Anna Aragno - The Roots of Evil - A Psychoanalytic Inquiry

THE ROOTS OF EVIL:
A Psychoanalytic Inquiry
Anna Aragno
Of all the great dualities of human experience, “good and evil” have
been the most instrumental in shaping the beliefs, rituals, and laws of
Homo sapiens. The polarization of our nature into “good and bad” and
anthropomorphic externalizations of these impulsions have been with
us for millennia, providing inspiration for magical rites, representa-
tional forms, and the cornucopia of dramas, narratives, and artworks
to which they give expression. Furthermore, whereas all religions ad-
vocate for good, the particular narratives of evil underlying the tradi-
tions of Western culture come to us from the Bible. However, good
and especially evil are theological and moral, not psychological, con-
structs. With Freud’s death instinct, and later Fromm’s necrophilous
character, the darker shadow of human nature became definitively
secularized. After an introduction and historical/developmental over-
view of select theorists, this paper adopts a strictly psychoanalytic
frame of reference in the exploration of what renders some human
beings capable of doing inhuman things. Looking at behaviors mani-
festing through the psychodynamics of character structure and severe
personality disorders, the breakdown of empathy and defacement of
the “other” in the creation of an enemy is discussed. In conclusion two
clinical portraits are offered, illustrating how primitive emotions and
defenses, superego pathology, and latent schizoid, narcissistic, and
projective mechanisms provide fuel and rationalization for malignant
aggressive, duplicitous, and sadistic behaviors.
Here we are dealing with the ultimate things which psychological

research can learn about: the behavior of the two primal instincts,
their distribution, mingling and defusion—things which we can-
not think of as being confined to a single province of the mental
apparatus, the id, the ego or the superego.
—Sigmund Freud, “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable”
Psychoanalytic Review, 101(2), April 2014 © 2014 N.P.A.P.

250 ANNA ARAGNO
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick: on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age, his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest,4.1.188–193
Human existence is dominated by apparent dualities: light and

dark, hot and cold, abundance and scarcity, hunger and satiety,
happiness and sadness, love and hate, good and evil. Of all these
sets, the impact of “good and evil” has undoubtedly been the most
instrumental in shaping universal taboos, belief systems, behav-
ior, and the laws of Homo sapiens, as we evolved from small groups
to swell into our modern civilization. From time immemorial we
have split, externalized, and personified these polarized emo-
tions, impulses, and the deeds that are their consequence, pro-
jecting their moral implications into stories, images, and dramas
yielding works of great art and literature that encapsulate their
meaning.
Emotions generate images conjuring archetypal characters
in stories that through narrative momentum build toward end-
ings always containing a moral message. It is partly thanks to our
need to seek motives, explain causes, and find moral coherence
in a chaotic unpredictable world that we anthropomorphize and
dramatize these forces creating tragic figures like Medea, Oedi-
pus, Othello, Macbeth, and Faust, or the purely evil Richard III,
Iago, Scarpia, and Mephisto (to name just a few major villains), as
well as the imagery and music of the divine, for which we are cul-
turally and spiritually the richer.
Early Biblical histories give accounts of conversations designed
to appease a militant Jaweh who demands unthinkable sacrifices
while inflicting plagues, famines, floods, disease, and disaster, as
well as expulsion, enslavement, and all manner of hardship on his
people below. It is difficult to reconcile belief in a just or benevo-
lent God in the face of such unrelenting punishment. No less ter-
rifying, the great Greek tragedies depict incest, infanticide, patri-
cide, matricide, war, brutality, and social ruin. In our times we
THE ROOTS OF EVIL 251
have only to look back at a century darkened by two world wars,

our collective consciousness imprinted by the muddy trenches,
devastated cities, misty fields of the dead, and jolting footage of
effects on body and mind of shell shock traumata after World War
I. And who can forget the petrified expression of a little Jewish
boy, arms high in surrender to an SS officer, or the skeletal fig-
ures wandering down alleys in Auschwitz or Buchenwald, vacant
eyes on those so emaciated they were unable to stand, lying list-
less, sandwiched between cramped bunk beds, when the concen-
tration camps were discovered? People dehumanized by dehu-
manizing ideas realized and put into action by humans capable of
doing inhuman things.
Or consider our own bright new millennium, with its novel
horror in the form of terrorism on a global scale: shocking foot-
age, watched live, of tiny bodies hurling themselves into a void
from towering heights against the gigantic backdrop of their flam-
ing falling skyscraper; shocking sounds of those on a plane point-
ed straight down to crash in a rural Pennsylvania field; shocking
images of ravaged faces, marred bodies, crumbling buildings,
around the world, and the catastrophic aftermath in water board-
ing, torture, imprisonment without due process. What country
can point a finger after the pictured sadism of Abu Ghraib was
unveiled, or the iconic testament to torture of a hooded figure
standing on a pedestal, arms outstretched, with electrodes at-
tached? And then there are the school murders, children killing
children with guns, with words, with taunts and ostracism, besides
the plethora of random common misdeeds: personal vendettas,
crimes of passion, family feuds, vengeance attacks and reprisals,
gang rapes, battered wives, abused children.
These iconic images are the new collective archetypes of an-
cient barbarisms emblazoned in our shared heritage along with
our DNA; they include the talionic response, scapegoating, sib-
ling rivalry, tribalism, the wish for dominance and power, greed,
prejudice, extremism, exploitation, and, uniquely human, the
pleasure in causing pain—and not to be omitted, the rationalized
Holy Wars, so much evil done in the name of “good.” One has
only to think of the Inquisition, the Crusades, the jihads, forced
conversions, witch-hunts, all forms of rigid dogma, subjugation,
252 ANNA ARAGNO
suppression, oppression, conditioning, and the creation of an en-

emy. In the face of all this it is not hard to believe that Satan is
indeed among us—and he seems to be gaining the upper hand!
Our personification of evil goes by many names: Lucifer,
“bearer of light,” originates in Caanite mythology from the god
Aftar, “morning star,” modeled after a fallen lord cast out for the
sin of jealousy. It is the biblical devil (Isaiah 14:12-15) who takes
Jesus to the top of a hill, tempting him with promises of power
and greatness. Yet the story of Satan is of relatively recent coinage,
coming to us from the Middle Ages. The devil is conceived as a
brazen angel who dared covet God’s dominion, for which he is
cast out of heaven and given far less desirable territory to stalk:
our Earth! So Mephistopheles is among us, a prince of darkness,
winning over souls by tempting people to make non-virtuous
choices. The concept of evil in Western culture is irrevocably tied
to a fall from grace through actions that, first, indicate moral or
carnal weakness, as in the seven deadly sins, and, second, that dis-
obey the Ten Commandments. This leaves open the following
question: Is evil simply the absence of good, or is it more, an ac-
tive pursuit of wrongdoing? Perhaps Goethe’s Faust (and in lesser
form, Dorian Gray) are the best prototypes for those who sell
their souls to the devil, a pact that inevitably backfires when they
encounter true love or the constraints of reality, including aging
and decline.
It is in medieval theology, however, that the concept of evil
turned most forcefully against the body. St. Augustine’s systemati-
zation of seven cardinal sins—Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Wrath,
Sloth, Envy, and Pride—transformed the characteristics of evil
into temptations of bodily appetites, the urges of which must be
curbed, harnessed, and tamed, almost out of existence. Medieval
ideology, like the mysterious alchemical “sublimations” of that pe-
riod, pivots around the idea of spiritual transcendence through
self-deprivation, acquiring that grim asceticism and austerity we
associate with the Dark Ages. Taken to an extreme, this dogma
became a sadistic punitive instrument, and many a young woman
died in monastic imprisonment under strict regimens of self-
flagellation, fasting, and sleep deprivation. But during this whole
period, side by side the pious, there continued a ribald, sensually
liberating, earlier tradition in the form of monthly Saturnalias cel-

ebrating the “Horned God,” during which all manner of debauch-
ery, intoxication, feasting, child sacrifice, sodomy, and licentious
sexuality occurred.
The more refined and insidious version of these more or less
bucolic releases of undesirable impulses occurred in castle dun-
geons and monasteries, in the higher ranks of society, where
Black and Satanic Masses were practiced and pure sadism, sexual
abuse, torture, and human sacrifice were indulged in by the de-
praved, priests included. So common, during this era, was the fear
and belief in demonic possession, that any deviations from con-
formity to strict Church dogma—which confused sorcery, witch-
craft, necromancy, alchemy, and astrology with astronomy, cos-
mology, philosophy, and scientific research—was relentlessly
persecuted and severely punished. Similarly, the mentally ill were
ostracized and exorcised, as though bedeviled, segregated in despi-
cable conditions to serve as society’s scapegoats. By the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, the calcification of a rich and rigid
Church, at the height of its powers, expressed a fear of “knowl-
edge” bordering on hysterical superstition, ruthlessly suppressing
any voice that criticized its habits or cast doubt on a literal reading
of the Scriptures, to which the fates of Savonarola, burned at the
stake, and Galileo, condemned to house arrest, attest. Absolute
belief and absolute obedience to the Church, above and beyond
good or evil, were the guideposts for a satisfactory afterlife. Here-
sy became the new cardinal sin, and all manner of iniquity was
justified for those who strayed.
In Shakespeare’s day, at the end of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, the preoccupation with evil and terror of
all things supernatural—prophetic mysteries, the occult, sooth-
sayers, and witches—was still very real and, like all unknowns,
shrouded in superstition. The tragedy of Macbeth encapsulates
the popular belief that dark and powerful supernatural forces
may overcome human sentiments and moral judgment. This play,
more than any other, poses the stark question of whether it is the
witches that plant the ideas spurring Macbeth’s deeds, or if the
seeds of overwhelming ambition were already sprouting from
within? Is the driving force behind the murder supernatural and
254 ANNA ARAGNO
demonic, or is it Macbeth and his lady’s own ambition, an aspect

of human nature? The drama lays bare the nature/nurture ques-
tion: Are there evil people, or do people do evil things? In short,
are we bad or mad?
To address this question sensibly we have to remember that
good and evil are theological and moral, not psychological, concepts:
The former, along with the law, judges motives and actions; the
latter, especially in psychoanalysis, is obliged to take a nonjudg-
mental, objective stance toward its phenomena and studies affects
and personality structure in relation to motives and meanings.
Moreover, aside from universal taboos against incest and killing,
societies with different adaptive challenges have different values
and moral codes. A definitive assessment of what is good or evil is
questionable.
With Freud, the secularization of good and evil took a defini-
tive turn by means of a psychobiological instinctual theory that
gradually enabled the evolution of a psychodynamic understanding
of how human beings are capable of doing inhuman things.
THE LIFE AND DEATH INSTINCTS: A THEORETICAL/

