Psychopathology and Human Evil: Toward a Theory of Differentiation

Abstract

The recent cultural background of the problem of psychopathology and evil is what Phillip Rieff calls the triumph of the therapeutic.¹ His thesis is that modern politics, psychology, and religion are now pervaded with a dominant cultural type, psychological man, whose basic posture is the pursuit of well-being without considerations of good and evil. The triumph of the therapeutic rests on a conflation of various forms or dimensions of human misery. Misery as onto-logical insecurity and anxiety in the face of the threatening contingencies of life, misery in the form of mental disorder or psycho-pathology, and misery in the form of human evil all turn out to be one thing. What follows represents an attempt at a theory of differentiation which argues that the psychopathological and human evil are different kinds of responses to the problematic and threat which is constitutive of life itself, and they are marked by quite different dynamics. Obviously, a theory of differentiation requires both an eidetics of the sphere of the psychopathological as well as of human evil. This paper is little more than a summary sketch, an outline, in which such an eidetics is attempted.² At the same time it should offer sufficient detail to make the theory plausible.