Psychoanalysis has traditionally had difficulty in accounting for the existence of evil. Freud saw it as a direct expression of unconscious forces, whereas more recent theorists have examined the links between early traumatic experiences and later 'evil' behaviour. Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives explores the controversies surrounding definitions of evil, and examines its various forms, from the destructive forces contained within the normal mind to the most horrific expressions observed in contemporary life.
Ronald Naso and Jon Mills bring together an international group of experts to explore how more subtle factors can play a part, such as conformity pressures, or the morally destabilizing effects of anonymity, and show how analysts can understand and work with such factors in clinical practice. Each chapter is unified by the view that evil is intrinsically linked to human freedom, regardless of the gap experienced by perpetrators between their intentions and consequences. While some forms of evil follow seamlessly from psychopathology, others call this relationship into question. Rape, murder, serial killing, and psychopathy show very clear links to psychopathology and character whereas the horrors of war, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism resist such reductionism.
Humanizing Evil is unique in the diversity of perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of evil. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and Jungians. Because it is an integrative depth-psychological effort, it will interest general readers as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines including the humanities, philosophy, religion, mental health, criminal justice, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies.
Ronald Naso, Ph.D., ABPP is psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in independent practice in Stamford, CT. The author of numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, he is an associate editor of Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, and contributing editor of Division/Review and Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry. His book, Hypocrisy Unmasked: Dissociation, Shame, and the Ethics of Inauthenticity, was published by Aronson in 2010.
Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. A 2006, 2011, and 2013 Gradiva Award winner, he is Editor of two book series in psychoanalysis, on the Editorial Board for Psychoanalytic Psychology, and is the author and/or editor of thirteen books including his most recent works, Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics, and Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, which won the Goethe Award for best book in 2013.
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Does evil exist, or is it a social invention? Is evil an action, a disposition, a property, a consequence, and/or a characteristic that necessarily makes it what it is, essentially? Does it hinge on creating pain for others—from relatively benign modes of discomfort to harm and gratuitous suffering? Does malicious intent have to be involved or simply just intent, even if not malicious? Surely, pain can result without intent, so what is the relationship between harm and human motivation? What if an event that brings about harm and suffering was not due to a direct action but rather a failure to act, such as in a weakness of will, the bystander effect or a miscarriage of moral courage? Here we may describe evil as the abnegation of responsibility, the failure to choose, the denial of freedom. But what happens if these failures are unconsciously informed, even chosen, the product of an unconscious will toward evil? Or are these queries contingent upon value judgments we ascribe to events and their causal attributions?
The question and nature of evil have been a human preoccupation since the rise of civilization, yet we can find no consensus on what constitutes its essence. The instantiation of evil unequivocally contributes to the necessary social manufacturing of law and order, religion, morality, justice and systemic mechanisms of restraint, as well as punishment, that govern individual and collective relations within all societies. Psychoanalysis generally has tended to focus upon the pathological dynamics that motivate evil actions, from primary, malignant, and traumatic narcissism to primitive defensive enactments, superego lacunae, failure in internalization and empathy, sociopathy, selfobject deficits, developmental trauma and attachment pathology, rather than on the question of evil itself. For example, is evil a human phenomenon, or does it have a metaphysical structure? What makes evil (by necessity) what it is? Is it merely a relative enterprise fashioned by our subjectivities? Any determination of evil stands in relation to the meaning of value and the value of meaning, for what differentiates a natural act (such as animals killing prey, extreme weather phenomenon resulting in environmental disasters with loss of life, and so forth) from a human act is the construction of meaning and value inquiry within ethical agency. Furthermore, are actions in themselves sufficient to determine the essence of evil, or does psychological intent become a necessary ingredient? What if such intent was unconsciously harbored yet unacknowledged by the conscious subject, let alone enacted, the evil within? And what about the consequences of both action and intention as a touchstone by which to adjudicate evil? These questions tend to situate the problematic of evil within a moral realm. But what if the question and nature of evil have nothing to do with morality whatsoever?
In this chapter, I wish to explore the essence and ethics of evil. What I will conclude is both controversial and counter-intuitive. But, before we get there, I will need to prepare our discussion. After laying out various philosophical problematics, our analysis will center around the domain and structure of violence as: (a) natural phenomena, (b) subjective interiority, (c) objective instantiation, (d) systemic perpetuation, and (e) ontic universality. The degree to which our natural constitution derived from evolutionary pressures predisposes the human animal toward evil will be contrasted with developmental currents that are cultivated as a result of social interaction and the interiority of suffering. What marks the qualification of evil is the degree of ethical agency within an individual and society determined by the objective attainment of self-consciousness and voluntary choice. The evil that inhabits man in thought, intention, and deed is beyond psychological dynamics, I suggest, for violence is a metaphysical principle that saturates the natural world as a mysterium tremendum, at once a frightening necessity governing life yet one that signals the non-violent domain of ideality we attribute to moral idealism, paradoxically, itself a violent imposition as ethical demand.
