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My topic is original evil, not radical evil. I focus, that is, on early development with the aim of depicting as nearly as possible the very first staging of the negative. In psychoanalysis, the negative refers to aggression, the death instinct, primitive guilt, depression, the negative therapeutic reaction, characters wrecked by success, the repetition compulsion, and suicide, and how forms of self-negation, self-disavowal, and self-destruction can be transmuted into forms of outer-directed violence, exploitation, and proneness to radical evil. Each of these negative outcomes of development is the subject of a vast domain of study. Not one of them could be encompassed by even the most valid formulation of original evil. Nevertheless, if there be an original common matrix in which all forms of the negative begin, a clearer way of thinking about that origin might shed light on the different paths leading toward each of the negative positions listed. It is also my hope, although I barely touch on such applications, that a better understanding of vicissitudes of the negative in individual development will help to clarify similar phenomena encountered at a societal level.
The points I want to make and the questions I raise in this paper are as follows:
Original evil is original danger that will come to be known as inner danger.
Flight from inner danger takes the form of focusing on an image of the object, an object imagistically remembered and anticipated as providing resolution of danger, a not-yet object that will come to be known as other, as outer.
The cry is initially a crying against inner danger and only later a call for the mother. Primal aggression begins as attack on the not-yet self and not, as Laplanche has suggested, in “aggressiveness that is directed outward” (Life and Death 90). Primal aggression precedes autoerotism.
We can take Freud's concept of the death instinct as biological and pronounce him wrong, as did Lacan, in at least one important passage (Ecrit