Following the gunfight at the Feliciana Fish Market, a fire-fight in which John Brigham is killed and for which Starling is made to take the fall, we read: “Her coworkers had caution in their faces when they dealt with her, as though she had something contagious. Starling was young enough for this behavior to surprise and disappoint her” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 223). This is social exclusion, one of the most powerful forms of human behavior for the encouragement of social conformity and cooperation. We know from recent scientific studies that social exclusion tends to decrease a person’s ability to inhibit socially unacceptable behavior, tends to increase, accordingly, aggressive responses to the exclusion, and tends to heighten a person’s awareness of conflicts and errors, especially in the social behaviors of others. Social exclusion can also result in efforts to seek affiliation with new partners. The pain of social exclusion and these behavioral responses have well-known and distinctive bases in neural circuits of the brain. One thing social exclusion does not do, according to these studies, is tend to erode the self-esteem of the excluded person. Indeed, in Starling’s case, her sense of confidence in herself is heightened by her exclusion, which is one element in the complex dynamic that exclusion causes in her.
Starling’s “Sea Change”
There are three things notable about Starling’s response to her social exclusion at the FBI. The first is her loss of faith in technique, in her forensic and FBI training in particular. The alternative is for Starling to turn to her own judgments, and especially her aesthetic judgments, her sense of taste. In doing so, she also begins to track the tastes of Dr. Lecter, as these are revealed by the patterns of his past purchases of exotic wines, foods, and cars. This trust in her own taste and judgment is the second element of Starling’s dynamic response to exclusion.
The third is a certain kind of “letting go.” She visits the grave of John Brigham, and while there she is reminded of her father’s grave in Texas, which she thinks of visiting. Like her father, Brigham is now more firmly than ever something in the past (she thinks). About this time we also read that Starling, aware that Jack Crawford is about to retire, understands that his counsel will not always be available to her. This causes her “flashes of panic,” but she carries on in her hunt for Lecter nonetheless, more confident in her own judgment than she has a right to be. She has taken a small step away from her dependence on Crawford also. She is learning to do without mentors. But Starling’s pilgrim’s progress has yet another stage to go through, one that is far more perilous.
Later in Hannibal, while on suspension from duty at the FBI, Starling defies the authorities in several ways. The first is to pursue Lecter’s kidnappers to Verger’s farm, despite her suspension—a pursuit which eventuates in Lecter’s escape. She deliberately equips herself to impersonate an active FBI agent on her own authority, and while doing so, shoots and kills a (corrupt) off-duty sheriff’s deputy in Verger’s employ. With these actions, she distances herself immensely from her previous loyalty to the Bureau. In sum, she has finally “exited” from the institutional framework that has primarily shaped her early adulthood.
Later still, towards the close of the famous dinner Starling has with Paul Krendler, she finally kills the “worm” that used to destroy her. She says to Krendler: “Every time you wrote something negative in my personnel folder, I resented it, but I still searched myself. I doubted myself for a moment, and tried to scratch this tiny itch that said Daddy knows best” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 471). But no longer will she scratch that itch. No longer is it the case that “Daddy knows best.” This turning marks an even deeper transition in Starling. This is the product of her metamorphosis, a deep-seated psychological change that is the product of her treatment at the hands of Dr. Lecter, to which treatment and its biological basis, I now turn.
What Happens Inside a Chrysalis
Metamorphosis, literally “change of form,” is what some insects undergo to reach their mature form and structure (together with the causal powers that define that structure). The chrysalis itself is the body of the insect that emerges with its last molt or casting aside of its skin. Inside the chrysalis a set of powerful enzymes partially dissolve the tissues and organs of that body. The result is a largely undifferentiated “soup” which serves as culture medium for change. Several small cells (called “imaginal disks”) start to grow and become new structures (rather like stem cells), such things as wings, legs, antennae and other organs. Most of the old organism is rebuilt, even its heart and much (though not all) of its nervous system. The whole process can take days, weeks, or months, depending on species and external conditions. It can use up as much as half of the original body weight of the insect, so much energy does it require. But not all the original structure is lost, else there would be nothing on which the rebuilding and reshaping process could work. Perhaps most startling of all is the survival in some insects of memories from its earlier experience as a grub. Some moths, for example, are known to preserve across the gulf of metamorphosis memories of food sources (plants) that were especially attractive or repulsive. These memories are postulated to reside in small clumps of neurons known as “mushroom bodies.” They shape the later behavior and choices of the adult in these species.
Starling is rendered unconscious during her attempted rescue of Dr. Lecter, by the injection of a massive dose of the drug acepromazine. Lecter makes good his escape and takes her unconscious body with him, later to revive her with great care and to shepherd her through a long and arduous “treatment” which is the basis for her psychological metamorphosis. The changes she undergoes during that treatment constitute a restructuring of basic elements of her personality akin to what happens to the grub in its chrysalis. And, as we will see, Lecter himself is not unaffected by these changes.
