what remains obscure. To remind us that behind every act, even the most unthinkable, there is a subject, a history, a wound, a fracture.

And perhaps that is what draws us so deeply to crime stories: the possibility of looking at the shadow without losing ourselves in it. The possibility of understanding, just a little more, what in each of us still seeks a form of light.

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REFERENCES

Bénézech, M. (2004). Legal Psychiatry and Criminology. Paris: Masson. De Clérambault, G.-G. (1942). Psychiatric Works. Paris: PUF. Freud, S. (1916/2010). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1955/2013). The Seminar, Book III: The Psychoses. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. London: Routledge. Racamier, P.-C. (1992). The Genius of Origins. Paris: Payot. Yalom, I. D. (1989). Love’s Executioner. New York: Basic Books.