What is Evil?
Let us first begin with basics. In classical Greek,
historically signifies that which is intrinsically “bad,” whereby the term “evil” is a transliteration. Etymologically the origin of the word is unknown, but many philologists believe it is derived from the proto-Indo-European root kakka, taken from κακκάω—to defecate. In other words, evil is shitty. The term is taken up in numerous contexts in classical antiquity and has generally informed our modern conception of all valuative discourses today.
refers to: (a) persons and their character: bad, lowly, wretched (see Herodas, 1922, 3.42); (b) of appearance: ugly; (c) of birth: ill-born, mean; (d) of courage: craven, cowardly; (e) of kind: worthless, sorry, unskilled; (f) of things: pernicious (see Homer, Odyssey, 10.64); (g) of omens: unlucky; (h) of words: abusive, foul; (i) of actions: to do harm or ill to another (Illiad, 2.I95); and (j) in the moral sense: base, evil. Interestingly,
is a cognate of καλός, its opposite, namely, the good, the beautiful.1 Here we may see how good and evil are dialectically related and mutually implicative. In other words, we cannot have any discussion of either concept without invoking the other. This makes evil, by definition, contingent on a notion of good, which is itself equally presupposed, debatable and problematic.
There is a natural simplicity to splitting based upon a perfunctory economy. This is an elementary aspect to mental functioning and observed endlessly as a normative process, whether in society or in the clinic. This natural (hence normal, inborn, instinctual or organic) tendency to think in terms of binaries—same/different, good/bad—is a rudimentary mechanism of thinking that is superimposed on all experience. It is only with cognitive development and the acquisition of self-consciousness or a reflective function (often referred to as mentalization) that the binary proclivity is breached through attempts at entertaining complexity, holism, integration of opposite perspectives, and synthetic attempts at unification or reconciliation of opposition and difference. But this synthetic function, I argue, is a developmental or ideological ideal that is never fully achieved as a hierarchical reality when it comes to certain matters, especially those involving the human emotions, including the notions of right and wrong. In fact, an ideology of right can intensify this bifurcation and fortify a rigid antithesis that blinds us to the opposing perspective, which further introduces a danger of imposing an absolutism on phenomena, phenomena that by definition are open, transient, fluid and pluralistic, thus radically resisting unification. Here there is no transvaluation of values, no Aufhebung, no discernible space beyond good and evil; rather we have an impasse, a gap, lacunae, or parallax where there is no synthesis between the two polarities. We cannot make each opposition—the fork between good and evil—a unified position based on fanciful logic alone. It defies all social realities. It betrays what we know about the human psyche as an unconsciously desirous and conflicted animal. There will always be a firm obstacle, limit or check between these opposing forces in the mind. Yet it all depends upon what perspective you take.
Evil is typically construed on the negative pole of the dialectic, a construct defined in relation to absolute difference. Evil as contrast to its opposite highlights its one-sided polarity, one based on pure negation, yet this duality forms an ontological unit. Since antiquity, evil has been signified by its privative function and formally instantiated as innate badness, viz., that which deracinates and generates social disharmony by lacerating all semblances of moral order. It is none other than the introduction of radical negativity, to the degree that existential preoccupations with its recalcitrant presence has generated the psychological need for elaborate systems of theodicy to explain its occurrence. Here reconciling the appearance of evil with the good and with the question and meaning of God has elevated the notion of evil to a metaphysical factor. Historically, God has been extricated from evil, and it is attributed instead to fallen angels or man, yet this fantasy is hardly intellectually worthy of support. In today’s secular world, the reification of evil to a supernatural hypostatization (i.e., the Devil) is an untenable explanation for the atrocities committed by human beings. In the absence of divine presence or intervention, evil is exclusively a human phenomenon.
What would a secular theory of evil look like? First we must explore whether we can pinpoint its essence, namely, that which necessarily circumscribes and defines what it is, without which it would not and could not exist. Here I am chasing after the question of universality: Can evil be shown to have an essence, and if so, does it apply universally across modes of human phenomena that are adjudicated to be or deemed as evil? This would imply, all things being equal, that any universal attribution of evil would carry epistemological and hermeneutic agreement to warrant such generalizations, even if only confined to theory. But is this possible? This would mean, hypothetically, that no one instance or particularity would elude the label of evil if it was deemed a universal attribution. This surely would challenge the notion of context, contingency, accident and chance. Perhaps we should not assume that universality and context are mutually exclusive, especially when they ontically inform each other. Perhaps evil may be viewed as a certain positionality as fixation on one side of its dialectical polarity, what may also be said of the good, whereby both positions form a tension arc between their oppositions. Here we may posit that both good and evil involve a radical splitting of the other, one that is obstreperous to mediation or synthesis.
