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Review of Everyday Evils: A Psychoanalytic View of Evil and Morality, by Coline Covington. London, UK: Routledge, 2017. 186 pp.
Coline Covington's title, Everyday Evils, stops us in our tracks. Everyday? When we think about events and processes that are deeply evil, our scale isn't pedestrian, it's huge, far beyond ordinary matters, whether we are referring to the behavior of individuals or nations. Because it is now largely unlinked from its religious origins, the term “evil” no longer has a consensually recognized meaning. Some find it everywhere, in traumas large and small, whereas for others it's hard to locate. And for some, at least in practical terms, it barely exists.
Around the turn of the century I asked 20 fellow practitioners whether they had ever treated someone they considered evil (Winer, 2001). They didn't have trouble telling me what it would take for them to find someone evil. There was a consensus that an evil person knowingly deeply hurts other people in a way that makes it impossible for them to protect themselves. Several expressed some form of the idea that the act needed to amount to radical destruction, evacuating the other person's soul. At the same time, essentially none of these therapists, myself included, felt that they had ever treated someone who was evil. Being able to imagine another's experience, to make some sense of it, we experience the person as human, and thus not sinister. We find that we can't repudiate what we can mentalize.
On the other hand, some clinicians and researchers, working with or studying particular groups of people, have fashioned detailed models of evil being and behaving that capture their experience. Here are two examples.
Being particularly interested in the mindset of serial killers, Christopher Bollas has used the term “evil” to signify the following sequence: The evil one presents himself as a force of goodness to a person in need. The person will in turn become dependent on this apparent rescuer who embodie