Everyday Evils

A psychoanalytic view of evil and morality

Coline Covington

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317593034
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Everyday Evils takes a psychoanalytic look at the evils committed by "ordinary" people in different contexts – from the Nazi concentration camps to Stockholm Syndrometo the atrocities publicized by Islamic State – and presents new perspectives on how such evil deeds come about as well as the extreme ways in which we deny the existence of evil.

Concepts of group behaviour, morality, trauma and forgiveness are reconsidered within a multi-disciplinary framework. The psychodynamics of dissociation, and the capacity to witness evil acts while participating in them, raise questions about the origin of morality, and about the role of the observing ego in maintaining psychic equilibrium. Coline Covington examines how we demonize the "other" and how violent actions become normalized within communities, such as during the Rwandan genocide and Polish pogroms. The recent attraction of the millenarian theocracy of the Islamic State also highlights our fascination with violence and death. Covington emphasizes that evil comes about through a variety of causes and is highly contextual. It is our capacity to acknowledge the evils we live with, witness and commit that is vital to how we manage and respond to violence within ourselves and others and in mitigating our innate destructiveness. In conclusion, the book addresses how individuals and societies come to terms with evil, along with the problematic concept of forgiveness and the restoration of good.

Everyday Evils blends psychoanalytic concepts together with the disciplines of sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, theology and studies of violence in order to develop a richer, deeper and more comprehensive understanding of evil. Intending to make the unthinkable thinkable, this book will appeal to scholars from across those disciplines, as well as psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and anyone who has ever asked the question: "How could anyone do something like that?"

1

Evil and destructiveness

A psychoanalytic view

What is good is always being destroyed.

D.W. Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

Introduction

Evil is an extreme form of destructiveness that dehumanizes people, reducing them to objects without minds and feelings, to be used by others as means to an end and disregarded as ends in themselves. Evil also entails choice. It is different from an act of nature that arbitrarily wipes out individuals and groups of people. It is an act that targets its victims or class of victims and requires the force of decision.

While evil is by its nature destructive, destructiveness is not necessarily evil. It may be accidental or, if it is premeditated, it may be an act of revenge, self-protection, or the result of unmanageable conflict. At the root of both destructiveness and evil is aggression and sadism, i.e. the pleasure we derive from destructive or harmful acts.

The early history of psychoanalysis was profoundly influenced by both world wars. The large scale destruction and slaughter of World War I raised fundamental questions about human destructiveness. Already struggling to integrate masochism within his theory of the pleasure principle, Freud viewed the destructiveness of war as evidence of an innate death instinct by which we are tragically driven toward destructiveness of others and ourselves. Freud postulated his theory of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920. Since this time, the idea of the death instinct has been widely disputed and debunked both philosophically and scientifically.¹ The fact that the psychoanalytic community continues to debate its viability signifies that our understanding of the roots of our aggression and destructiveness remains incomplete if not controversial. However, we cannot begin to think about the nature and origin of evil without first addressing the question of our impulse toward both destructiveness and creativity and how the two are inter-related.

Freud postulates that the libido contains the seeds of love and hate. While Freud defined libido specifically as the energy derived from sexual instinct, we can extend the idea that our basic instincts for survival, e.g. hunger, warmth, sex, and so on, are dependent on and cause us to establish relationships and attachments to others. Our first instinctual act can be seen in the infant’s rooting for the breast.

In this introductory chapter, I will focus on Winnicott’s idea that the infant’s act of sucking is a basic, and fundamental, act of aggression that at the same time destroys what it seeks. It is this act of destruction that, paradoxically, leads to an awareness of external reality and otherness and creates the basis for relationship. Winnicott’s observation, “What is good is always being destroyed” (Newman, 1995, p. 160), provides us with a starting point in thinking about the psychological root of evil and our individual capacity to commit evil.

The role of narcissism

Freud’s theory of the death instinct was derived principally from his experience in grappling with repetition compulsion and the negative therapeutic reaction, but he also lays the foundation for the death instinct in early narcissism. Freud first used the phrase “narcissism of minor differences” in his essay titled “The taboo of virginity,” which he wrote in 1917, toward the end of World War I, in which he observed that “… it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them” (Freud, 1917, p. 48). Freud subsequently elaborated his ideas on the narcissism of minor differences and applied these to the difference between the sexes and within the context of group psychology.

In his essay, “Civilization and its discontents,” written in 1930, Freud makes the link between narcissism and intolerance explicit. He explains aversion toward strangers as a defensive function of narcissism in the service of self-preservation – but the self-preservation is concerned with fending off or diverting innate aggression into the “other”, whether it is an individual or a group. It is also possible to understand innate aggression in terms of an aversion or hostility to strangers as an integral aspect of primary narcissism. The early infantile experience of omnipotent fusion with the other – a return to a homeostatic state – has an enormous pull on us all. We all know what it is to fight against or deny the constraints and separation required by reality. Ron Britton postulates that human beings have “an inbuilt impulse to annihilate otherness” (Britton, 2003, p. 127). He calls this the “xenocidal impulse” and argues that it is a component of the destructive instinct, just as the destructive instinct is a necessary component of envy. In its extreme form, the impulse is murderous toward the “other” and in its mild form it is merely misanthropic.

