Why psychotherapists need to acknowledge and address the ubiquitous phenomenon of evil.
Evil is inevitably one of life's "ultimate concerns."In my view, the problem of human evil has, with few exceptions , been ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology but can no longer be denied or avoided without serious consequences.
As C.G. Jung presciently put it,"Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. . . . We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us let alone what to pit against it." I propose that the perennial and increasingly ubiquitous problem of evil must be given its proper due in psychology and, genocide, terrorism, fascism, or war, or in cataclysmic cosmic occurrences like cyclones, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, pandemics, floods, and tragic accidents that wreak untimely death, destruction, and suffering on multitudes of innocent beings, how can we constructively cope with it? Human suffering stemming from the trauma of evil takes myriad forms, such asevils psychologically shake the ground of our existence, causing us to question the fundamental nature and meaning of life and death. They obliterate our illusory sense of safety, forcing us to face the frightful fact that existence, like the mythical Sword of Damocles, hangs by a tenuous, slender thread, and is intrinsically uncertain and insecure; that; that death is always but a final breath away; and that the basic structure or reality we depend upon daily for a sense of significance, predictability, meaning, purpose, continuity, security, safety, and protection is, in reality, transitory, groundless, unstable, illusory, ephemeral, and exceedingly precarious. In such dreadful moments, we can experience the existential void of emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, absurdity, the inevitability of death, and the abject terror of being abandoned, isolated, alienated, and totally alone in a cold, callous, uncaring cosmos. Fundamentally, it is this traumatic confrontation with evil itself, the seemingly senseless suffering it causes, and the existential and spiritual questions it inevitably confronts us with that frequently brings people into psychotherapy. Many, if not most, patients explicitly or implicitly seek psychotherapy when they can no longer comprehend, make sense of, tolerate, or come to terms with the distressing reality of evil in others, themselves, and the world, and the immense suffering such evil engenders. When the psychologically and emotionally devastating phenomenon of both cosmic and human evil—death, destructiveness, violence, loss, sadism, cruelty, hatred, and"man's inhumanity toward man"—renders life subjectively meaningless, we instinctively try to make some sense of it, to put it into some spiritual, philosophical, scientific, or psychological context. Encountering the existential reality of evil for the first time can be a devastating, disillusioning, and disorienting experience that can precipitate a predictable pattern of reactions, symptoms, and suffering described in detail in theIndeed, we could say that the diagnosis of acute stress disorder and PTSD noted, “it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.” Yet, with greater frequency and intensity than ever before, such"absolute," archetypal, or radical evil is not only on the rise but increasingly and unavoidably visible to us every day in gory detail on television, the internet, cinema, and Even for the emotionally detached, spiritually enlightened, or geographically remote observer passively viewing someone being brutally beaten or soldiers killed in action or witnessing some catastrophic natural disaster taking place 10 or 10,000 miles away on the television or cell phone screen from the secure comfort and safety of their own living room, the grotesque spectacle of both human and cosmic evil can be vicariously traumatizing. This is particularly true for those individuals with a significant prior personal history of trauma, who are prone to being retraumatized by exposure to evil in the present. But being vicariously traumatized by evil is something to which every, caring, and sensitive human being is susceptible at any time. People suffering from such an unexpected and precipitous traumatic encounter with evil—be it natural or human, or both—are initially in a severe state of emotional shock or “psychic numbing” . They are, at least temporarily, unable to psychologically process the experience.victims—tend to feel anxious, out of control, helpless, powerless, abandoned, disoriented, and deeply discouraged. Frequently, they also feel angry, enraged, resentful, and embittered about what has so unfairly, undeservedly, or unjustly happened to them—furious at God if they are religious; or with fate, fortune, or life itself. They have been brutally and abruptly robbed of their innocence and sense of safety. Their once secure, familiar, and comforting worldview has been decimated. Many traumatized victims of evil will—for worse or better—never be the same. Their previous perception of reality, and sometimes of themselves, others, and the world, has been irrevocably altered. In such tragic cases, psychotherapy can help, but only when the therapist truly appreciates the intensely traumatizing power of evil on the fragile yet remarkablyhuman psyche, and the crucial importance of assisting traumatized individuals to consciously acknowledge, recognize, confront, and, in their own way, accept and come to terms with, the existential reality of evil. .Diamond. S.A. . The psychology and psychotherapy of evil: Encountering the daimonic. In Hoffman, L. .Find a Trauma and PTSD TherapistSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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