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Coline Covington has written a moving and thought-provoking paper looking at the nature of evil from a psychoanalytic perspective. She explores evil as a state of mind to which we are all vulnerable by weaving together studies from anthropology, the Holocaust and Cambodian genocides, the literature of Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész, the Oscar award-winning film Lives of Others, and most especially the philosophical writings of Hannah Arendt. Employing Arendt's concept of the ‘banality of evil’, Covington explores the chilling acts of evil perpetrated by individuals who ‘follow orders’ under a totalitarian regime. She illuminates how an individual capable of love and affection can also commit horrific crimes under the sway of an idealized leader such as Hitler or Pol Pot. She identifies the all too human tendency to turn our thinking and singularity over to inner and outer ‘totalitarian leaders’ in exchange for narcissistic fantasies of total care and safety. Most significantly, her astute analysis links the psychoanalytic work of developing the capacities for self-reflection, memory, and remorse with the possibility of averting ‘banal evil’. For me, this underlines the view that psychoanalysis is, at its core, an ethical undertaking.
Covington accepts Arendt's definition of a ‘person’ as a human being who has the capacity to think and to remember. In order to think, a ‘person’ has to be capable of imagination (Arendt's term)1 and have the ability to place themselves in the other's shoes. This capacity to imagine the actual other is what allows for the emergence of an internal dialogue between the observing ego and the activities of the self. ‘Thought’, according to Arendt, is defined as the inner dialogue between