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DEEP IN THE BEDROCK OF the trouble that many people carry in their lives and bring with them into psychoanalytic treatment is the intensely-held conviction that they are essentially and innately bad, destructive, dangerous, and unworthy. This conviction may initially be available consciously, but it is often largely unconscious, surfacing and taking tangible form for the patient only through the process of the treatment. In either case, this belief in one's essential badness is one of the most fundamental and crucial yet enduring difficulties that the patient and analyst face in their work together.
In this paper, I propose that for some patients who experience this deep core of sense of essential inner badness or defectiveness, which often borders on a feeling of being personally evil, there is an underlying and almost always unconscious fantasy of having been the wicked destroyer of a preexisting paradise. What I mean by this is that the person unconsciously believes that before his or her conception and birth, there existed a state of paradisiacal unity and bliss between the parents and an essential goodness in the family situation that was ruptured by the child's advent and thereby irretrievably lost. This is a specific way in which the child blames him- or herself for the pain and difficulty of a family situation structured by narcissistically deprived and damaged parents.
It is the individual and psychological equivalent of feeling oneself to the be the Serpent in the Garden, the cause of Original Sin, the spoiler and destroyer of all that is good and the cause of untold