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Dr Lamb whom I supervised in my work abroad had a patient who dreamt the following dream: ‘I am the shepherd of a herd of sheep. I am standing with a bucket full of poisonous food by the fence of the sheep pen. All the sheep of my herd except one are lying on the ground, dead; there is only one sheep left alive and I am about to feed this last sheep with my poisonous food. I imagine with relish how I will be able to witness the slow agony of this last sheep's dying’.
We would never think of calling a shark which attacks and kills a swimmer ‘evil’ nor an earthquake which within seconds kills thousands of people.1 ‘Evil’ refers to man and man-made situations. It is a notion which is part of the man-made moral grid of conscience, intention and choice. Whenever I use this term in the paper it appears therefore in inverted commas.
Bad has a counterpart in good, with which it can form a relationship and undergo modification. ‘Evil’, although it may have a counterpart in something like ‘pure angelic innocence’, refers to a situation which is beyond the influence of its counterpart and thus cannot be altered. ‘Evil’ is for my understanding reserved for a kind of unmitigated destructiveness which is absolute.2 It attempts to describe a state of mind in its perpetrator which is totally devoid of any care, concern, guilt, scruple or empathy for the person chosen to be its victim. (A state of mind which, although it is horrific and terrifying, nevertheless exerts great fascination.)3
When I began thinking about what, as a psychoanalyst, I could contribute to the discussion about ‘evil’, I thought that, apart from throwing some light on the very workings of ‘evil’ as I see it, and thus bringing some understanding into what feels so incomprehensible, I would concentrate on a very particular function which I think this term can perform for us. I thought I would try to show how much this notion of ‘evil’ as a realistic threat coming from outsi