The Psychology of Evil: A Contribution from Psychoanalysis

Abstract

It has often been noted that evil — by which I mean evil in human motivation and action — is difficult to understand. We find it hard to make sense of what ‘drives’ a person to commit evil This is not because we cannot recognize or identify with some aspect of the psychology of evil; we all experience feelings of envy, spite, cruelty, and hatred. But somehow this shared experience can seem insufficient, and we are left at a loss as to how such natural, universal human motivations could have resulted in this.

There are two fundamental reasons for this, relating to how we make sense of human motivation and action. First, as Aristotle observed, we standardly explain what someone does and why they do it in terms of the good they aim at, understood from their perspective. But is there always some (deviant conception of the) good at which the evil person aims? Or is evil better understood in terms of an attack on the good? Second, we often make sense of another’s motivation and action by adopting their perspective, identifying with them ‘off-line’. However, it is rare that a person understands their motives as evil. The apparent lack of an ‘internal perspective’ on evil casts our attempts at understanding adrift.

The aims of this chapter are modest, to do no more than point our attempts to understand the psychology of evil in a particular direction. § 8.2 is a synoptic overview of what I shall call the ‘traditional’ picture of the psychology of evil. In § 8.3, I argue that this picture is explanatorily inadequate. §§ 8.4–8.6 develop the traditional picture by suggesting some resources drawn from psychoanalytic theory that can meet the explanatory challenge. My argument here is schematic, seeking only to motivate a research project. § 8.7 situates the psychology of evil in relation to ‘normal’ psychology by noting the positive functions of mental processes involved in the psychology of evil.