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Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives is an intriguing title for a book that seeks a deeper understanding of evil, including the lasting impact of witnessing evil. The two editors are distinguished psychoanalysts and scholars and one of them, Jon Mills, is in addition a professor of philosophy. The book was inspired by the notion that psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition has had difficulty accounting for the existence of evil. Familiar concepts such as splitting, malignant narcissism, perversion, aggression and constricted consciousness are not specific to evildoers and therefore have limited explanatory power. Jung, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of the shadow in its archetypal, collective and personal manifestations, and Jungians have long engaged the concept of evil, both clinically and theoretically. In a refreshing spirit of dialogue between these two traditions of depth psychology, the editors have included contributions by two well-respected Jungian analysts, John Beebe of San Francisco and Coline Covington of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP). Another chapter, ‘The psychoanalytical relevance of Jacob Boehme's concept of evil’, discusses Boehme's influence on Jung's ideas.
I found the two chapters by Jungian colleagues to be the most engaging, as each uses dramatic clinical material to draw out clarifying theoretical and clinical implications in a convincing manner. In contrast, many of the other chapters (and for such an ambitious book, it is surprising that there are only eight chapters in total) are theoretically top heavy. Even more questionable is the tendency to draw their ‘evidence’ from journalistic accounts of perpetrators. Perhaps the strongest example of this comes from Oren Gozlan, a Toronto psychoanalyst with a special interest in transsexuals. His chapter, ‘Trauma and evil’, recounts the breakdown of an experienced forensic psychiatrist in response to watching videos of a Canadian Army