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no
longer obscure to us. It must represent the struggle between Eros
and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruc-
tion, as it works itself out in the human species.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud was a research biologist before becoming a medical neu-

rologist, and his psychoanalytic “method” was as much a research
lab as a therapeutic situation. His ideas and theorizing were con-
stantly open to change and reformulations. Concerned with ori-
gins, and heavily influenced by Darwinian naturalistic/evolution-
ary ideas, his writings are peppered with speculative flights into
psychobiological and phylogenetic reconstructions informed by a
multidisciplinary palette of current knowledge, a style that set the
stage for psychoanalytic interdisciplinarity. In seeking universal
principles governing the psychology of human nature, he first
postulated the basic pleasure/pain principle and two broad pri-
mordial instincts: the self-preservative ego instincts and the sexual

instincts, safeguarding continuation of the species, “ego-instincts
and object-instincts” (Freud, 1930, p. 64), both streaming from
libidinal wellsprings. The breakdown of this simple grouping be-
gan in “On Narcissism” (Freud, 1914), finally giving way in “Be-
yond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920) a work originating in
his observations of the posttraumatic war neuroses. Here he intro-
duced the repetition compulsion, an insidious return to a painful
state, postulating an independent innate destructive counterforce,
the death instinct, returning life to an inert state.
By 1930, in Civilization and Its Discontents, the antithesis be-
tween Eros, a force that binds and joins things together, and
Destruido, aggression, which breaks them apart, is firmly implant-
ed. Freud recognized that a separate destructive force must be
operating simultaneously in human nature. An antithesis origi-
nally viewed as permutations of libidinal currents, self- or object-
cathected, is now viewed as being between opposing energies: “This
aggressive instinct is the derivative and main representative of the
death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which
shares world-dominion with it” (Freud, 1930, p. 122). Libido now
denotes manifestations of Eros in contrast to destructive tendencies
emanating from the death instinct. Freud arrived at this high-
ly abstract dual-instinct theory through laborious psychosocio-
philosophical discussions (Freud, 1920, 1930), masterfully inte-
grating his requirement for biological underpinnings broad enough
to articulate overarching psychological principles governing hu-
man existence.
Freud’s life and death instincts have been hotly debated in
our field, criticized as too biologistic, too abstract, and far too re-
moved from interpersonal manifestations in clinical experience.
Yet for those of us drawn to conceptual abstractions, these two
opposing drives, typically mixed and alloyed with aspects of each
other, are immensely powerful in understanding the insidious
and often intractable calcification of certain destructive and self-
destructive patterns. Further developments in Freud’s (1930)
thinking culminated in Civilization and Its Discontents, where focus
turned to the ego and the introduction of a structure functioning
as “conscience”: the superego, an internalization of the voice,
256 ANNA ARAGNO
rules, and behavioral expectations of authority figures and soci-

ety. This new id/ego/superego Structural model catalyzed a great
spurt in clinical refinement due to its direct bearing on therapeu-
tic goals and technique in resistance analysis. The impact on
metapsychology of Freud’s endopsychic Structural theory rever-
berated in psychoanalytic circles, taking up relational trends in
Great Britain and evolving into ego psychology in America.
The introduction of “internalization” in psychic structuring
precipitated a theoretical shift toward an “inner world” of intro-
jected relationships, which formed the basis for British and Amer-
ican object-relational schools, creating a move toward an inter-
personal psychoanalysis more interested in the person than the
organism. This turn began with Melanie Klein’s (1932) Psycho-
Analysis of Children, continuing in Great Britain with Fairbairn
(1952), Guntrip (1961), and others. Klein’s pioneering work with
very small children introduced the idea of much earlier and fierc-
er forms of primitive aggression, anxiety, and guilt, leading to
reparation and repression starting from the first years of life.
Klein’s view was of a primitive internal world populated, indeed
dominated, by more or less persecutory introjects created out of
the infant’s own frustration and aggression projected outward,
and subsequent guilt and anxiety. She predated oedipal sexual
and aggressive fantasies and rudiments of superego formation to
much earlier oral and anal phases, retaining Freud’s death in-
stinct as an existential reality, at work from birth.
While Klein’s early works adhered to classical concepts, in-
cluding the phases of psychosexual development and Freud’s
Structural model, her theoretical contribution was in bringing
preoedipal aggression, primitive persecutory and murderous fan-
tasies, and infantile anxiety to the fore, stressing the purely psy-
chodynamic concepts of introjection/projection. From this emerged
that we exist in two planes of experience, two coexisting worlds:
an inner, tied to past introjects and imagoes, and an outer, tied to
current reality. It is impossible to keep these two worlds complete-
ly separate; they constantly interact and overlap, distorting reality
in neurosis, even more so in psychosis, where the inner domi-
nates. Freud’s primary distinction between Cs and Ucs is here su-
perseded by “inner and outer worlds.” Klein’s emphasis on preoe-
dipal aggression, guilt, anxiety, and restitution led to her conception

of the “paranoid” and “depressive” positions, and her work with
children heralded awareness of an unmodulated underlay of
primitive affects as precursors in psychic structuring, underscor-
ing Freud’s emphasis on innate temperament and constitutional
factors in both superego and character formation.
Along with Spitz (1965) and Bowlby’s (1980) research on the
psychobiology of early attachment, these studies exposed a preoe-
dipal underlay of early developmental etiology for potentially se-
vere personality disorders. In “Criminal Tendencies in Normal
Children” (1927) and ”On Criminality” (1934), Klein returned to
her principal theme of innate aggression and guilt leading to per-
secutory anxiety and paranoid projection, reorienting the goal of
therapy to diminish the punitive power of an overly strict super-
ego. She echoed an important point made by Freud (1916) in
“Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” that guilt antecedes delinquent
acts, which are done in order to rationalize a preexisting primary
sense of culpability. The problem in delinquency is not the ab-
sence of a superego but its primitive, punitive nature. One might
speculate that the concept of “original sin” stems from just such a
primordial predisposition toward guilt feelings, which in turn
confirms how heavily we are programmed for attachment and so-
cial adaptation.
Klein’s viewing of the infant’s phenomenalistic inner world
of primitive affects and part-object imagoes, and Anna Freud’s
(1936) cataloging of defenses had a strong influence on clinical
theories that followed. I mention Fairbairn (1952) here less for
his radical departure from Freud than for his considerable in-
sights into schizoid processes and pathology. The concept of a
deep, underlying “schizoid position” constitutes his specific con-
tribution to the British relational theory of mental structure. Fair-
bairn expanded and elaborated Klein’s core contributions, devel-
oping a fully psychodynamic object-relations theory of personality
that gives predominance to the need for good object-relations
over instinctual gratification, that is, the premise that libido is
object-seeking not pleasure-seeking.1
Fairbairn’s examination of schizoid phenomena provided
the basis for an inversion of Freud’s developmental program:
258 ANNA ARAGNO
Rather than atomistic component-instincts slowly integrating in

maturation, Fairbairn’s ego starts whole but splits up in reaction
to misattuned or deficient mothering. The resulting rageful frus-
tration disrupts the capacity to risk libidinal investment, so the
schizoid position is caught between longing for love and an acute
inhibition of the capacity to love. Yearning for, yet unable to form,
libidinal ties, the schizoid’s dilemma stems from the fear of ex-
ploiting and destroying a good object, precipitating a compulsive
flight inward, and detachment from any object. This defeating
drama rages around conflicts aroused by object-hunger, depen-
dence, fear, rage, and hopelessness (Guntrip, 1961). The impor-
tant point for our topic is that all schizoid mechanisms employ
primitive dissociative or projective defenses in order to keep dread-
ed parts of the self split off. How this generates a “using” of the
object, and hence, the abuse of its psychic integrity, will become
clearer in my later examination of the breakdown of empathy and
creation of an enemy.
TWO INTEGRATIONISTS: ERICH FROMM AND OTTO KERNBERG

