Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Robert Maxwell Young wrote:
> 'Evil as Love and as Liberation'
> by Ruth Stein, Ph.D.
> at PsycheMatters web site:
> http://psychematters.com/papers/stein.htm
>
> Paper presented to the "Terror and Aftermath: Perspectives on the WTC
> Tragedy" program, October 29, 2001 at NYU Medical Center. This paper
> is a draft copy that has been submitted for publication and is
> available online at Psyche Matters with permission. Do not duplicate
> without permission.
>
> "Š the end of the world was the consequence of the conflict which had
> broken out between him, Schreber, and Flechsig, Š [the
> consequence] of the indissoluble bond which had been formed between
> him and God" (Freud,
> 1911, p. 39).
>
> "It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of
> social psychology too, should prove soluble on
> the basis of one single concrete point - man's relation to his
> father" (Freud, 1913, p. ).
>
> Introduction: Concerning the theme of Evil
>
> The letter to the hijackers which was found in Mohammed Atta's
> luggage in the car that had been left in Logan Airport before the
> World Trade Center Attack (1), is a striking document. A highly
> revelatory testimony, it may provide us with some understanding
> regarding how the mind of a suicidal-killer might work. As we and
> psychoanalysis face an emergence of new kinds of mass-destructive
> attacks on human beings, any additional knowledge should be sought
> concerning states of mind that are conducive to such attacks, and in
> particular we should try to contact the experience of authentically
> accomplishing a highly religious task of self-sacrifice. We would
> like to learn more about the psychodynamic issues involved in a
> decision that caused (and may go on causing) horrible suffering and
> grief to masses of people; choosing to call this act evil, we would
> like to inquire what are the themes linked with, and explanatory of,
> this kind of evil.
>
> The theme of "evil" has been very little dealt with in psychoanalysis
> because of a (justified) wariness of using terms whose provenance is
> theology, terms which lend themselves to the reification and
> hypostatization of their designaturm (e.g., seeing evil as a power in
> nature, Satan, or the devil). Most of us, I believe, would not see
> "evil" as existing in itself, but rather as a process that has
> incipient beginnings converging from many sources and is most often
> gradual, and that in addition requires a close, objectified, judgment
> about the meaning of a human act. "Evil" may sound too allegorical or
> too concrete, too
> essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking
> that are oriented toward the study of individual subjectivity. A case
> in point is Melanie Klein, a profound thinker on destructiveness, who
> does not use the term "evil" in her writings. She does famously use
> the term "bad object" to denote a subjective cluster of experience
> and beliefs created out of certain affects (Klein, 1946, , Stein,
> 1990) which serves as a carrier and evoker of experiences of
> frustration, abandonment, or persecution,
> or the containment of projections of violent affect. The bad object
> is something that is subjectively (and internally) experienced as
> "bad", but which objectively may not be bad at all, or, more
> precisely, may not have intentionally done anything bad to the person
> who harbors it (i.e., it cannot be judged from the outside as having
> intended to harm). In contrast to the Kleinian
> subjectivist notion of the bad object, evil is by definition
> something blameworthy and bad that has been perpetrated on another
> person (or on one's own self). In contrast to the subjectivist notion
> of a "bad object", only an objectified judgment can dub an act as
> evil; complementary to this view, there is wide-ranging consent among
> thinkers on the psychology of evil that for the most part, evildoers
> do not themselves consider their acts as evil (Khan, 1983; Bollas,
> 1995; Oppenheimer, 1996;
> Baumeister, 1997; Grand, 2000).
>
> It is not surprising, therefore, that very few psychoanalysts have
> addressed the subject of "evil", and even less -- in fact, next to
> none -- have written on the conjunction of religiosity and evil.
> Among the first group, two authors have importantly enlightened us
> about the subject of evil: Christopher Bollas, and Sue Grand.
> Christopher Bollas (1995) writes deeply about
> the serial killer as a "killed self", a child who has been robbed of
> the continuity of his being by sadistically or masochistically
> abusive, or murderously abandoning parents, who goes on "living" by
> transforming other selves into similarly killed ones, thus
> establishing a companionship of the dead. Bollas also distinguishes
> between the passionate murderer who is driven by rage,
> and the murderer who "lacks a logical emotional link to and is
> [emotionally, not necessarily physically, R.S.] removed from his
> victim. Bollas mentions Stuart Hampshire (1959), who suggests that
> Nazi killers worked in a moral vacuum, in which "the genocidal person
> identifies not with the passionate act of murder, but with the moral
> vacuum in which killing occurs, a meaningless, horrifying wasteful
> act" (p. 189). Sue Grand (2000), talks about traumatic experiences,
> which, on the perpetrator's side, are acts of "rape, incest,
> childhood beatings" (p. x) that are often done on close family
> members. The evildoer here is a survivor of unspeakable trauma that
> has resulted in unformulated, uncommunicable "catastrophic
> loneliness." Deadness and vacuity have become the defining
> characteristics of the perpetrator's identity, and evil is "an
> attempt to answer the riddle of catastrophic loneliness" (p. 5).
> Grand speaks about a vacuous no-self, remarking that "In perpetrator
> and bystander there is neither the desire, nor the illusion of
> "understanding" the no-self; on the contrary, in the
> perpetrator-bystander-victim relation, "the no-self is in the
> presence of others who confirm the truth of catastrophic loneliness,
> even as these others do not know this loneliness" (p. 6). Grand sees
> evil as providing for some people the only context that makes it
> "possible to achieve radical contact with another at the pinnacle of
> loneliness and at the precipice of death" (p. 6). Both authors have
> given us deeply touching, penetrating studies of evil. However, the
> phenomenon of evil that is committed specifically in the name of
> religion has not received attention in psychoanalysis. Evil can be
> done privately or collectively, for directly obvious self-serving
> purposes, as well as out of true faith in some ideal. Evil done for
> idealistic purposes may have some dynamics of its own, part of which
> I hope to address in this paper.
>
> Thinking about evil requires a tremendous effort of the imagination
> and a willingness to open one's fold to encompass this phenomenon in
> one's thinking. Getting deeply into what it feels like to have a
> violently disinhibited, super-humanly entitled, or radically
> contemptuous and hateful, or utterly despairing, or ecstatically
> numbed, state of mind without trying to repudiate it and to split it
> off and yet without completely identifying with it, is no easy task.
> It may feel alien and disturbing to one's usual self-states; pursued
> deeply, it becomes frightening. The shocking absence of compassion in
> evildoing feels too discontinuous with what we have achieved as a
> culture in terms of our Western ideals and values of humanism,
> morality, and compassion (it
> is by its lack of compassion that religious evil, or what may be
> called coercive fundamentalism, distinguishes itself from religious
> thinking, since all religions preach compassion [Armstrong, 2001, p.
> ]). Against the psychoanalytic imperative that nothing human shall
> remain alien to us, stands the effort to understand something that is
> meant precisely to annihilate any
> understanding as well as any physical (or normal) existence. With all
> these caveats, it nevertheless seems that psychoanalysts need to
> urgently seek to understand more the phenomenon gathered under this
> concept and to incorporate it into their vocabulary.(2)
>
> Robert Maxwell Young
> robert at rmy1.demon.co.uk
> http://www.human-nature.com
>
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