While Freud identifies an innate hostility to “otherness” and regards this as a manifestation of the death instinct, linked directly to narcissism, Andre Green extends this idea to the ego’s resistance to the unconscious. Green states that narcissism binds together the component parts of the ego and provides a “formal identity” and “sense of existence” (Green, 2001, p. ix). In his view, this explains why narcissism is “one of the fiercest forms of resistance to analysis” (Green, 2001, p. ix). The fundamental “other” is the unconscious. As the unconscious is beyond the ego’s control, recognition of its existence is therefore perceived to be a threat to the “empire of the ego” (Green, 2001, p. ix). However, as Green points out, narcissism also gives the ego a sense of itself as a separate entity, or perhaps what Winnicott would describe as a sense of me. In this respect, narcissism plays a positive role in differentiating self from other and in creating an identity that can tolerate what is other and beyond the control of the ego. This entails the presence of an internal, intermediary space within the mind that can allow for fantasy. When this process goes wrong, the destructive aspect of narcissism, what Green describes as death narcissism, gains the upper hand and develops into a rigid edifice in which aggression can only be used in the service of destroying the other and destroying life itself. There is no internal space available in which a healthy narcissism, or what Green refers to as life narcissism, can develop. In short, there is a huge difference between the sense of me that is derived from and encompasses relation to others from the sense of me that comes about in the absence of relation to others. What determines the balance between life narcissism and death narcissism within the psyche raises the question as to how a space for “otherness” is created in the first place – or not – and how this affects narcissistic development, not simply in relation to the tolerance of difference, or otherness, but in relation to its incorporation. An integral aspect of this question is the role of aggression in narcissistic formation and the way in which aggression is mediated and experienced.

Destructiveness as primary

Winnicott addresses this question in his, “Comments on my paper ‘the use of an object’ ” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 238) and arrives at a particular view of aggression and the death instinct, refuting and refining Freud’s earlier views. For Winnicott, it is the destructive impulse or drive that allows the ego to discover “otherness” through its destruction and hence to discover reality. The necessary ruthlessness of the infant in seeking and attacking the breast is seen by Winnicott as an elementary act of aggression that is essential to the survival of the infant. For the infant, the object does not yet exist in its own right but it is nevertheless there to be used and it is only through the experience of using the object and its consequences that the infant can begin to experience the object as a separate entity and to have a sense of me as a result. In this respect, the infant’s aggression serves to establish not only external reality but the capacity to experience internal psychic space (i.e. the unconscious).

Winnicott describes this process as follows:

Should a philosopher come out of his chair and sit on the floor with his patient, however, he will find that there is an intermediate position. In other words, he will find that after ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object’ (as it becomes external); and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the subject.’ But there may or may not be survival. A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way round and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control…. In other words, because of the survival of the object, the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject stands to gain immeasurably; but the price has to be paid in acceptance of the ongoing destruction in unconscious fantasy relative to object-relating.

(Winnicott, 1989, pp. 222–223)

Winnicott goes further than Freud’s theory of the death instinct or Britton’s xenocidal impulse because he sees destructiveness as primary: it is necessary for creating both the experience of externality and the capacity to love. For Winnicott, the destruction of an object is the first creation of an object – as long as it survives – and is categorically different from the aggression experienced at a later stage that is caused by frustration. Destructiveness is a drive that compels the infant to become alive, it is not a reaction to the environment, such as rage with an object that already exists. It is the infant’s aggression that first brings the object into existence as an internal object in (unconscious) fantasy, and in this way object relating is established. This is in contrast to the Kleinian view in which object relations are there from the beginning, the object exists ipso facto, and it is the infant’s innate envy that must be mediated. Hannah Segal, in her seminal paper, “On the clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct”, states this position very clearly and makes the important link that not only is there an impulse to destroy the object but also to destroy the self that perceives the object so any awareness of otherness is obliterated. She writes: “I think that the destructiveness towards objects is not only a deflection of self-destructiveness to the outside, as described by Freud – important though it is – but that also from the very beginning the wish to annihilate is directed both at the perceiving self and the object perceived, hardly distinguishable from one another” (Segal, 1993, p. 56). Winnicott, however, turns this equation on its head and argues that the object only comes into existence because of the impulse to destroy it. While the object comes into existence in this way, similarly, so does the perceiving self in Winnicott’s formulation. This marks a significant theoretical departure from both Freud and Klein. For Winnicott, aggression is innate and contains within it the libidinal component, the life instinct, in a fusion. Winnicott echoes Pliny’s comment on fire: “Who can say whether in essence fire is constructive or destructive?” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 239).