Dr. Headshrinker (to Officer Krupke): . . . . this boy don’t need
a doctor, just a good honest job! Society’s played him a terrible
trick . . . unt . . . he’s sociologically sick!
The Jets: . . . .we are sick, we are sick, we are sick, sick, sick . . . we
are sociologically sick!! —Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story lyrics
In all that follows I adopt the standpoint, . . . that the inclination to
aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in
man, and constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
In their flight from “instincts,” the British Relationists shunned

the whole biologistic foundation of Freud’s metapsychology.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a prominent mem-
ber of the Interpersonalist school was reconceptualizing and re-
orienting Freud’s death instinct in a mega-study of destructive-
ness. Erich Fromm’s (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
is one of the great interdisciplinary tomes of that era, the heyday
of psychoanalysis, in the crossover style for general readership of
Reik and Arieti. In over five hundred dense pages, Fromm pre-
sents a multidisciplinary, in-depth analysis of the subject from ev-

ery possible angle and point of view, covering historical/theoreti-
cal, phylogenetic, anthropological, ethological, neuroscientific,
and psychodynamic perspectives within an overall sociobiological
systems approach.
Having dispensed with Freud’s biologistic “instincts,” Fromm
reformulates the motivating force of existential needs as “human
passions,” which, whether driven by love or hate, fuel the fires of
life-furthering or life-thwarting behaviors. Humans are driven by
basic existential needs that may be satisfied in different ways and
are character-rooted, character here defined as a relatively perma-
nent system of strivings through which people relate to the natu-
ral world. This is one of Fromm’s great psychoanalytic contribu-
tions in revising and advancing Freud’s “dual-instinct” theory: He
does not address actions themselves as good or evil, but brings
unconscious motives and character-driven needs, issuing from
the core of the personality, to the fore. Making a distinction be-
tween rational and irrational passions, he proposes as rational any
thought, feeling, or act that promotes the full realization and
growth of the whole of which it is a part, and as irrational that
which weakens, thwarts, or destroys, the whole (Fromm, 1973, p.
263). This includes within the destructive spectrum ambiguous
traits like procrastination, arrogance, defiance, or cunning, and
states like rumination, indecisiveness, or deceit, rendering their
ultimately damaging outcomes in human life palpable.
If destructiveness is a vice, it is because it leads to an existen-
tial failure—the inability to become all that one could according
to the possibilities of one’s existence. Thanks to these humanis-
tic/existential philosophical foundations, Fromm is able to gar-
ner the sweep and grandeur of Freud’s high abstractions, Eros
and Thanatos, while bringing up for scrutiny the data of their
manifestations through comprehensive coverage of contempo-
rary research, always particularly mindful of the social aspects. His
knowledge and conceptual range are vast, as is his vision, and he
ends this masterwork with a case study of Hitler, the embodiment
of evil in the past century.
From the beginning Fromm (1973) defines terms and sys-
tematizes distinctions, specifying his orientation: Beginning in
260 ANNA ARAGNO
phylogeny, he differentiates survival instincts for food, shelter,

and reproduction from specifically human needs for freedom,
self-realization, effectance, solidarity, and the “sacred,” a sphere
that motivates beyond physical survival, for which some are pre-
pared to die. He anchors all major human motivations in rational
and irrational passions—the striving for love, tenderness, cooper-
ation, growth, and peace, as well as narcissism, greed, envy, and
ambition, needs to control or submit, or steal and destroy—and
he draws a clear distinction between adaptive benign or defensive
aggression, common to all species, versus maladaptive, malignant
aggression or destructiveness, its uniquely human form: “Biologi-
cally benign aggression is a response to threats to vital interests.
. . . it is not spontaneous . . . but reactive and defensive; its aim is
the removal of a threat” (p. 187). Biologically nonadaptive, aggres-
sion, that is, sadism, cruelty, and destructiveness, is socially disrup-
tive; though not instinctual, “malignant aggression is a human
potential rooted in the very conditions of human existence” (p.
187). For Fromm, whether driven by love or hatred (p. 266), am-
bition or revenge, exertion of the will or lack of it, deception or
self-deception, the powerful energy of human passions is the
same. Undoubtedly he leans toward a sociological viewpoint on
human aggression, backing this with anthropological and neuro-
physiological explanations: “The fact that destructiveness is not
an isolated factor, but part of a syndrome, speaks against the in-
stinctivist theory” (p. 177). While rejecting Freud’s biologistic pes-
simism, he does not ignore the stream of historical evidence for
wars, sackings, murder, and the malignancy of absolute power:
“The fact that destructiveness and cruelty are not part of human
nature does not imply that they are not widespread and intense” (p.
177). Having ascribed to benign aggression a phylogenetic origin in
the fight/flight response, sequestering it from any malignant con-
notations, he is left to question “what manner and to what degree
the specific conditions of human existence are responsible for the
quality and intensity of man’s lust for killing and torturing” (p. 186).
From the important premise that an apparently similar “pas-
sion” may have very different motivating roots for its “aggressive”
impetus, Fromm identifies distinct sources and kinds: In the “be-
nign aggression” category he lists pseudo-aggressive forms like ac-
cidental, playful, and self-assertive forms; in the “defensive” cate-

gory he differentiates animal behaviors in various situations from
specifically human motives such as aggression in relation to free-
dom, narcissism, ideology, and resistance as well as conformist ag-
gression, ending with a discussion on wars and how to prevent
them. His major discussion of destructive and sadistic character-
rooted passions is organized around the conditions that foster
forms of malignant aggression. For these he looks to evolution,
particularly evolution of the human brain. This serves another
major thesis: that maximum development of the neocortex di-
minished instinctive determination in our species to such a de-
gree as to usurp it completely, leading to the typical struggles of
humankind—conflicts between body and mind, as neither can be
isolated or eliminated, and, I would emphasize, those between at-
tachment and separateness, since we crave autonomy within uni-
ty! These existential dilemmas lead universally to phases of rela-
tional conflict where they play out interpersonally in, or between,
groups, within families, or between couples. Today Fromm’s “pas-
sions” are called emotions, and his expressly existential needs for
freedom and belonging bear directly on separation–individuation
issues that are given too little weight in psychoanalysis today.
Among many important angles from which Fromm examines
human destructiveness, perhaps one of the most important is that
in psychoanalysis we are less interested in behavior per se than in
the motives and dynamics of character that have lead to it; no sin-
gle behavior is labeled evil, in and of itself, but must be examined
and understood in a context and situation, in consideration of
the full compass of underlying impetus and motives from which it
issues. We do not study or judge behaviors separately from the
contextual genetic history and dynamics of the person in whom
these tendencies originate; this means that we look at “the origins
and intensity of aggressive impulses and not at aggressive behav-
ior independent of its motives” (Fromm, 1973, p. 6).
Freud’s death instinct had entropic connotations: Fromm
brilliantly reconceptualizes and humanizes these into the ne-
crophilous character. This enables a conceptual expansion of the
Freudian range beyond repetition and aggression to include
boredom, laziness, detachment, indifference, and the absence of
262 ANNA ARAGNO
devotion, commitment, effort, or concentration, as necrophilous

traits. These are embedded in interpersonal agendas that are
deadened and deadening, concerned with entropic, not life-
generating, activities or results. In a similar way, by atomizing
many forms of nondestructive aggression, Fromm makes an over-
all drive toward life and growth-promoting behaviors the new
Eros, with its opposite—dominating, distancing, damaging,
and destructive behaviors—the new Destruido. Deinstinctivizing
these abstractions, Fromm refinds them in life-enhancing or life-
destroying personality traits of everyday and clinical occurrence.
By the end of the book, Fromm has completely transposed a
“death instinct” into the necrophilous character, putting flesh
onto a theoretical conception, breathing experiential life into a
high abstraction. It remained for a next generation integrationist
and great clinical theorist to bring the concept and manifesta-
tions of evil character traits even further along, right into the con-
sultation room, and into the heart of the clinical transference–
countertransference.
I am referring to Otto Kernberg’s (1984) landmark Severe Per-
sonality Disorders, a work that advanced both the theoretical under-
standing and clinical approach to borderline and narcissistic pa-
thologies. Despite controversies between Kernberg’s and Kohut’s
(1977) views on the etiological roots and treatment of the preoe-
dipal/developmental pathologies, Kernberg’s major theoretical
integration and crystal-clear exposition of the structural organiza-
tion underlying these cases stands apart for its clinical value. His
principal goal is to refine the diagnosis, structural understanding,
prognosis, and treatment of severe borderline and narcissistic pa-
thologies. He does this by combining aspects of Kleinian object-
relations theories, the work of Edith Jacobson (1964), Herbert
Rosenfeld (1964, 1971), and the great ego psychologists, integrat-
ing these contributions into a Freudian structural framework that
subsumes preoedipal and oedipal organizations.
A major contribution of his structural analysis is the distinc-
tion between a descriptive diagnosis and the in-depth understand-
ing of structural organization, referring to a relatively stable con-
figuration of mutually interacting processes, that is, dynamic
relationships between the quality of internalized object relations;
characteristic predominant defenses, especially projection and

projective identification; developmental status of proto-structures
like superego precursors; nonspecific ego weaknesses; and degree
of identity and superego integration. Kernberg considers these
important diagnostic and prognostic factors. A structural analysis
uncovers interrelationships between mutually interacting agen-
cies like id, ego, and superego, and dynamically integrated sub-
structures influencing functional levels of processes involving
cognition and ego defenses. It also refers to relationships between
derivatives of internalized object relations (considered proto-
structures of the ego) as well as the content of unconscious con-
flict, particularly the Oedipus complex. This constellation is
viewed as subsuming both the developmental history of early ex-
periences as well as phase-appropriate drives and motivations,
from which derives his concept of the borderline patient’s con-
densation of preoedipal and oedipal organizations. In Kernberg’s
conception, mental structures subsume internalized object rela-
tions, the quality of which, along with constitutional and social
factors, determine the basic organization at which the personality
is functioning. “Regardless of the genetic, constitutional, bio-
chemical, familial, psychodynamic, or psychosocial factors con-
tributing to the etiology,” Kernberg (1984) asserts, “the effects
are reflected in psychic structure which becomes the underlying
matrix from which behavioral manifestations of the personality
develop” (p. 5). This distinction between underlying structural
organization and descriptive diagnosis represents a considerable
advance in the clinical understanding of primitive disorders.
Within this model, Kernberg (1984) identifies three broad
structural organizations: neurotic, borderline, or psychotic classi-
fications based on the individual’s overriding characteristics with
regard to degree of identity integration or diffusion, habitual de-
fenses, and capacity for reality testing. Neurotic organization im-
plies high-level defenses like repression, isolation, and reaction
formation; relatively stable identity and superego functioning;
and intact reality testing. In contrast, borderline and psychotic
structures are characterized by a spectrum of primitive defense
mechanisms impairing judgment, impulse control, and reality
testing, implying identity diffusion, the use of projective, dissocia-
264 ANNA ARAGNO
tive, or merger/identification mechanisms to protect a weak ego