Lecter first helps Starling to revive from the effects of acepromazine, taking care to do so gradually and safely. He then makes use of a combination of hypnotic/sedative drugs and “deep hypnosis” to engage her in a psychotherapeutic investigation aimed primarily at altering the parental imago he has hinted at in The Silence of the Lambs. He had already obtained the drugs in his raid on the dispensary at the Baltimore hospital where he used to work. The drugs Harris names here are noted for their sedative/hypnotic, sleep inducing powers, and also their capacity to relieve anxiety. The latter is probably the main reason Lecter wants them. It is notable that he secures these drugs well in advance of his capture by Verger’s men. Clearly, Lecter is already planning some form of psychological intervention with Starling. His treatment of her is not merely fortuitous. Moreover, we learn what motivates that treatment, and with it uncover one of his major flaws as a therapist.
Replacing Mischa
The evening before his raid on the hospital drug supply, Lecter revisits a film about the work of the cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Hawking once thought that time could be reversed and the universe run backwards. Lecter hopes to follow Hawking’s thinking in this regard and imagines “the expanding universe to stop, for entropy to mend itself, for Mischa, eaten, to be whole again” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 363). Reminded by the more pedestrian evening news reports about Starling’s disgrace and suspension from the FBI, and fueled by his desire for her, Lecter’s imagination goes further:
He held her countenance whole and perfect in his mind long after she was gone from the screen, and pressed her with another image, Mischa, pressed them together until, from the red plasma core of their fusion, the sparks flew upward, carrying their single image to the east, into the night sky to wheel with the stars above the sea. Now, should the universe contract, should time reverse . . . a place could be made for Mischa in the world. The worthiest place that Dr. Lecter knew: Starling’s place. (Harris, Hannibal, p. 364)
Of course, such replacement may require the death of Starling herself. This possibility is not fully discounted until near the very end of her treatment with Lecter. It is already a grave flaw in him, as no responsible therapist would have such an agenda.1
I t
ake his imaginings here to be a point of fixation in Lecter. At no time in Harris’s novels is either Starling or Lecter (yet) assigned any adult sexual experience. Starling is fixated on her father, and thus prospective lovers like John Brigham inherit the incest taboo human culture places on parents. But something parallel has to be said about Lecter himself. Incest taboos also apply to siblings, and his fixation on reversing the fate of his beloved sister blocks him from complete intimacy with Lady Murasaki (otherwise freely offered to him by her). And it appears that such blockage has continued through his adulthood. It is perhaps his deepest flaw and at least partially responsible also for his eating of parts of some of his victims, as Mischa was murdered for food. He thereby seeks to reverse his earlier and traumatic inability to save Mischa from her fate. As we shall see, his fixation point is also relieved in the treatment with Starling, and thus she is not the only one to undergo metamorphosis.
Hypnosis
Recent decades of scientific research have begun to uncover sound empirical bases for the practice of hypnosis. We have begun to see that hypnosis is a real phenomenon, that many of its characteristic features have real biological underpinnings, not least in the neural patterns of the brain during the different phases of the hypnotic experience. Much is disputed still, and much research remains to be done. But it is no longer possible to regard hypnosis and hypnotic therapy as a mere invention of folklore.
One real consequence of hypnosis is a relative lack of self-awareness while in the hypnotic state. Such awareness and thinking especially oriented to the self is supported by the default mode network of the brain (DMN), and we now know that important elements of the attentional system are negatively correlated with activity in the DMN, such that heightened activation of the attentional system lowers activation in the DMN. This appears now to be the objective basis for the subjective experience in hypnosis of lessened self-awareness. Harris repeatedly writes of Starling that, during hypnosis, she is “herself and not herself,” “not yet herself,” “awake and not awake” (Harris, Hannibal, pp. 440–41).
A further result of this condition is that the hypnotist, in this case Lecter, takes over the executive functions of the subject’s brain. He does so by way of his suggestions. This is the basis for hallucinations under hypnosis: subjects can be made to see highly colored objects as lacking color, or the reverse. They can imagine complex scenes and psycho-dramas and take them for realities. Starling “visits” with her dead father, once in the person of Lecter himself (perhaps his greatest illusion), who dresses in his clothing and speaks in his voice. A subsequent “visit” is more realistic, as she views his skeleton and the hat he wore on the night he was killed. In the first of these visits, Starling is distinctly child-like in her behavior, and in the second is much more a grown person, closer to reality.
What Starling discovers, of course, was foreshadowed in Lecter’s account of the parental imago in Silence of the Lambs: she discovers her enduring intense rage at her father for abandoning her and her family by his death. As her “treatment” progresses under Lecter’s care, some of the tableaux she envisions involve her father, and some involve Paul Krendler:
Her resentment of the very real injustices she had suffered at Krendler’s hands was charged with the anger at her father that she could never, never acknowledge. She could not forgive her father for dying. He had left the family, he had stopped peeling oranges in the kitchen. He had doomed her mother to the commode brush and the pail. He had stopped holding Starling close . . . (Harris, Hannibal, p. 454)
Only now Starling is held close in the safety of the hypnotic state, under the care and watchfulness of Lecter (and with the aid of powerful anxiety-relieving drugs). And now she can revisit her hidden rage, draw it to the surface of her mind, metabolize it in the safety of the therapeutic setting. Only in this way can she achieve also a well-functioning and adaptive attitude towards her dead father, one that combines his best qualities with his worst in a mature representation that resides securely in her autobiographical memory. Only in this way can she achieve release from the fixation point that has been the mainspring of her life up to now. Only in this way can she expect to enjoy normal relationships with other men.
