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Volume XXXVI, No. 1, Winter 2006

From the Editor — Kathryn Madden

We all have our own images of evil and our own personal responses to the ways in which evil manifests itself. We may be suddenly thrust into the field of evil by a mother’s frantic phone call — her college-age son murdered with a hot to the head by a .38; his girlfriend shot five times while reaching for her cell phone; the murderer, one of the best friends of the two he shot before he then killed himself — an act of jealous rivalry and untreated depression.

On a global level, we may recall how in 2004, Chechen-led rebels, fighting to secede from the Russian Federation, seized a Middle School in Beslan. A 52-hour siege followed. Over 330 people died, half of them children. The fierce blood feuds in Grodzny at the center of Chechnya represent a centuries-old struggle for sovereignty, one side rebelling to reclaim ethnic independence, the other struggling to reassert federal rule.

The Chechen homeland has degenerated into a lawless enclave and a magnet for Islamist extremists. In the midst of this abyss of grief, a Russian general exclaims callously, ““If they [Chechen rebels] shoot at us from a house, we destroy the house. If they shoot from all over a village, we destroy the village.” The blind vehemence of such a statement attests to the fact of evil as an unconscious force.

Permeating our psyches, the news is available 24 hours-a-day, rife with images of war, racial conflict, starvation, plague, and murderous cruelty toward whomever is determined by a particular individual or group to be the enemy. Dictators, terrorists, serial-killers, thieves, each from different foundations of power, perpetually commit atrocities and crimes that replicate the torturous and barbarous manner in which people have treated others for centuries.

In light of individual and global cruelty, we may begin to question our own acts, our own projections and projective identifications. In response, we may try to do good by offering kindness to our neighbor, offering our service to humanitarian causes: hurricane, flood, or earthquake victims. We may visit people on death-row. We may serve the homeless and unsheltered. Soup-kitchen lines wend around the block at a church in New York City that feeds millions annually.

But, as Jung (1988) tells us, “… people who have an excellent opinion of themselves and cherish amazing virtues, have always somebody in their surroundings who carries all their evil” (Neitzsche’s Zarathusra, Vol. 2, p. 145). He (1977) adds, “Nobody is immune to nationwide evil unless he is unshakably convinced of the danger of his own character being tainted by the same evil [the awareness of our potential susceptibility to fall unconscious and hence unwittingly become an agent for evil acts as a psychic immunization against this happening]” (Collected Works 18, p. 612).

Films on our pay-per-view channels perpetuate scenes of horror, which have grown increasingly graphic and bloody. We are titillated with explicit visuals. Have our senses become defensively numbed by the violent scenes depicted in our media world? Do we need to be jarred at such a forceful level? Clearly we are caught in a rather obvious complex if we thrive on images of evil. Yet, the complexity of evil on an archetypal level exists.

Jung (1988) grounds us in the ultimate seriousness of evil when he says,

This is an exceedingly dangerous time and we are confronted with a problem which has never been known in the conscious history of man. You cannot compare it with the early times of Christianity, because that movement did not come from the blood, but from above, a light that shone forth. This is not a light but a darkness, the powers of darkness are coming up. (italics mine, NZ, Vol. 1, pl 500)

Unlike Jung, I am not convinced that the darkness is growing, except perhaps by virtue of human beings developing more deadly weapons. The darkness has always been there in archetypal proportions. The behavior of human beings toward each other has not changed significantly over the centuries. There always is and will be a warring faction unless we as a species can look within and wrestle deeply with the psychological shadow-contents of others. Evil is archetypal, but the potential for evil is also in us.

Thus, the focus of this issue: the authors explore the archetypal dimension of evil, the danger of identifying with our God-images, succumbing to inflation and shadow-projection, and sinking into a psychological impasse that may prove self-destructive to ourselves and others. Ann Belford Ulanov helps us to locate our own specific “hinge” that enables us to make conscious the unconscious material hidden in the abyssal hinge-place of our psyches. This effort is crucial, for as Jung (1975) says, “…[W]hen an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and hence forced to its fatal goal” (Letters, Vol. 2, p. 594).

Edward Christopher Whitmont emphasizes that instincts that remain unconscious can give rise to evil in the name of goodness and truth. He gives examples from his own life in Nazi Germany of how certain despots enacted atrocities believing, according to the standards of their culture and time, that the were enacting the good.

Whitmont encourages us to hone and deepen our recognition of the source for individuation through images in dreams that seem to threaten only chaos or evil. What may appear to be evil may in fact be the means to our integration of a necessary aggression or eros. Above all, our conscious minds alone cannot assure our goodness. Always, we need the integrative dialogue with the unconscious to enable us to avoid identification with any one-sided view.

Ulanov emphasizes the notion of the intersubjective nature of evil. One must become two before comprehensibility and consciousness are possible. As the ego acknowledges the Self, the Self makes a counterstroke through dreams and images so that the dialectical or synthetic processes of self-knowledge may take place. Likewise, Whitmont attests to a “yes and no” situation where the yes represents life. His “yes and no” opposition reminds me of the 17th century mystic Jacob Boehme, who believed that in order for anything to become manifest, there must be a contrarium. Therefore, “no” is the necessary counterstroke of the “yes.” A “yes” without a “no” has nothing in itself. Thus, in the oscillation between the two, we create an antithetical counterstroke.

All of us bear personal responsibility to dig out the caves of regression of our own shards of unconsciousness. As Jung (1961) says, “… the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness” (Memories Dreams Reflections, p 330).

Whatever is beyond the God we create of our images, or the Self that bridges beyond to God, is unknown, a mystery. And yet, as these authors attest, this mystery, inclusive of both the nature of what is divine and what is evil, is crucially at the center of human concern.

— Kathryn Madden

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