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Whereas all of us as private citizens can attest to the calamitous presence of malevolence in our daily world, as behavioral scientists, we have, with few exceptions, assumed one of two overriding distancing attitudes about the problem of evil: 1) evil can be safely ignored by behavioral scientists because it is a moral problem and, as such, the province of the theologian and the philosopher rather than a legitimate concern of mental health
practitioners; b) there is no such thing as an evil person because the character structure of the perpetrators of heinous actions can be reduced to known and well-understood psychological concepts and psychiatric diagnosis. Both attitudes, I submit, are based on fallacious assumptions (Goldberg, 1996).
C. G. Jung is one of the few eminent behavioral scientists who wrote extensively on the subject of evil. Moreover, from 1933 to 1945 he lived in close proximity to the rise and fall of Nazism. His writing gives us a propitious opportunity to pose the existential question, Does being an experienced examiner of the human psyche enable a world-renowned psychoanalyst to understand the deep implications of the shadow of evil in a nation close to his homeland that are not apparent to less psychologically sophisticated people?
Jung on Evil is a selection of 12 of Jung's essays, lectures, and personal correspondence in regard to the dark side of human existence. In several of the selections, Jung passionately attacks the Christian doctrine of evil as privatio boni (evil as privation). St. Augustine was the first to suggest that evil is not an active principle but an absence of virtue. Just as cold is the absence of heat and dark is the lack of light, according to the doctrine, evil is an insufficiency of good.
Jung felt that the privatio boni principle underestimates the powerful reality of evil. In his view, it was a weak attempt to discard dualism by accounting for the apparent presence of evil in the world, while at the same time retaini