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With this novel, Hannibal, Thomas Harris has unwittingly set a feast for psychoanalysts. Although Hannibal has much to teach us, unlocking its secrets requires a key whose simplicity has been clouded by the history within psychoanalysis of the notion of cannibalistic fantasy.
Freud first introduced the idea of cannibalism as a stage of libidinal organization in 1915, in a revision of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). With this idea he intended to characterize the sexual striving of a neonate and draw attention to its influences on later development. The infant “easts” its mother's breast to the accompaniment of intense pleasure; later on lovers kiss, enjoying a minor pleasure preparatory to the greater one of sexual intercourse. These are old ideas, but they have left their traces on our thinking. One trace is that cannibalistic fantasy has been understood in unduly limited ways. The emphasis in the analytic study of fantasy has been on cannibalism as an act (such as biting, chewing, or swallowing) or inchoate urge—Shengold (1989) writes of aggression of cannibalistic intensity—not as a story.
The fact is that cannibalistic fantasy is involved whenever another person is treated as food (for what is likely the first published statement of this principle, see Malcove 1933). This fact is the key that gains us admittance to the feast that is Harris's Hannibal. Harris presents us an abundance of stories in which persons are treated as food. His characters are baited, hunted, stalked, pursued as prey, killed, skinned, disemboweled, butchered, cooked, seasoned, and relished. Yet there is not much biting, chewing, or swallowing in Hannibal. In this novel, as in the associations of our adult analytic patients, cannibalistic fantasies are expressed through the fully developed capacities of their author. As with all fantasy, the relative richness of their language and imagination, rhythm and cadence, poetry and wit, ambiguity and whimsy, will contribute to the