A Review of Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil, Edited by Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth R. Howell: A Review of Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil, edited by Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth R. Howell (2020),  Routledge, New York,  273 pages.

“I thought if we could find the man, or if I knew why he did what he did, things would go back to normal,” young Matthew Lang explained to the detective he’d been assisting in Margot Livesey’s haunting “The Boy in the Field” (Livesey, 2020, p. 217). Matthew was one of three siblings walking home from school one day who had come upon a small boy lying bloody and unconscious in a grassy field. The three children manage to save the life of the boy, Karel, but soon realize they have been forever changed by the act. When the newspapers announce that the mystery of Karel’s stabbing has been solved, Matthew implores the detective to explain how anyone could possibly commit such an unconscionable act. Thoughtfully, the detective tells Matthew that he seems to be wrestling with the problem of evil, and that he himself, twice Matthew’s age, was still searching for an answer to that most disturbing problem. “Nothing,” he said, “prepares one for the discovery that there are people who have no conscience” (p. 218).

Who among us, especially we analysts, has not wrestled like young Matthew with the reality of human evil, its origins, banality and prevalence, not to mention whether it lurks within all of us and what must be done about it? Such questions assume even more urgency today, given the deluge of psychopathic figures across the globe endangering freedom and democracy, along with the horrors of gun violence, terrorism, climate change and the corrosion of

ethics and consensual reality. In response to these alarming world events, Itzkowitz and Howell set out to deepen our analytic understanding of what motivates such aggression and destructiveness, noting that the subject of human evil has been problematically under-examined, even dissociated, in psychoanalysis. The breadth of their contribution is noteworthy. Clinicians from multiple disciplina