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Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Evil: Debating Othello in the Classroom

Since “evil” has become a term much in vogue in our current political climate, it seems ever more important to explore its psychic meanings and origins. What, first of all, do analysts and therapists mean by the word “evil”? The grandiosity of the term, as well as its traditionally religious connotations, perhaps make it unsuited to the therapeutic context. As Ruth Stein (2002) has commented, “’Evil’ may sound too allegorical or too concrete, too essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking that are oriented towards the study of individual subjectivity” (394). In an article entitled “Evil in the Mind of the Therapist” (2001), Robert Winer surveyed a number of practitioners and found a general consensus that “an evil person is someone who knowingly deeply hurts innocent people” (613). The emphasis here, he says, is on the “knowingly”—conscious deliberateness is key— as it is on the extremity of the hurt inflicted: “negating the other person’s soul, . . . destruction as an end in itself” (613). Winer discusses how his own psychological engagement with a patient works against his ever seeing that patient as evil, “no matter how outrageous his crimes” (614). The social psychologist Roy Baumeister (1997) has observed that even serial killers never see themselves as evil but “regard themselves as victims” (47). Winer suggests that it is easier to experience characters in books and movies as evil because we know them only through their evil actions. Even so, he concludes, “Our inability to identify with a character we understand to be evil seems connected for me to our inability to acknowledge our own destructiveness” (621).