Will Graham’s psyche: what’s true and what’s false.
Empathy disorder? More like killer-empathy disorder, since Will only ever connects with killers, or, in rare cases, with victims who stir something personal in him (like Peter). The show presents Will as highly empathetic, yet this remains one of its greatest deceptions.
Will never truly empathizes with anyone who hasn’t killed or doesn’t possess the latent capacity for it. His empathy is entirely selective, drawn only to those he already perceives as reflections of himself.
What Will actually engages in, more than anything, is Verdrängung (repression in the psychoanalytic sense). He does not lack awareness of his own violent urges; rather, he buries them under layers of moral justification, allowing himself to indulge in them under the guise of righteousness. His role as an investigator grants him a socially sanctioned outlet for his fantasies, transforming them into something not just acceptable but *honorable*. This is why, when Hannibal suggests he quit, Will so forcefully asserts, “I save people!” He clings to that rationale, not because it’s true, but because it keeps his self-image intact.
And yet, why didn’t he quit? He had more than enough reasons—moral, emotional, even physical…but he never did. How much of the blame can we really place on Jack Crawford? At what point does Jack stop being a selfish manipulator and become just another one of Will’s scapegoats? Will doesn’t leave because he lives for this. He is obsessed with the euphoric sensation that his overactive imagination provides when he immerses himself in the mind of a killer.
For those unfamiliar, what Will is actually doing is a form of self-hypnosis. He’s not gifted with it (he is with an active imagination) he has trained himself, evidenced by his use of an induction method (the pendulum). This isn’t some innate ability; it’s a learned skill. He explicitly states that he is well-versed in psychology and “knows all the tricks,” so it’s not surprising that hypnosis is the one thing he allows Hannibal to perform on him. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which he resists, hypnosis is effective in his concept.
Will had likely been fantasizing about killing for a long time, which explains his career choices. Becoming a cop offered him the opportunity to kill while maintaining moral superiority. When he claims he was “unable to shoot” and subsequently quit, the question arises: was he truly incapable because he’s a good guy, or was it something else? A failure to act not out of moral hesitation, but out of something more physiological, as a man who cannot perform sexually when too overwhelmed by the anticipation of actualizing his fantasies?
Observe his expressions as he emerges from his crime scene inductions: rapture, exhilaration. He is high on the experience. His repression is so severe that his desires manifest in his dreams, yet even there, his reactions betray him—he doesn’t wake in terror, but in euphoria. “I’ve never felt more alive,” he confesses after killing Randall Tier. That wasn’t fear or disgust speaking…it was pleasure.
This is why he becomes obsessed with killing Hannibal. Who else could he kill with his bare hands and still be perceived as the hero? The slayer of monsters? But Hannibal is not just any killer, he is the embodiment of Will’s own pleasure in causeless violence, the mirror of his most unthinkable desires.
Will represses (Verdrängt) Hannibal because to acknowledge what Hannibal represents, the raw, uninhibited joy of destruction, would be “too ugly a thought”: that beneath the mask of righteousness, Will Graham does not simply understand monsters.
He is one.
When someone embodies a repressed individual’s unconscious desires, their presence can trigger a crisis within the repressed person, forcing those buried impulses toward the surface. Freud describes repression (Verdrängung) as a process that doesn’t eliminate desires but merely pushes them out of conscious awareness. However, when an external figure appears who openly embodies what the repressed person has spent their life denying, this creates a destabilizing effect.
The repressed individual may react in several ways:
Fascination and Obsession: They may feel inexplicably drawn to this person, seeing them as magnetic, intoxicating, or even fated. The unconscious recognizes a mirror of its own buried desires.
Rationalization and Projection: Instead of admitting their attraction, they might intellectualize their feelings, attributing their obsession to external factors (“I need to stop them,” “I want to help them”, in Will’s case Abigail) or projecting onto the other person the very desires they refuse to own (“They’re trying to manipulate me”).
Moral Struggle and Hypocrisy: They may position themselves as morally superior or in opposition to the person, as if their role is to tame, punish, or save them. This dynamic allows them to engage with the repressed content while maintaining a socially acceptable self-image.
Compulsion to Destroy or Merge: In extreme cases, the person may oscillate between wanting to destroy the “other” and wanting to become them. The embodiment of the repressed can be seen as both a threat (because they expose the truth) and an object of desire (because they represent a forbidden completeness).
Will’s relationship with Hannibal is a textbook case of this. Hannibal embodies Will’s repressed desires: violence without guilt, freedom from moral constraints, indulgence in his own darker nature. Rather than directly acknowledging this, Will frames his obsession as a battle between good and evil, between law and chaos. But his actions betray him: every choice he makes pulls him closer to Hannibal rather than away. His repression ensures that he cannot admit his true motives, even to himself, so he continually recasts his pursuit of Hannibal in socially acceptable terms—justice, survival, necessity—when in reality, he is drawn to him because Hannibal is his repressed self made flesh.