A Retrospective Review: Beebe, John (Ed.), Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy: Perspectives from Analytical Psychology. Papers from the 2002 North American Conference of Jungian Analysts and Candidates. Einsiedeln, Switzerland:  Daimon Verlag, 2003. Pbk. $26.00.

This is a terrible book. It is terrible the way that all good books about the human passion for terror are terrible. William Golding's Lord of the Flies, William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism are examples of such books. This book certainly belongs to their kind, yet offers a much-needed psychological perspective: it reveals the inner world as the ultimate battlefield where we must confront and fight terror, violence, and destruction.

The thirteen essays that John Beebe has compiled share a commitment to confront the dark side of the soul. Altogether—and they do hold together in a compelling manner— the essays hammer us with a stark truth: the human condition strangely feeds upon terror, violence, and destruction. In the book's opening essay, ‘Explaining Evil’, Clarissa Pinkola Estés puts it this way: ‘Evil is hungry’. Every essay from this one forward paints a different picture of this hungry ghost. Each asks, ‘What are the unconscious roots of its need to terrify and destroy? What should be our conscious response to its destructiveness?‘

Pinkola Estés tells moving stories of her childhood encounters with battered people and her psychological work with survivors of the Columbine High School tragedy. ‘People’, she writes, ‘are most especially defenseless after a wounding—when and if they remain untended to. If they remain unhealed, some significant portion of the psyche often calcifies into a defensive bitterness that can take the form of detached cruelty to self and others’. A group with these dynamics becomes corrupt and acts like an ‘out of control golem’, projecting its own subhuman, animal-like qualities onto others and perceiving them as soulless, a stain to be rubbed out. This easily justifies war. To resist such evil, Pinkola Estés advocates self-examination, integrity, and remembering our humanity.

Jacqueline Gerson takes an in-depth look at a form of terr