You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For all the interest that evil as a subject arouses, it is quite surprising that there are so very few serious references made to it in psychoanalytic literature. The fascination that evil as an idea has had for humanity is known to us all and we need only look at the work of many artists throughout history to see its presence and importance, be it in literature, painting, music and particularly films, the form of art that has most vigorously focused on the subject.
Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, approach the subject in a rather timid way, at least when speaking officially. It would seem, however, quite difficult to imagine why, particularly considering those patients whose preoccupation with evil is familiar to all of us.
'It is not only the bullying that makes me unhappy, it is also the nightmares I have every night. I have never told anybody … do you know who Dracula is?' Thus started the analysis of a 10-year-old boy whose internal world was populated with evil. Because of his individual psychopathology as well as the culture he came from, this boy had no difficulties in talking about evil and in recognizing its presence. Yet we, psychoanalysts, are at times ill at ease and dare not always call it by its 'proper' name.
Evil. Self and Culture is a book that fills a gap in the psychoanalytic literature and we should be grateful to the people who made it possible, particularly to Marie Coleman-Nelson and Michael Eigen, the editors of this collection of essays. After a brief and illuminating introduction by Marie Coleman-Nelson, the papers are grouped into three parts. The first deals with the models and origins of evil; part two concentrates on evil as it is encountered in the day to day psychoanalytic practice from the clinician's point of view; part three comes under the title of 'Inter-disciplinary Perspectives'. This collection is supposed to be a dialogue among cultural historians, clinical practitioners and theologians concerned with transformations