from conflict. These same defenses, especially projection and
splitting, operate in psychotic organization to prevent further
boundary disintegration, where they may complement delusional
systems with complete loss of reality testing.
The severe personality disorders we are addressing—border-
line, pathological and malignant narcissism, and a spectrum of
antisocial, paranoid,psychotic, psychopathic, and schizoid pathol-
ogies—operate with different primitive defense mechanisms
manifesting through different levels of structural organization.
Defenses are categorized along a continuum from lower-level dis-
sociative splitting, projection and projective-identification, denial,
omnipotence, idealization, and devaluation, to higher, neurotic-
level defenses like repression, reaction formation, rationalization,
intellectualization, and undoing. Higher-level defenses protect
from conflict and anxiety, keeping ideational and affective repre-
sentations out of consciousness, whereas lower-level defenses like
splitting along with projective and related mechanisms protect
the conscious ego from conflict by means of wholesale dissocia-
tion, keeping apart contradictory experiences of self and signifi-
cant others. When such mechanisms predominate, reality testing
is severely compromised and contradictory ego states are vigor-
ously segregated from each other, further weakening the ego. Ex-
treme splitting—the division of “all-good” and “all-bad” with com-
plete reversals of feelings toward a particular person—manifests
in repetitive oscillations between contradictory perceptions, ideas,
affects, and self-representations, accompanied by projection of
the hated and/or denied drive infiltrations (Kernberg, 1984, p.
269). Kernberg addresses these pathologies through the structur-
al diagnostic approach and a keen sensitivity to transference and
countertransference manifestation in the here and now of clinical
encounters.
In addition to types and levels of defenses in severe personal-
ity disorders, for our topic the quality and developmental status of
the superego is all important. Severity of superego pathology is
reflected most glaringly in degrees of syntonic antisocial behav-
ior. More subtly, it is also evident in habitual dishonesty and lack
of concern or responsibility toward others. Experiencing an ap-
propriate sense of guilt and moral responsibility implies an ade-

quately functional superego; pervasive dishonesty, lack of empa-
thy or consideration, a history of callous exploitative relationships,
or many ruptured relationships are indicative of an absence or
deterioration of superego functions. After Jacobson (1964), Kern-
berg lists three stages of superego development in a continuum
from deeply primitive, sadistic, and punitive-imago precursors, to
a second tier fusing idealized self- and object-representations
which, hopefully, will be toned down, leading to a third level
when a more mature, depersonified, abstract agency—a moral
compass, as it were—monitors behavior and self-esteem through
more cognitively mediated affect regulation.
It is certainly in the vicissitudes of superego pathology that
we are likely to find some insights into the evil mind, and Kern-
berg describes a complex relationship between superego and
quality of object relations. The most extreme forms of superego
pathology are found in the psychopathic antisocial personality
disorder proper, where an ability to lie, deceive, manipulate, and
betray destroys the possibility of genuine emotional connections,
in either direction. Kernberg (1984) finds a continuum from the
passive, exploitative, parasitic psychopath to the frankly sadistic
criminal, whose social conditions may facilitate the gratification
of aggressive/cruel impulses (p. 278). Examining the narcissistic
spectrum, he finds that such personalities invariably reveal antiso-
cial features; even when superficial interactions and the capacity
for some investment in others is somewhat intact, chronic antiso-
cial tendencies in falsifications, stealing, and deceitful behaviors
may persist. In such categories ego-syntonic grandiosity combines
with cruelty and sadism and acute paranoid traits. Borderline con-
ditions, on the other hand, despite the predominance of primi-
tive aggression, condensation of genital and pregenital strivings,
and identity diffusion, may present remarkably intact, if somewhat
primitive, superego functioning.
Kernberg considers supportive rather than analytic psycho-
therapy more appropriate for narcissistic personalities, providing
vivid examples of characteristic alternating of idealization followed
by spoiling and devaluation. When a pathological grandiose self is
infiltrated with aggression, patients may consciously voice ideas of
266 ANNA ARAGNO
cruelty, violence, destruction, or a perverse pleasure in causing

others’ pain. Where syntonic rage reactions, severe antisocial fea-
tures, and transitory paranoid minipsychotic episodes predomi-
nate, Kernberg employs painstaking active examination and clari-
fication of potential triggers in the here and now. Sessions with
narcissistic patients with paranoid features are dominated by boast-
ing grandiosity regarding other peoples’ ineffectiveness and stu-
pidity. One listens in silence or receives disparaging comments
about pointless interventions that interrupt the patient’s train of
thought, placing the therapist among all the other useless expen-
sive idiots by which the patient is surrounded. The aggressive
quality of these disparaging attacks and overbearing omnipotence
severely test one’s tolerance for taking abuse. Yet difficult as ag-
gressive devaluation is to take, accusatory paranoid projections, in
my experience, are even worse because they provoke a need to
defend oneself and retaliate. The threat of intolerable guilt push-
es paranoid people to increasingly primitive distortions and pro-
jective mechanisms to justify their own aggressive malice. Projec-
tive identification is a particularly powerful interpersonal “weapon,”
as Kernberg (1984, p. 269) refers to it, as it “unloads” aggression
onto the other, a move that may provoke counteraggressive de-
fensiveness, thereby facilitating a triumphant justification to ratio-
nalize further aggressive attacks. Of all distorting defensive mech-
anisms, paranoid projection is the most insidious and entrenched
and the most difficult to endure imperviously.
For our purposes it is important to understand that primitive
defenses not only distance and sever social relationships by offen-
sive, betraying, cruel, and sadistic behaviors, they contaminate
them with unmodulated aggression due to unconscious merger
with an omnipotent sadistic internal-object imago. A frequent de-
fense in severe pathology, splitting prevents integration of “good
and bad” self-object representations, weakening the ego and real-
ity testing and leaving savagely condemning all-“bad” self repre-
sentations to be projected onto whoever is around. The interper-
sonal impact of these often fierce accusations, rageful explosions,
dismissive denials, or chilling devaluations are felt with alarming
effects in the immediacy of the clinical setting, effects to which
Kernberg (1984) gives particular attention: In patients with severe
disturbances of object-relations, no basic trust, intense uncon-

scious envy or paranoid dispositions, the very benevolent interest
and calm presence of the analyst may evoke resentment, suspi-
cion, and a destructive derogation of the whole situation. In con-
clusion, Kernberg asserts that the “study of narcissism cannot be
divorced from the study of the vicissitudes of both libido and ag-
gression and of internalized object relations” (p. 189).
It is important to note that for Kernberg the quality of inter-
nal object-relations (and ability to maintain a human connection)
go hand in hand with the quality and organization of other mutu-
ally impacting dynamic systems, especially the functional status of
the superego, a concept that is particularly valuable in under-
standing the delinquent, sadistic, or outright antisocial criminal
mind. The connection and interrelationship between maintain-
ing a nonexploitative human connection and cultivating adequate
superego functions is central in the dividing line between those
who are capable and those incapable of doing atrocious deeds.
Fromm and Kernberg, two influential psychoanalysts barely a
decade apart, represent, respectively, the culmination of the cul-
tural/historical, sociobiological perspective, and the refinement
of clinical diagnostics and treatment approach for those severe
personality disorders associated with necrophilous characters and
their capacity for nefarious behaviors. Both are major theoretical
integrationists, synthesizing what came before, including interdis-
ciplinary research and object relationist advances, adding con-
temporary knowledge, albeit from different camps and perspec-
tives. While Fromm transposed the concept of an innate death
instinct into socially, historically, and developmentally rooted ori-
gins for malignant destructiveness, locating its extreme forms in
character traits, Kernberg fine-tuned the integration of Kleinian
primitive affects and preoedipal defense mechanisms with inter-
nalized object relations and contemporary understanding of ego
and superego precursors, in an overall structural approach.
Yet the question still remains: Are extreme destructiveness
and cruelty primarily provoked by threat of attack (physical or
psychical) and/or social conditions, as Thomas Szasz, and Fromm,
would have it? Or are they innate, temperamental, and dynami-
cally constitutional?
268 ANNA ARAGNO
Despite their divergent conceptual orientations and stylistic

goals, Fromm and Kernberg both mark a significant advance in
the psychoanalytic understanding of how some humans can behave
in inhuman ways. As a general developmental psychology, theo-
retically and clinically, psychoanalysis demands that all of Freud’s
and Heinz Hartmann’s metapsychological dimensions be ac-
counted for in the in-depth study of any given human phenome-
non, including the sociohistorical and adaptive. With that in mind
we cannot really forgo either of their perspectives or go forward
without subsuming their important contributions. Welding these
together, with the help of two clinical portraits, I now offer a few
integrative ideas of my own.
THE ROOTS OF EVIL: THE BREAKDOWN OF EMPATHY

