When the Night Looks Back at Us: What Serial Killers Reveal About Our Imaginary

There is something unsettling and profoundly human in our fascination with serial killers. We observe them through documentaries, series, and podcasts, as if trying to understand what, in them, has tipped over. As if, by approaching the extreme, we were attempting to grasp our own shadows more clearly. It is not raw violence that draws us in, but the enigma. The enigma of a subject who crosses a boundary we will never cross, yet whose transgression questions us despite ourselves.

Freud reminded us that human beings carry within them aggressive impulses they prefer not to acknowledge. The figure of the serial killer, in its radicality, becomes a distorted mirror: it allows us to look at human violence without being swallowed by it. Lacan wrote that acting out emerges where speech fails, where the subject can no longer find an address for their suffering. In this perspective, the serial killer is not a monster but a subject whose symbolic thread has long since broken.

In crime narratives, what fascinates us is not the act itself but the repetition. Repetition as a desperate attempt to master an anxiety, to seal a psychic breach, to replay an inner scene that refuses to fade. De Clérambault, at Sainte‑Anne Hospital, described with almost surgical precision these mechanisms of mental automatism, these inner compulsions that can drive a subject to act under the pressure of a psychic necessity that exceeds them. He showed that behind horror lies a logic, an internal coherence, an economy of delirium.

During my own work contributing to psychiatric assessments at the Psychiatric Infirmary of the Paris Police Prefecture (Infirmerie Psychiatrique de la Préfecture de Police) within Sainte‑Anne Hospital, I encountered acts that arrived raw, unfiltered, sometimes terrifying. And yet, even there, something was trying to speak. Forensic psychiatric expertise does not aim to excuse. It aims to understand. To situate the act within a trajectory, a structure, a fracture.

Bénézech, in his work on forensic psychiatry, emphasized that expertise is neither defense nor accusation, but perspective. It allows us to distinguish psychotic violence from perverse violence, mental disorganization from structured intentionality. In certain trials, this distinction has been decisive. It has revealed that a subject, at the time of the act, no longer had access to reality, or that they acted under the grip of a delusion that held them captive. Where the press speaks of monsters, expertise speaks of structure, delirium, fragmentation, desubjectivation.

What fascinates us in serial killers is not cruelty. It is the attempt to understand what, in another, has broken. It is the possibility of approaching the unthinkable without losing ourselves in it. It is the promise—perhaps illusory—that the enigma can be solved. That chaos can be ordered. That meaning can be found.

In reality, 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 are drawn to stories of serial killers because they offer a bearable version of this work. A version where the investigation progresses, where clues align, where truth can be grasped. A version where we can close the book or turn off the screen believing that order has been restored.

Life is never so simple. But that is precisely why clinical work exists: to welcome what cannot be resolved, 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 these narratives: the possibility of looking at the night without being consumed by 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.