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Coline Covington has written before on the subject of human destructiveness, and has accumulated a body of knowledge around some of the most extreme historical manifestations of cruelty, such as civil war, the use of torture, and genocide. She ends this book with a question: ‘Do we need a theory of evil?’, and opens it with an overview of some of the psychoanalytic theories that have attempted to answer this. Freud's term ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (1917) describes how an unstable sense of self, provoked by certain circumstances which threaten it, leads to fending off innate aggression by turning it towards the other, one's closest neighbour, who is turned into a stranger. Winnicott (1989), writing on aggression as a crucial component of the love-impulse dispenses with the Death Instinct, and stresses that aggression is not merely a reaction to frustration, though frustration in adulthood can lead to a regression to ‘pre-ruth’, a total loss of concern for the other. This is where a more sociological dimension is needed to explain perverse group behaviour: Covington moves on to outline ‘the complex set of dynamics, fuelled by histories of fear and humiliation and impotence, which can so easily trip over into atrocity’ (p. 3).
Hannah Arendt's much quoted theory of ‘the banality of evil’ (1973) is a first attempt: she distinguishes between ‘banal evil’ and ‘radical evil’ (characterized by individual omnipotence and an intention to destroy the other). She argues that Adolf Eichmann's ‘banality’ was characterized by an absence of thought. Circumstances of extreme socio-political change, accompanied by a violent ideology, can cause a group to substitute individual conscience with a failure to think from the standpoint of someone else. Instead, normal empathy and the superego are replaced by a perverse ego-ideal projected into the leader and the group (reprising some of Freud's ideas on group psychology), and subservience to a collective fantasy. In this way evil