Psychoanalysis and Evil

The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective. By Sue Grand. Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 2000,  216 pp., $36.00.

The Evil We Do: The Psychoanalysis of Destructive People. By Carl Goldberg.  Prometheus Books, 2000,  260 pp., $25.00.

It is perhaps illustrative of the extent to which our mental health professions have succeeded to the place of the priesthood in our society that in a recent Newsweek cover story, “Evil: What Makes People go Wrong?” (see Begley 2001) eight of the nine authorities interviewed and quoted were mental health professionals. None offered more than banal generalizations, leaving the thoughtful reader disappointed and skeptical.

Of course, it is hardly self-evident that psychoanalysts are especially qualified to understand evil. Some among us acknowledge outright that evil is beyond our ken. For example, Twemlow (2000), in rejecting Al Gore's characterization of the Columbine school massacre as “evidence of evil,” wrote that “the idea of evil places it beyond the pale of human understanding and thus beyond a possibility of resolution without divine intervention” (p. 776). There is a literature that occupies a hazily defined interface between religion and psychiatry that purports to deal more confidently with the problem of evil. For Peck (1983), for example, where evil is his patient's problem, procedures such as exorcism or deliverance may be the prescription (see especially chap. 5).

However, the study of fantasies of evil can readily be considered a proper subject for psychoanalytic investigation. Freud, in his little-read essay (1923) on demonic possession and exorcism, concluded that for the case at hand the Evil One, the Devil, represented a distorted version of the father of his childhood and a reprise of the primal father of human prehistory. Religious material, as well as artistic, folkloric, and musical works, can be fruitfully analyzed as sources of fantasy.