Metamorphosis
Lecter’s treatment of Starling is like the action of a surgeon: he must dig deeply into her psyche to reach the abscess that threatens to poison her whole life. With success goes a whole restructuring of Starling’s personality, a re-ordering of her emotional set, entertainment of a wider range of associations, discovery of new intentions and goals for action. The proof that she has gone this far lies in the closing stages of her treatment, especially during the dinner with Krendler. There she explicitly defies Krendler’s authority to his face, as we have noted: “You don’t know best, Mr. Krendler. In fact, you don’t know anything . . . You are forever an . . . an oaf, and beneath notice” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 471). And there she asks for more of his brains to be served up in the opening course of the meal, “releasing in Dr. Lecter glee he could scarcely contain” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 474). Starling is also quite calm and accepting of Krendler’s death by cross-bow. But there is more to her metamorphosis than this.
During the final course of the meal, Starling reverses the field on Lecter. He has confessed his desire to find a place in the world for Mischa and that Starling’s place might suit. She responds, “If a prime place in the world is required for Mischa, and I’m not saying it isn’t, what’s the matter with your place? . . . if, as you say, there’s room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 476). Lecter is discomfited by this move. But Starling is not finished with him, and there follows the famous scene where she offers him her own breast, drawing on her own experience to achieve a primary insight into Lecter himself: that he had resented his younger sister and having to give way to her at his mother’s breast. This whole scene is pretty unrealistic, but emotionally and imaginatively satisfying. It seems to prove that Lecter has indeed suffered from a neurotic fixation on his sister (his denial here smacks of self-deception), as we have suspected all along since the story of his war-time experiences unfolded.
Lecter responds to Starling’s invitation and they become lovers. And when we “see” them three years later, living in Buenos Aires, their love for one another, including adult sexuality, is thriving. Lecter has at that point not even dreamed of Mischa for several months. Better proof you could not have for the success of the treatment, as well as for the symmetry that is typical of deep psychotherapy, which changes both the patient and physician. Better proof you could not have for our hypothesis of a flaw in Lecter answering perfectly to the flaw in Starling. But have the illusions stopped?
A Concluding Challenge
I hope to have shown that Thomas Harris’s imaginative intuition has discovered in Hannibal Lecter (and Clarice Starling) processes and dynamics that have a sound footing in our understanding of human biology and psychology. We can also see in both of them something that is common to the experience of social exclusion, namely the search for affiliation with new partners. Belonging is a fundamental human biological imperative, and both of these very unusual characters have that need as much as anyone else does. In finding each other and in forming what at least appears to be a successful partnership, they satisfy their common need.
It might be tempting to conclude that Lecter is a kind of “wounded healer,” making use of a motif found widely in human cultures. It would be better, in my view, to say that he is a flawed healer. But, despite his flaws (his possibly murderous agenda, for example), it is finally the healing impulse that dominates in him. Lecter shares with Starling an inability to remain indifferent to the plight of innocent sufferers. This common characteristic may be largely responsible for the bond that has formed between them. The dominance in Lecter of the healing impulse also serves to order his motivational set. Out of that order emerges many of his most momentous choices.
And what of us? We may identif
y very strongly with Starling, especially. She has many very attractive qualities, after all. She is physically beautiful. She is intelligent. She is persistent and conscientious. She is brave, to a fault. She is strong, both physically and mentally. She is shown repeatedly to befriend others very well. Harris’s portrait of her is such as to evoke our admiration and identification. We pull for Starling and for her success. This lays the ground for a challenge to us: perhaps the autonomy that Lecter thirsts for and that we see Starling begin to exercise might also be ours. Perhaps our institutional loyalties might be re-ordered in a similar fashion. Perhaps they need to be so re-ordered.
But can we really accept that Clarice Starling partners with Hannibal Lecter? Many of Harris’s readers have refused to do so. And this is understandable. It is one reason for thinking that Lecter’s “treatment” of Starling is itself immoral: delving too deeply into her personality results in a transformation into someone we do not recognize. True, both Starling and Lecter are released from their disabling incestuous fixations, and are able to undertake normal adult sexual relations. True, Starling is in need of release also from her “Daddy knows best” strategy with regard to major social institutions and their representatives. True, they seem, as we last see them, to be living a form of life that suits them and realizes many of their potentialities. They have established a well-functioning household. But she is now a fugitive along with Hannibal. And we do not know if their union will finally prove to be adaptive and a cause of their flourishing.
Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Page 27