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For all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed.…
Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,—
That is my proper element.
Sigmund Freud (1930, 120-122) does not write very much about evil, or at least he does not call it that. In Civilization and its Discontents he does, quoting the above lines by Goethe, and equating evil with the Todestrieb, the drive toward death. Not just because the Todestrieb seeks destruction, but because it seeks the void, nothingness.
I too argue that evil is about nothingness—not just the nothingness we seek, but the nothingness we dread. Evil is nothingness because it is no-thing: the dread of boundlessness, and all that goes with it—loss of self, loss of meaning, loss of history, and loss of connection to the world itself. Though I refer to Freud, I draw more heavily upon Thomas Ogden, the analyst who originated the concept of the autistic-contiguous position, an experience of boundlessness at once transcendent and terrifying.
One might respond that dread is not the same as evil: the former is a psychological experience, the latter a moral category. There would be some truth to such a response, and I address their complex relationship shortly. For now it must suffice to say that when sixty-eight subjects were asked to talk about evil, most referred to an experience of dread.
Each interview lasted about two hours, and was conducted in a conversational, open-ended fashion. Fifty of the respondents were average citizens responding to advertisements placed in a campus newspaper, a local newspaper, and the newspaper of a retirement community (the methodological appendix addresses the problem of self-selection). Eighteen of