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The principal question posed by Nathalie Zaltzman in her last book entitled L'Esprit du mal [The Spirit of Evil] is whether we can think about evil today.2 She confronts each of us with a crucial question: can the psychoanalytic method of psychic investigation shed any light on the phenomenon of evil? This gives rise to two further questions. Firstly, can psychic treatment, as a form of cultural work, help to overcome the operation of evil in culture? And, secondly, are the barbaric tragedies repeated over history mere returns to earlier states or do they generate unprecedented forms?
Paraphrasing Baudelaire's preliminary address to the readers of Les Fleurs ciu Mal, we would say that this book invites us, its hypocritical readers, to confront the question of evil by recognizing that this is in fact a ‘delicate monster’ that exercises all too familiar a mastery and role in our actions. The inquiry into the psychic dimension of evil is connected with the disagreement that Zaltzman experiences with Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1930). This leads her to tackle evil to examine whether there is any treatment that may be applied to it by the cultural work.
In what is generally designated as evil, Zaltzman identifies the return to the psychic scene and the world scene of a psychological truth that the ideals and commandments created by society and civilization have sought to deny in rejecting the effort that its transformation would have imposed.