Respect for rules and norms can develop only when the opinions
and reactions of others matter. —Frans de Waal, Good Natured
. . . the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them.
—Jim Harrison, The River Swimmers, Novellas
All species are phylogenetically hardwired for behaviors that will

most benefit survival and reproduction in their natural environ-
ment. While cats are notoriously solitary predators, totally unin-
terested in collaboration, we are definitely pack animals. Survival
and adaptation for humans entails affiliation, cooperation, and
adherence to closest of kin from family, to group, to community,
to country and nation. Most people are eager to please, honor
rules, stay out of trouble, and maintain harmonious relationships.
But others diverge at crucial crisis points, becoming oppositional,
antagonistic, antisocial, even criminal. How does someone, equipped
at birth with the same basic emotional repertoire as you or I, be-
come capable of hatred, malice, cruel and sadistic behaviors, hei-
nous deeds? What has gone wrong at the heart of the intricate
fabric of his or her social commitment to provoke a total disen-
gagement from human relations, and what are the markers in the
potential for evil in the collapse of the human connection, for
that is what we are looking at—the breakdown of interpersonal
sentiments so complete as to leave a ravaged inner life and a com-
pulsion to compensate by acting out destructive impulses. These

are the questions orienting this section.
Of course there are many possible variables and constitution-
al factors impacting on the interrelationship between tempera-
ment and environment: Early internalizations and identifications,
developmental derailments, peer and group pressure, clashes be-
tween character and cultural expectations, struggles with individ-
uation, or any number of life stressors may conspire to push a
person to the tipping point. Roots may lie in gross misattunement
at the earliest stages of mother–infant symbiosis, resulting in se-
vere disruption at any one of the subphases of the first separa-
tion–individuation process, when mnemonic traces for basic trust
and libidinal investment are being laid down. The correlation be-
tween borderline pathology and failures in negotiation of the rap-
prochement phase in this most important first psychological birth
were pointed out by Mahler (1968; Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975).
Her systematization of this crucial developmental sequence, espe-
cially in its second, fundamentally structuralizing reappearance in
adolescence is underutilized today. (The vicissitudes of the two sep-
aration–individuation phases, in infancy and in adolescence, are
invaluable tools clinically in understanding much otherwise incom-
prehensible age-inappropriate, regressive acting-out behavior.)
Excessively restrictive societies or those fostering inequality,
lack of freedom, or opportunity will incite rebellion, just as early
exposure to violence may result in habitual cruelty. More inti-
mately, at home, antisocial defiance may be traced to excessive
leniency in upbringing, leading to narcissistic traits that are struc-
turally prone to underdeveloped superego functioning and im-
paired moral development. Alternatively, excessively strict up-
bringing may produce a harsh, punitive, malformed superego
fueled by aggressive derivatives manifesting in violent defiance,
wholesale identifications, or numbing mindless obedience. In ei-
ther case a persecutory, punitive superego will demand its “pound
of flesh,” so to speak, leading to masochistic needs for punish-
ment. Yet another cause may have phylogenetic origins in that
precisely because we are such tribal creatures, tied by affiliation
and loyalty to adhere to groups, this automatically creates outsid-
ers—those who are not of us—the “Others.”
270 ANNA ARAGNO
In his wonderful book The Origin of Virtue, Ridley (1996)

writes, “No less an authority than Margaret Mead asserted that the
injunction against murdering human beings is universally inter-
preted to mean human beings of one’s own tribe. Members of
other tribes are subhuman” (p. 192). This assertion needs no
pondering. Likewise, notwithstanding the Christian injunction to
“Love thy neighbor as Thyself,” humorously ridiculed by Freud
(1930) in Civilization and Its Discontents, historical records of the
Crusades and Inquisition testify to the pronounced tendency for
Christians, like everyone else, to love only those neighbors who
share their beliefs! The “other” may be cast in any number of
roles, but once the “I–Thou” relationship breaks down into “Me
and Them” or “Us and Them,” a wall has been erected whereby
projective mechanisms, ostracism, scapegoating, or paranoid dis-
positions are set to predominate. Bullying, blaming, excluding,
accusing, and exiling all stem from the same impulse to eject and
project disavowed aggression or envy onto a scapegoated object.
Using the “other” for projections or as an “outcast” scapegoat sev-
ers the human connection, eliminating empathy while creating a
dehumanized container onto whom to discharge rejected impuls-
es or disavowed aspects of the self.
The opposite of aggression is not love—a highly complex,
mature emotion—but empathy. It will be useful here to include a
few words about the neural substrate of “empathy,” specifically
the implications of the recently discovery of “mirror neuron cir-
cuitry” in tracing the deep primary roots of human interaction
(Aragno, 2008a, 2008b, 2009). The uncovering of this hardwired
neural region by Gallese and Rizzolati underscores the phyloge-
netic origin and vital role this nonverbal form of intense emo-
tional attunement has played in the survival of our species. Space
allows for only a very brief mention of the essential themes of Gal-
lese’s (2001, 2003, 2007) contributions, emphasizing those involv-
ing the sociobiology of attachment, learning, emotional expres-
sion, and communication. The “mirror neuron circuits” are so
named because the networks involved in deliberate (willed) ac-
tion and experienced emotions/sensations are activated also
when merely witnessing or observing similar emotion/sensations
in others. From these seeds, Gallese (2003) posits “a whole range
of hardwired different “mirror matching mechanisms” (p. 171).

These centers bypass any representational or cognitive/linguistic
systems by directly “feeling-into” others’ states. Recognition of the
perceived state or emotion goes straight to the matching emotive
state in the viewer, suggesting that the experience is underpinned
by activity of a shared neural substrate providing instantaneous
“empathic” understanding. This unmediated “reading” takes place
by way of “embodied simulation” (known to us from Piaget as “sen-
sorimotor” assimilation). Rapid unmediated grasp of emotional
signals woven through concomitant interactive behaviors, and ad-
equate responses to them, are crucial forerunners to social bond-
ing, verbal communication, and a whole concatenation of signify-
ing and symbolizing capacities that have essential adaptive value.
Consider, then, how certain primitive schizoid and narcissis-
tic defenses must contribute to the deterioration of this primary
unspoken emotional connection, gradually eroding the very neu-
ral threads out of which deep human bonds are formed and main-
tained. The perceptual/emotive component of the neuronal sub-
strate of empathy suggests that the roots of empathic attunement
are quite crucial in generating deep interpersonal connections
and also in maintaining solidarity with kin in group cohesion. For
this powerful relational glue to dissolve, there have to be over-
whelmingly negative emotions at play. Clearly, the spectrum of nar-
cissistic and schizoid defenses that corrode or shut down this vital
interpersonal connective tissue, replacing it with self-generated
hostile or paranoid feelings, has serious consequences not only in
relationship to others and the inner world, but in the capacity to
test reality.
A program, “Mind of the Rampage Killer” (O’Brien, 2013),
aired on public television following the Newtown school tragedy,
focused on correlative biological underpinnings of irrational be-
haviors. Details in the study suggest that in many such cases of os-
tracized or withdrawn youngsters, their antecedent isolation leads
to a ruminating internal relationship with the group built on
blind rage that festers, gradually evolving into a carefully planned
act of violent vindictiveness. Far from detached, however, the in-
tensity of the youngster’s vengeful fury fosters a regression blur-
ring the boundaries between self and other. The suicidal mass
272 ANNA ARAGNO
killing is carried out in a state of undifferentiated merger in which

killing and suicide are one and the same. I suspect that the un-
conscious phenomenology in dehumanizing and dehumanized
situations is of boundary loss and merger—perhaps an echo of
the primitive identificatory dialectical union between hunter/
hunted, master/slave, sadist/masochist.
What intrigues in a discussion of evil is the process of defac-
ing, essentially dehumanizing, the “other” by stripping him or her
of identity and eradicating any residual reminders of the individ-
ual as being part of our common humanity. Debasing of the “oth-
er” as fellow human is accomplished by severing any emotional
connection and undoing recognition of the person as part of our
species. This is achieved through a process of erasing the person’s
unique attributes and obliterating his or her individuality while
homogenizing and categorizing the individual instead—such as
shaving heads, stripping naked, numbering, garbing in uniform
nondescript clothes— outfitting them in the projected role of
“enemy,” or lesser being, that is, the degraded outsider. The “oth-
er” is defaced by unnaming their identity and demoting them to
the subhuman homogenized category of outsider.
In the exploration of how enemies are created we are drawn
through psychology back to biology, from Freudian drives through
Fromm’s passions to “emotions.” At bottom it is emotions and
emotional attitudes that move people’s actions. The presence of
affection, loyalty, concern, empathy and love are guarantors of
our commitment. Within family or intimate relationships it is the
presence of negative emotions—envy, greed, rancor, ambition,
hatred—that breaks the interpersonal pact. In the wider sphere,
there have to be strong tribal undercurrents, with all their primi-
tive roots and derivative defenses, to generate walls thick enough
to obliterate recognition of another human as one of us, a mem-
ber of our own species. But walls, whether mortar or psychologi-
cal, never attenuate antagonism; on the contrary, they engender
it. In the end it is the excluded, scapegoated, or ostracized, the
displaced or exploited, that eventually come back, in talionic ven-
geance, to repeat the cycles of attack and counterattack.
Emotions are hardwired neurophysiological global expres-
sions constituting our first means of communication, a survival kit
prior to the advent of language and our universal human heri-

