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“…the power [The Force] has to transform men to things is bidirectional: it petrifies (in a different but equal manner) the psyche of both those who suffer it, and those who exercise it.”
Evil as an extreme variation of ‘the bad’, cannot be found in the psychoanalytic vocabulary. Even the term ‘bad’ itself, is but afforded a rather restricted usage. It carries no ethical dimension and is used exclusively as a qualifying adjective for a part-object, signifying the fact that the particular object is not providing satisfaction to the self's drive needs. Both Freud and Klein agree that splitting and projection (expulsion) of this experience from the ego, leaves the ego in both a state of satisfaction (reduction of tension) and under a paranoid threat of retaliation. The repeated introjections and reprojections, together with a sense of guilt and need for reparation, instituted by the Depressive Position, gradually establish within the psyche, the moral principles of Goodness and Evil. This, according to André Green, cannot but be recognized as a foundational process of the human psyche.
Within the wider philosophical field however - even though its original meaning was purely psychological, what one desires to avoid,….because it is a source of harm (Pagels, 1989 p. 143) - ‘Evil’ or ‘Badness’ nowadays refers to a particular way of relating to the Law, be it moral, divine, or civil.
One starts from the ascertainment that terms like evil or badness and aggression, transgression of the law or destruction should in no way be considered synonyms. One can easily imagine an aggressive/destructive act to which the characterization evil would not apply, e.g. the destruction of a symbiotic syncytium as an indispensable element needed for individuation, or as we are reminded by Sabine Spielrein ‘Destruction [can be] the Cause of Coming into Being’. Destruction can also be experienced as an artistic creation like the 1995 happening called ‘dropping of a Han dynasty urn’. Ev