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It took me three chapters to appreciate this powerful book, but perseverance was rewarded. Diamond's reach is ambitious: to consider the ‘meaning’ of human violence and evil as displayed in contemporary social and cultural history, as well as in severe mental disturbance and in the ordinary individual's capacity for rage. He ranges over myth, religion, metapsychology, psychopathology, art and creative genius. Throughout the book he expounds Rollo May's concept of the ‘daimonic’, derived from the classical Greek idea of a unified life force potentiating both evil and good, which is of course analogous to Jung's concept of the split forces of archetypal potency.
Diamond's exploration opens almost journalistically. He conducts a critical audit of the contemporary American zeitgeist, cataloguing examples of the epidemic of ‘senseless’ violence and of antagonism between the sexes. He asks what produces serial killers, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Bobbitt castration case, the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and explores more generally the male response to the rise of feminist anger. He links violence with woundedness and fear, and discusses notions of demonization and projection, especially of animus and anima. His argument is that modern America has misunderstood and devalued the daimonic by deeming it solely demonic. He distinguishes subtly between rage, anger and aggression, makes a case for ‘good’ anger and appeals to Darwinian biology to account for a ‘need’ for violence. The psychophysiology of rage as a state of possession denotes the presence of the daimonic: ‘To feel rage fully, to be totally filled with it, even temporarily overcome or possessed by it, is to know a type of ecstasy - a momentary loss of voluntary control, social inhibition, and self-discipline; a surrender to animal instinct, as occurs during sexual orgasm; a direct - and sometimes purposely sought after - ‘participation mystique’ in the daimonic powers of nature’ (p. 15). These same forces are also