tage. Emotional roots begin in eight basic expressions and core
affect-states, intimately tied to a constellation of attachment be-
haviors on which hinge the first separation–individuation process;
how they are responded to will impact significantly on how this
passage is negotiated. The reciprocal interaction early on between
temperamental disposition and environmental response, in turn
heavily influenced by parental style and sociocultural norms, will
play a defining role in shaping behavior and character. How early
feelings of safety or fear affect attachment and basic trust, how
polarized experiences of gratification and frustration are modu-
lated in compromise and defense, to what degree love and hate
remain polarized or achieve a degree of neutralization, and to
what extent sublimation will absorb some of these dynamics all
impact significantly on personality structure.
Pathologies associated with unmodulated primitive aggres-
sion and destructive acting out are typified by (1) gross disruption
of libidinal ties in the outer and inner world of object relations,
(2) delayed, regressed, or pathological superego functioning, (3)
a retreat from relationships into private grandiose omnipotence,
with corresponding loss of reality testing, correlated with (4) a
massive use of projective mechanisms (especially projective iden-
tification) to eject and project shameful, envious, vengeful, or
rageful impulses. The diagnostic spectrum includes antisocial and
psychopathic personalities (malignant narcissists, borderline per-
sonalities with antisocial features), and the full schizoid, schizo-
typal spectrum.
Major defenses associated with these disorders include primi-
tive, dissociative splitting. Denial, negation, and projection impact sig-
nificantly on reality testing and reinforce splitting, dissociation,
and isolation of affect. Projective identification has enormous, quasi-
mysterious interpersonal consequences, so powerfully does it
“take over” the recipient. It serves important functions in keeping
negative self-representations and anxiety at bay, leading, however,
to desperate attempts at controlling the feared object while per-
petuating self-justifications for continued antagonism and aggres-
sion. Extreme forms of idealization and devaluation, often follow-
ing one from the other, oscillate between identificatory grandiosity
274 ANNA ARAGNO
and profound shame and dejection. Lack of superego integration

and disturbances of identity, in borderline and psychotic patients
leads to disturbances in volition—a too-little-considered human
faculty. These defenses weaken ego functioning, impulse control,
frustration tolerance, and the ability to engage in appropriate
sublimatory channels.
This dynamic approach provides criteria with which to assess
a person’s total functioning, a method more reflective of the psy-
choanalytic frame of reference than a purely descriptive psychiat-
ric diagnosis. I have found this approach helpful technically in
getting a handle on the uneven functioning that especially emerg-
es in long-term treatment.
CASE EXAMPLES
The following two clinical portraits illustrate some of the traits and
dynamics discussed earlier, bringing to the hub of the human en-
counter those entrenched negative attitudes and elicited feelings
of severe personality disorders. Because primitive organization is
partially undifferentiated, for those patients in whom projection,
unmodulated ambivalence, envy and aggression, entitlement, and/
or fierce devaluations are habitual, activation of countertransfer-
ence reactions is most powerful and telling. Many of these types of
patients are unlikely to come in for treatment. When they do it is
a lesson in countertransference vigilance.
Madame C
I begin with the case of an extremely narcissistic woman in
her late forties, whom I will call Madame C, who came on recom-
mendation of another therapist she had consulted to help her
deal with her suicidal, anorexic, delinquent adolescent daughter,
recently expelled from a Connecticut boarding school. Madame
C had been advised to seek therapy in this regard. Her presenting
complaint was that the other therapist was of no use, as she di-
verted focus from the daughter to her. I suggested a trial period
during which she secretly continued to see the other therapist,
playing us off each other by complaining to each of the other’s
deficiencies. Although she eventually left after months of sporad-

ic sessions, she revealed a history of habitual litigiousness, chroni-
cally ambivalent relationships beginning with her single mother
and absent devalued father, and a trail of abruptly severed and
abandoned relationships, including her husband, father of the
daughter.
An only child, conceived out of wedlock, this woman had
managed to exploit her mother, obtaining whatever she wanted,
even with threats, and had succeeded in hiding chronic shame
and social anxiety by appearing worldly and supereducated, an
elegant façade she carried off while actually having never achieved
a high school level diploma and living more or less continuously
on alimony or handouts, in a secluded life. Her falsifications were
backed by a chain of rationalized lies. She preserved a grandiose
self-image with an aura of superiority through “ownership” and
maintained omnipotent control by surrounding herself with ser-
vants or subservient people from whom she extracted narcissistic
supplies and almost slavish servitude.
Despite her considerable intelligence, Madame C was barri-
caded inside her armored bubble, using avoidance, denial, and
projection so persistently and skillfully that she parried any at-
tempts to consider her own contribution to her daughter’s prob-
lems. Her daughter’s delinquent tendencies actually mirrored
her own entitlement, careless impulsivity, and often cruel disre-
gard for others. I grew to understand the daughter’s suicide at-
tempt as partly the result of projective identification, her contain-
ment of the rejected part of her mother’s massive malignant rage
and ruthless destructiveness, and partly a scream for help. A har-
rowing incident, recounted by Madame C with oblivious arro-
gance, stands out, suggesting psychopathic traits: She described
forbidding a hospice nurse from administering morphine to her
dying mother, because, she said, “She’d had too many needles al-
ready.” Her daughter’s anorexia could also be understood in its
compromise aspects as a desperate masochistic attempt at claim-
ing a separate superior identity, while gratifying her mother’s in-
satiable orality and rabid dependency, by becoming her cook and
feeding her while starving herself. When I attempted to explore
this arrangement, however, Madame C abruptly rationalized away
276 ANNA ARAGNO
the question, insisting that her daughter “liked to be thin, and

enjoyed cooking,” effectively barring any further exploration.
Repetitive and fixated in her complaints, Madame C had no
self-reflective or analytic capacities whatsoever and was unable to
develop any observing ego. Even the little headway we might
make one day was immediately distorted by the next meeting,
when my interventions were selectively remembered to be deval-
ued, spoiled, and vindictively thrown back at me, in paranoid pro-
jection. I began to expect her retaliatory hostility each time there
seemed to have been a little reflective opening in our dialogue
and recognized in her the malignant narcissist’s compulsive need
to betray, of which Kernberg speaks. When I thought that we were
engaging, I was deceived: Her apparent receptive silence belied a
perpetual secret antagonism that backlashed without fail in retali-
ation. Her self-esteem was so fragile, defenses against conflict and
anxiety so potent, and splitting mechanisms so extreme that it was
virtually impossible to establish a lasting alliance or test reality,
which shifted constantly in contradictory stories with unconvinc-
ing rationalizations.
Any progress or good in her life was always followed by a ne-
gation or a negative turn, a pattern that mirrored her inability to
feel lasting appreciation for anything. She defeated me, the pro-
cess, and every interaction in such a way as to deaden the air
around me and truncate any possibility of a clear thought or hon-
est benevolent exchange. If I delicately attempted a confronta-
tion she sat silent, as though receiving a death sentence, but then
secretly took to bed for several days as though wounded, so that I
immediately abandoned that approach. On the other hand, her
hostile paranoid stance also protected her: Her sadism was always
attributed to someone else, and failure, even blatant lack of
achievement, was never her own. She was impenetrable, unreach-
able, immovable, and, apparently, lacking in human emotions.
Her chilling turnarounds, distortions, and cutting denials never
failed to parry any exploration of her own participation in her
problems with her daughter. No one was spared her cutting criti-
cism: Even a boyfriend of many years with whom she traveled and
mercilessly exploited was devalued. Significantly, they never lived
together or married.
Madame C was, however, interested in the theater and poetry

and brought in a few nodal dreams: In the first, she is entering the
hallway of her boyfriend’s building to go up to his apartment but is blocked
at the foot of the stairs by a large rabid dog barking loudly, which prevents
her from going up. She is not particularly frightened of the dog, he was just
barking loudly.
In the second dream, a recurring one, she is stranded, perched
on top of a rock in the middle of the ocean, unable to get down or figure out
a way to extricate herself from this precarious position.
And in a third dream, she is even more starkly isolated: She is
in a room, looking at three distinctly separate groupings of people standing
around in different corners of the room in silence. They are dressed as if
from a past century or era, as her ancestors might have been.
In combination, these three dreams exhibit almost textbook
characteristics of the utterly barren inner life of schizoid traits
and severe narcissism. Her inability to make use of our interpreta-
tion of them underscores the intractable rigidified quality of the
defenses of this structure. In the first dream, the very disposition
of her person in relation to her wealthy boyfriend “upstairs” con-
veys her experienced “inferiority” and idealization and envy of
someone she is unable to reach due to deep-seated envious rage
that prevents her. Nevertheless, it appears that her “bark is louder
than her bite” in that she is not afraid of the rabid dog. In the
second dream we have her desolate sense of isolation and paraly-
sis, stranded, alone, in a perilous rocky place, surrounded by a
dangerous inanimate sea, stuck in an obsessional self-defeating
quandary between the fear of plunging in and doing something
and the fear of not being able to do anything at all. She is stuck on
that isolated perch, like a statue, unable to risk moving but where
at least she is firm, “above water,” her grandiosity unchallenged
and removed from all others. In the third, to which she offered
sparse associations, she is present but detached, disconnected, ob-
serving three separate silent groupings of ancestral relatives from
her confused past: Her biological father gave her his name but
married and had a family in another region of the country of
which she was not a part. On the maternal side she boasted a priv-
ileged lineage from an important but troubled family, especially
with respect to her mother’s frayed relationship with her grand-
278 ANNA ARAGNO
mother, whom she far preferred and with whose chilly snobbism
she heavily identified. I understood the dream to reflect her de-
tached association with her disconnected and disparate family
roots—relatives with whom she had no strong emotional ties or
real relationships, except for her grandmother, but who were for
her distant imagoes, on whom she pegged a construed identity,
people without voice or expressions, segregated and detached yet
present in her inner world, like mannequins of distinction as
adornments to bolster her lack of self-confidence or identity.
The treatment lasted about nine months because, as she re-
minded me, I had wasted time on her instead of helping her cor-
rect her daughter’s problems. She believed I was inexperienced
and probably not up to the task, rationalizing, thereby, her chronic
incapacity to rely on me or anyone. Her severe splitting and projec-
tive mechanisms masked a schizoid, isolated core, which did not
emerge until the dreams. As I plodded on, attempting anything
constructive with kid gloves, any advance provoked a backlash of icy
passive-aggression veiling massive hostile anxiety, which was imme-
diately defended against by more devaluations, denials, and projec-
tions, or an absence, to the point where I became so constrained
and inhibited in saying anything that I pretty much withdrew my
attempts to be of any use to her. I renounced my role, eventually
becoming an emptied sounding board. Kernberg describes the
crushing and paralyzing effects of devaluation: Were it not for this
awareness and the dreams that so clearly revealed her devastatingly
empty core, and definitely softened me toward her, I may not have
been able to maintain a benevolent neutral stance, so forcefully did
she engender retaliatory aggression by her projections.
Finally she declared that this too had proved pointless and
ineffectual. I did not disagree. Declining any formal ending, she
slinked out by simply not showing up again despite my recom-
mendation she not do this, as it repeated all her previous cut-off
relationships. But offering her alternate ways of looking at her
disappointment and dissatisfaction with me was summarily dis-
missed as pointless. She exited, betraying me as she had entered
betraying someone else. I could foresee that her disturbed daugh-
ter’s collusive exploitative and provocative dynamic with her, which
mirrored her own sadomasochistic dynamic with her mother,
could only but repeat itself down the road, with little chance of
breaking into this transgenerational chain of destructive antago-
nism and ambivalence. Such is the insidious impact of parental
denial and projection on offspring.
Mr. B
Mr. B, one of my first clinic patients, had been returning in-
termittently and came back at the height of a relational crisis.
Originally diagnosed as “schizotypal,” this young man from a
middle-class Long Island household left high school and home at
sixteen, never to return after several harrowing hospitalizations
for severe anorexia. His father died early, and initially he spoke
primarily about his hated family: three siblings, and especially a
mother he detested, with whom he had no contact. Until recently
she remained a rejecting, “emasculating,” toxic introject, catapult-
ing him away from any emotional engagement. Though intelli-
gent and artistically talented, he lived a marginal existence selling
balloons and then walking dogs, harboring grandiose ego-syntonic
ambitions to make mountains of money, while at the same time
adhering to the teachings of a spiritual guru from India, where he
frequently visited. He is a vegetarian, with many unusual food and
air sensitivities, physical states he always reports on. For a long
time he reported almost no dreams, and those he did had virtu-
ally no narrative structure, but only sparse, isolated, incongruous,
and usually inanimate images which he threw at me, hurriedly
and impatiently, as one might a bone to a dog (!), without any
real interest in understanding them. One recurrent dream he did
describe, remarkably like Madame C’s in paralytic feeling: He is
standing on a shore looking out at huge stormy ocean waves and
would like to go in but cannot move. If, or when, I am able to of-
fer an interpretation on which he might reflect momentarily, he
quickly deflects the impact by smiling and requesting that we
move to “tea time,” a metaphor for “nontherapeutic” conversa-
tion. He epitomizes Kernberg’s patients who have great difficulty
listening to or using analytic observations as stimulus for self-
knowledge, and who cannot experience deep sadness, remorse,
or any real guilt.
280 ANNA ARAGNO
But the predominant focus of his uninterruptable oratory