Because evil is historically by definition the absence or privation of good, opposition is required for it to have structure and meaning. Here evil is value laden, hence it stands in relation to the question and nature of morality. This presupposes that evil cannot be amoral as it signifies a judgment about value and agency. But what if evil is in itself a relative construct and there are no absolutes? What if it has no value? This would imply that there is neither good nor evil, for valuation itself is either held in abeyance, neutralized, suspended, non-existent or devolves into a meaningless construct. But how can a material act or embodied event lack valuation, how can it escape human judgment? Perhaps we may conclude there are no absolutes due to the relativity of conferring value judgments while still observing appearances of evil that are universal. Conversely, can the notion of pure negativity carry with it a metaphysical value even if it lies outside of human valuation? In other words, can evil exist without agency? These are difficult questions to sustain.
Evil is often defined as an act of transgressing, which in many cultures corresponds to something that is wrong, yet we immediately encounter the thorny issues of determining what constitutes wrongness, the non-good, and what it means to transgress, as these determinations stand in relation to a contextual and collective attribution of meaning as valuation. Here evil is not merely an intellectual concept or the religionization of human desire and action, for it stands in relation to an absolute value that has been contravened, devalued or occluded. Because value judgments are determinative and transpire within a given material culture and linguistic social structure replete with local customs and prejudices of meaning, the question of absolute value may succumb to relativity. Regardless of the questionable antipodes and extremity of either absolutism or relativism, the essence of evil is found in its contextual valuation whether absolute, universal or relative in its instantiation and scope. This necessarily places valuation at the heart of any determination of evil, and since valuation stands in juxtaposition to greater collective-meaning structures within any given society, evil becomes a social artifact.
The term “evil” is burdened by its history. In the Judeo-Christian tradition that has dominated Western thought, evil is considered to be that which violates God’s will. We may already see an ideology at play by presupposing a Supreme Being to begin with, one that dominates world discourse and preys on the fears, emotional vulnerability, ignorance and religious prejudices of contemporary cultures. Promulgating such a way of thinking further reinforces the unconscious social fantasy that such a reified Ideal exists by which all humans will be compared to and judged by divine authority. In ancient times, the God posit served many pragmatic and psychological purposes, but it hardly serves as a touchstone let alone justification for an operational definition of evil. I see no valid rational argument for perpetuating this psychomythology that evil is deviation from God’s way, when God is merely a social construction born of a fantasy principle and instituted as a cultural symbolic (Freud, 1927; Mills, 2016).
But we must take seriously the notion that evil is the privation or absence of good. This was set out by Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae (see Part I: Treatise on The Distinction of Good And Evil [Q 48–49]), which was earlier echoed by Augustine (Confessions, Bk 3, vii [12]), what Plotinus believed was a psychic or subjective event, hence belonging to the soul (Enneads, I, 2.1–3; 8.8), not a godhead, yet at the same time an ontological condition based upon the fact that we are embodied. But the privation (steresis) theory of evil (kakon), although debatable, may be said to have its genesis in Aristotle who discussed the notion of lack, such as when something is deprived of an attribute belonging to its nature, for “a thing comes to be from [it’s] privation” (see Physics, bk 1: 191b15). With stipulations, this may be (loosely) interpreted to mean that which is evil comes into being from what it is lacking. Perhaps this is merely an inverse tautology: evil is the lack of goodness. Of course this sentiment is inherited from Plato: evil is the destroyer and corrupter of all things (Republic, 10.608e), which can never be done away with (Theaetetus, 176a). That which is deemed objectively beneficial is good, and that which is deemed evil is not. As for the nature of evil, it is derived from the natural “desire of food of drink of sex,” but not for the momentary pleasure it produces, but rather from its “consequences” (Protagoras, 353c-e). Here we may see a kernel of Neo-Platonism influencing the Christian perversion of pathologizing human nature as sinful. Despite the fact that discourse on the nature of evil was inspired by the pre-Socratics and can be historically found in virtually all records of early civilization, good and evil have become the positive and negative exemplifications of moral absolutes.
Radical Evil
Kant’s treatise on evil does not attribute evil to original sin or to a turning away from God, nor does it conform to the Augustinian denial of evil since it is nothing but the privation of good (privatio boni). It does not even conform to human want or desire, but rather is due to free choice (Willkür). Evil is the product of our determinate powers of choice because, for Kant, we are radically free to determine the grounds for the sake of which to behave. This places the onus of responsibility squarely on the existential agent making such choices and not on natural inclination, impulse or desire, for as Kant (1793) tells us, “the source of evil … can lie only in a rule made by the will for the use of its freedom, that is, in a maxim” (p. 17). So even though we are born with innate needs, desires, leanings, dispositions, and impulses, man is the author of his nature due to acts of freewill as choice that either conform to or neglect the moral realm. This so-called freedom of the moral will that generates maxims upon which all human beings supposedly construct for themselves, is a purely determining, autonomous spontaneity of choice and is therefore influenced by many “incentives.” And for Kant, “the moral law, in the judgment of reason, is on itself an incentive, and whoever makes it his maxim is morally good” (pp. 19–20), whereas deviation from the moral injunction makes one an “evil man.”