In writing about Freud’s life and death instincts, Winnicott in his essay “A primary state of being” begins with the premise that “at the start (of life) is an essential aloneness” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 132). Winnicott is also describing a state of oneness with the environment. He explains that “this aloneness can only take place under maximum conditions of dependence” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 132). However, prior to this state of aloneness is what Winnicott refers to as “unaliveness”. He writes: “the wish to be dead is commonly a disguised wish to be not yet alive. The experience of first awakening gives the human individual the idea that there is a peaceful state of unaliveness that can be peacefully reached by an extreme regression. Most of what is commonly said and felt about death is about this first state before aliveness, where aloneness is a fact and long before dependence is encountered” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 132). Winnicott then goes on to discard Freud’s theory of the life and death instinct except for “the original idea”, i.e. Freud’s formulation of “an inorganic state from which each individual emerges and to which each returns.” Winnicott neatly argues that it is only natural for the human individual to want to return to the state of pre-dependent aloneness and that this state should be linked in our minds with a conception of the “unknowable death that comes after life” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 133).

In this same essay, Winnicott criticizes Freud’s theory of the death instinct and introduces a fresh understanding of the death instinct and destructiveness that is highly relevant today. Winnicott writes:

The recognition of this inherent human experience of pre-dependent aloneness is of immense significance. Freud’s later development of the theory of Life and Death instincts introduces perceived death, the perceived distinction between organic and inorganic states, and even the idea of destructiveness, and at the same time Freud omits reference to the original dependence, double because not yet sensed, and to the gradual sensing and perception of dependence. In the end his theory becomes a false theory of the death that comes as an end to life, and also a theory of aggressiveness which is also false because it avoids two vitally important sources of aggression: that which is inherent in the primitive love impulse (at the pre-ruth stage, apart from reaction to frustration) and that which belongs to the interruption of the continuity of being by impingement that enforces reaction. The development of psycho-analytic theory to cover these (and probably other) early phenomena has perhaps made Freud’s theory of Life and Death instincts redundant, and Freud’s own doubt about the vitality of the theory seems to me to have become more important than the theory itself. It is always possible, however, that I have misunderstood Freud’s true meaning.

If the sequence is to be found, aloneness, double dependence, instinctual impulse in a state prior to ruth, then concern and guilt, it seems not necessary to introduce a “Death Instinct”. If on the other hand there is no aggressive element in the primitive love impulse, but only anger at frustration, and if therefore the change from ruthlessness to concern is of no importance, then it is necessary to look round for an alternative theory of aggression, and then the Death Instinct must be re-examined.

(Winnicott, 1988, pp. 133–134)

Winnicott points out the inadequacy of Freud’s idea of the death instinct on the basis that Freud failed to recognize what Winnicott refers to as the “primitive love impulse.” Winnicott redefines the instincts along ontological and epistemological lines and fundamentally disagrees with Freud’s metapsychological formulation of instinct or ‘Trieb’. He bases his theory of instinct on his observations of the experiential “need to be” and an “innate tendency towards integration” (Fulgencio, 2007, p. 449). Winnicott argues that Freud’s theory of the life and death instincts is redundant, but he then questions this on the premise that we nevertheless need to recognize the importance of the “aggressive element”. In this respect, Winnicott calls for a re-examination or a re-formulation of the death instinct. As with Pliny’s observation on fire, the aggressive drive is neither destructive nor creative; it simply is. But in linking the idea of death with aggression, Winnicott unravels a new conceptual thread with which we can approach the idea of the death instinct and which also, most significantly, leads to a theory of the origins of psychosis and the roots of evil. Both of these ideas I will come back to.

Andre Green reiterates Freud’s view that the destructive tendency is characteristic of infantile sexuality. Within the context of drive theory, Green, like Winnicott, argues that aggression and love necessarily go hand in hand and counterbalance one another throughout life (Green, 2001). At one point in “On the use of an object,” Winnicott refers to this as the “combined love-strife drive” (Winnicott, 1989, p. 245). Green also takes care to emphasize the role of Eros in this combined – or as he expressed it “fused” – drive, and is highly critical of the Kleinians for their emphasis on destructiveness and their failure to recognize the importance of the pleasure principle (Green, 2001). Winnicott disagreed with Klein who saw the pleasure principle as a survival issue as opposed to a statement of fact. Green asserts that Freud’s theory of drives, including the death drive, the silent partner of the two, became a firm conviction “as a result of clinical experience as well as social phenomena” (Green, 2001, p. xi). What we also see from clinical experience is what Green describes as the fusion and de-fusion of the drives, the process of their conjunction and dis-conju...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to evil
• 1 Evil and destructiveness: A psychoanalytic view
• 2 Hannah Arendt, evil and the eradication of thought
• 3 Invisible handcuffs: The masochistic pact in capture-bonding and the struggle to be free
• 4 The origin of morality
• 5 Witnessing evil
• 6 Demonization and mass killing: The other as evil
• 7 The problem of forgiveness and reparation in the aftermath of evil
• 8 The Islamic State and the glory of death
• 9 Do we need a theory of evil?
• Conclusion
• Index