(sometimes I indicate with my hand a desire to say something)
swings between celestial astrological constellations and move-
ments of the stock market, interrelated patterns he derives from
complicated calculations partly supported by obscure “websites”
frequented by other numerical geniuses. In all fairness, he does
have an “idiot savant” flair for numbers, guessing birthdays and
keeping dates and complex calculations in mind for years. His
obsession with wealth, and daily efforts to perfect a foolproof
method to assure profitable stock trades, is fueled by unabashed
greed, a goal designed to raise his standard of living, but primarily
to give him an upper hand socially while boosting his self-
confidence and self-esteem. He has, apparently, in interim peri-
ods, made some money while trading from the floor of the stock
exchange but then went “below board,” as he put it, when a clear-
inghouse demanded payment of a debt. Yet he remains too cheap
to spend it and pays me a “ridiculous” fee, but won’t pay more.
Prone to slightly manic states and phases of subdued bleak
dejection and insecurity, he has, however, been consistently so an-
tisocial, litigious, inflammable, and aggressive, as to provoke fre-
quent scenes, accidents, expulsions, fights, and even arrests. On
one occasion he was riding his bike across Washington Square
Park when he accidentally brushed by an older woman. She must
have reprimanded him, because the ensuing discussion turned
into a heated argument about who was in whose way. Enraged, he
turned the bike around, went back a ways, and then purposefully
rode at full speed into her, knocking her down. Onlookers natu-
rally ran to her aid and held him until the police arrived on the
scene: His agitated comments to me were that nothing bad had
happened but that she chose to make a fuss and pick on him until
she deserved to get what she was complaining about, so he
knocked her down as hard as he could. More recently, during one
of his lengthy opening monologues on the skies and the market,
he was ranting about a useless idiot middleman broker who had
lost him some money that week when, as an afterthought, he
threw in an aside,“ Oh, did I tell you that my mother died on Sat-
urday?” Once this was mentioned, he abandoned the subject com-
pletely to fly back into his money conundrums.
Also consistent, but as strong positives, are his love of swim-

ming and making quirky art pieces, his attraction to “girls,” and,
inexplicably, a certain attachment, albeit always mocked, to me.
Despite not knowing what to do with his intractable and impene-
trable delusional system (he dismisses me as a market ignoramus)
and severely restricted in speaking at all, my aim initially became
to establish a truly safe space and form a thread of connection,
which, over many years, has produced some therapeutic results.
His greed, grandiosity, aggression, antisocial defiance and acid
devaluations were all ego-syntonic initially, but now, in his fifties,
he no longer spoils our work or devalues me. In fact, over the
years there has developed a level of mutual respect and a deepen-
ing of his positive affects. I have emboldened my interventions
and he has come to recognize that his aggressive grandiose front
is actually a defense against a far more pervasive deep-seated inse-
curity. I consistently built on his good qualities, and abstained
from any forced confrontations or interpretations, staying in met-
aphors, often his own, which he grasps and which are removed
enough not to seem threatening. He has come a long way; now
“above board,” he pays taxes, visits a divorced sister, and has been
able to form a whole authentically caring relationship with V, a
foreign woman whom he loves and has recently married—a mira-
cle, in my opinion!
Although I frankly did not know what to do at the beginning,
I now stay strictly within the parameters of an analytic stance and
approach. I believe that having cultivated constancy and safety in
the dyad enabled him to rekindle whatever natural interpersonal
potential there was, in a spiritual dimension as well, in relation to
his Indian guru and friends, the first safekeepers of his libidinal
reservoir. He still sexualizes everything, although now it is within
bounds, an awareness contained by humor, and there are signs of
an embryonic superego at the intimate, if not institutional, level.
Having capitalized on his qualities and artistic sensibilities has
helped make therapeutic headway so far, I believe, primarily due
to my having withstood and survived his massive aggression and de-
valuation for years without being destroyed or altering my stance,
while genuinely trying to understand him. I saw him as one of
those patients for whom neither awareness nor insight but the set-
282 ANNA ARAGNO
ting itself, its constancy and the analytic holding function, are
therapeutic, like a benevolent gaze or quiet nonthreatening pres-
ence.
Then in a recent session he surprised me: He came in one
of his black moods, hard, pale, and ferocious, and immediately
started saying that he does not see the point of coming in, he is
“unhappy at his place in the scheme of things,” wants a much
better lifestyle, and really can’t see that I am of any use; he feels
alone, frustrated by lack of progress (by which he means prof-
its), disconnected from India and his guru, from V, from his
art—as he put it, “none of it fits into the world,” adding bluntly,
“You’re of minimal help, V’s of minimal help, everything is
eclipsed by my frustration.” First I said it mattered that he was so
unhappy. Then I addressed his shutting down (turning frustra-
tion inward and withdrawing) and forgetting (his splitting) how
at other times he is appreciative of V and of many things, even
me, and that his closing himself off to receive anything good
from V, me, or anything “in the world” isolates him. I also of-
fered a tentative reconstruction regarding what it must be like
not to have experienced a comforting early object and how for-
tunate he is that he now has V. He was visibly moved and opened
up—out poured a flood of mini-dream images, one very poi-
gnant: A flock of multicolored little birds was flying around him
when suddenly a big black dog appeared and all but one, a little
blue-breasted bird, flew away, but the little bird came back to
rest gently on the dog’s nose! He smiled and mellowed as he re-
counted this “good” dream. After this he was able to explore
how he himself perpetuates a state of intense frustrated rage,
forgetting all that he does have in his life, especially in V, and
that by shutting it all out he generates a familiar black, lonely,
hopeless state. This session, I hoped, might mark a turning
point: He is becoming capable of self-reflection and using ana-
lytic work to understand the defeating effect of his repetitive
outbursts, biting cynicism, and withdrawals (cycles of rage–
shame–guilt). This was the first time I saw him hang on, stay
connected, and leave with a gentle, authentic smile. Yet the fol-
lowing week we spiraled back once again to repeat the old dis-
paraging theme of the uselessness of it all.
Existentially these two cases converge at the deep-seated level

of an empty core stemming from a paucity of internalized good
objects, lack of identity or any integrated sense of central agency,
and unmodulated primitive aggression, Madame C’s originating
in profound envy, Mr. B’s in the frustration of grandiose ambi-
tion. Both are consumed by avarice and omnipotent grandiosity.
However, unlike Madame C, who lived in denial and projection,
in an arid inner landscape, unable to feel appreciation or depend
on me in any way at all, Mr. B owned his problems and emotions
and, over time, was able to use me enough to achieve a nonex-
ploitative loving relationship that opened doors to self-reflection
and modulations of aggression.
Keeping in mind the underlying battery of primitive defenses
operating in the transference enabled me to maintain a baseline
benevolent neutrality in the face of harrowing devaluations and
provocations which, in the long run, helped tap benevolent as-
pects in those patients who stayed in treatment. In forming even a
tenuous alliance, I have found it essential to keep those good, or
potentially good, aspects of the personality in the forefront, espe-
cially when formulating confrontations or risky interpretations.
Intent and stance, here, are as important as utterance. From these
seeds it seems possible, in some cases, to regenerate a modicum
of human trust and from there a tiny pathway in, and forward.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The essence of evil remains embodied in the unmodulated emo-

tions underlying the seven deadly sins: envy, greed, wrath, lust,
gluttony, pride, and sloth, to which one might add vengeance, ri-
valry, spite, laziness, and the urge for power and to overpower. All
these grow out of the decay of unproductive lives, disconnection,
emptiness, and loss of meaning. These negative affects stream in
and rise, full force, swelling from energies that ought to be ap-
plied to productive, socially embedded, and rewarded efforts. In-
adequate sublimatory channels and the extreme insular, brittle
egocentrism of malignant narcissism preclude empathy and often
stymie or inhibit personal effort while misdirecting aggressive en-
ergies through malicious motives.
284 ANNA ARAGNO
From a psychoanalytic perspective, evil deeds and behaviors

are viewed as manifestations of pathological personality structure
and the nature and level of defenses that maintain that dynamic
organization, fueling its motives. No psychoanalytic discussion of
aberrant and abhorrent actions—perhaps one and the same—is
complete without closing on the issue of superego pathology. I
believe it safe to say that all malignant narcissistic personalities
and those with strong narcissistic traits present some antisocial
characteristics, and vice versa; antisocial tendencies result from
narcissistic rage, envy, entitlement, and primitive egocentric atti-
tudes. Without adequate decentration, higher levels of moral de-
velopment cannot develop. It is fortunate, writes Kernberg (1984),
that
only in a small subgroup of narcissistic pathology, where infiltra-
tion of an aggressive pathological grandiose self gives rise to . . .
“malignant narcissism”—ego-syntonic grandiosity combined with
cruelty or sadism, and severe paranoid traits—that the destruction
of the inner and outer world of object-relations goes hand in hand
with irreparable breakdown of super-ego functions. (p. 276)
Having explored the roots of evil, here are some of its mani-
fest forms:
1. Sibling rivalry: a malignant envy so universal as to be considered
commonplace. Like vengeance, it is a pernicious, corrosive,
emotional disposition that may, and often does, reach peaks of
treachery and immorality around inheritance. Excessive ambi-
tion may also elicit pathological jealousy, but sibling envy con-
stellates specifically around an interpersonal triangle: the wish
to eliminate and replace a hated and resented rival sibling,
who is perceived as being in the way of having the coveted par-
ents’ exclusive love.
2. The Talionic response: Until the New Testament Christian doc-
trine of forgiveness, an “eye for an eye” was the Old Testa-
ment’s recommended retribution for an offense. The problem
is it produces a chain of unending vengeance and destruction.
3. Cult leadership: individuals so overpowering and convincing in
their grandiose delusions as to be able to lead their flock to
wholesale massacre, as in the Jonestown “Kool-Aid” tragedy.
4. Racism, enslavement, and prejudice: In their dehumanizing de-

basement of the “other,” these attitudes are surely the most
flagrant examples of justification for the use and abuse of oth-
ers, leading to acts of atrocity, to which ought to be added the
youthful versions in the next list item.
5. Bullying and Ostracism: the cruel picking on someone, or ex-
cluding him or her, from a peer group, the tragic consequenc-
es of which have come to public awareness through recent sui-
cides. From another angle, these actions embody the destructive
power of the following item.
6. The Evil Eye has been feared for centuries, a testament to our
social sensitivity to being looked upon with benevolent “gaze.”
Close on its heels comes the uniquely human sadistic passion
for the following item.
7. Observing the suffering of others: Consider that ancient Roman
spectacles consisted of watching people mauled by lions, com-
bat unto death, and public crucifixion. All over Europe, into
the seventeenth century, along with common gallows and oth-
er marketplace punishments, public hangings, burnings, and
especially beheadings of nobility provided vivid attraction for
bemused crowds. In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, writ-
ing about lynchings in the South, Susan Sontag (2003) calls
attention to the fact that not only were these savage killings
public, but someone actually recorded them in pictures taken
as souvenirs, many revealing honest-to-goodness grinning spec-
tators. Thousands more spectators were drawn to a New York
gallery showing of these pictures in 2000. Sontag writes, “The
lynching pictures tell us about human wickedness. About inhu-
manity. They force us to think about the extent of evil un-
leashed specifically by racism. Intrinsic to the perpetration of
this evil is the shamelessness of photographing them” (p. 91).
And finally:
8. Planned and calculated murder (of any kind) needs no qualifica-
tion; it speaks for itself. A word might be said here about the
“banality of evil,” the famous phrase coined by Hannah Arendt
(1951) to describe Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem.
Here sat a neatly dressed, impervious, expressionless little bu-
reaucrat, unaware and completely disconnected emotionally
286 ANNA ARAGNO
from the atrocities that his precise and diligently executed “or-
ders” led to. He may have been banal, but there’s devil in such
icy indifference. Blind, mindless obedience is a superego stripped
of any personal judgment or agency, oblivious of the human
consequence and therefore devoid of moral compass or value.
This is not true of serial killers, for instance, whose mega-
megalomania, grandiosity, crafty deceitfulness, and frozen
emotionless lack of remorse make them true psychopaths.
In conclusion: Traits that result from structural pathology, as
we have seen, are thread throughout character; we cannot, in psy-
choanalysis, really separate deed from the whole personality. Are
we then to say that these are the acts of barbarians, not human at
all? Or on the contrary, that they are eminently human and that
we must face the full compass of our nature?
Freud invoked the “death instinct” to account for phenome-
na that did not fit the framework of a pleasure-seeking, life-
affirming organism. I concur in seeing the implosive, necrophi-
lous, catabolic effects of a closed calcified repetition compulsion,
along with all other malignant and destructive forms, as manifes-
tation of maladaption. The inability of a person, or society, or a
species, to learn from its mistakes and modify behaviors, allowing
change for the better, justifies the need for an abstract conceptu-
alization of a force that is counter to life.
That said, as psychoanalysts, are we not called on to promul-
gate more awareness regarding the familial, social, and educa-
tional conditions that would counter destructive tendencies by
fostering growth, and to single out for assistance those stunted in
their development, crippled by trauma or constitution, or con-
sumed by envy, rage, spite, or core emptiness, in order to attenu-
ate and, ideally, eradicate, the roots of evil?
NOTE
1. A critical word needs to be added here regarding two “relational” premises.
First, Freud’s instincts are characterized by their conservatism, invisibility,
malleability. Mixed and alloyed with each other, the life and death instincts
are observable only through derivative manifestations. Although Freud’s
death instinct is an abstraction, Klein equates it with aggression per se. Second,
the principal critique of Freud by the object-relationists is that people are

object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking. However, Freud’s instinctual drives
manifest in and through relationships, as does his whole clinical/therapeutic
protocol, so, in my opinion, the relational argument is spurious: Freud was
the first object-relationist! He articulated meta-theory from a different angle,
at higher levels of abstraction.
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140 West End Ave., Apt. 23C The Psychoanalytic Review

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THE ROOTS OF EVIL:

Here we are dealing with the ultimate things which psychological

Psychoanalytic Review, 101(2), April 2014 © 2014 N.P.A.P.

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Human existence is dominated by apparent dualities: light and

have only to look back at a century darkened by two world wars,

suppression, oppression, conditioning, and the creation of an en-

liberating, earlier tradition in the form of monthly Saturnalias cel-

demonic, or is it Macbeth and his lady’s own ambition, an aspect

THE LIFE AND DEATH INSTINCTS: A THEORETICAL/

Freud was a research biologist before becoming a medical neu-

mordial instincts: the self-preservative ego instincts and the sexual

rules, and behavioral expectations of authority figures and soci-

dipal aggression, guilt, anxiety, and restitution led to her conception

Rather than atomistic component-instincts slowly integrating in

TWO INTEGRATIONISTS: ERICH FROMM AND OTTO KERNBERG

In their flight from “instincts,” the British Relationists shunned

sents a multidisciplinary, in-depth analysis of the subject from ev-

phylogeny, he differentiates survival instincts for food, shelter,

cidental, playful, and self-assertive forms; in the “defensive” cate-

devotion, commitment, effort, or concentration, as necrophilous

characteristic predominant defenses, especially projection and

tive, or merger/identification mechanisms to protect a weak ego

propriate sense of guilt and moral responsibility implies an ade-

cruelty, violence, destruction, or a perverse pleasure in causing

disturbances of object-relations, no basic trust, intense uncon-

Despite their divergent conceptual orientations and stylistic

THE ROOTS OF EVIL: THE BREAKDOWN OF EMPATHY

All species are phylogenetically hardwired for behaviors that will

pulsion to compensate by acting out destructive impulses. These

In his wonderful book The Origin of Virtue, Ridley (1996)

of hardwired different “mirror matching mechanisms” (p. 171).

killing is carried out in a state of undifferentiated merger in which

prior to the advent of language and our universal human heri-

and profound shame and dejection. Lack of superego integration

deficiencies. Although she eventually left after months of sporad-

the question, insisting that her daughter “liked to be thin, and

Madame C was, however, interested in the theater and poetry

But the predominant focus of his uninterruptable oratory

Also consistent, but as strong positives, are his love of swim-

Existentially these two cases converge at the deep-seated level

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The essence of evil remains embodied in the unmodulated emo-

From a psychoanalytic perspective, evil deeds and behaviors

4. Racism, enslavement, and prejudice: In their dehumanizing de-

the principal critique of Freud by the object-relationists is that people are

140 West End Ave., Apt. 23C The Psychoanalytic Review

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