theomachic
Archetypal Evil — treated in the depth-psychological corpus under such aliases as 'theomachic,' 'archetypal shadow,' and 'the Prince of Darkness' — designates a category of evil that is not reducible to personal shadow, moral failure, or the privatio boni of scholastic theology. The corpus reveals a persistent and unresolved tension between two broad orientations. The first, exemplified by Jung's own late writings and carried forward by Guggenbuhl-Craig, holds that evil possesses genuine ontological status as an autonomous archetype — independent of the personal unconscious, inassimilable by consciousness, and expressible through such symbols as the Devil, the sol niger, Shiva, and Loki. The second orientation, represented cautiously by figures such as Corbett, acknowledges transpersonal evil as a clinical and phenomenological reality while hesitating to grant it full metaphysical independence. Marie-Louise von Franz contributes the decisive alchemical argument: certain psychic contents constitute a terra damnata that defies transformation and must be repressed rather than integrated. David Schoen's extended engagement with addiction provides the most systematic contemporary deployment of the concept, arguing that true addiction cannot be understood without positing a transpersonal, unintegratable destructive principle. James Hillman offers the sharpest phenomenological formulation: archetypal evil is experienced as impersonal, incomprehensible, and beyond human desert. The term's stakes are high — touching theodicy, clinical practice, and the limits of individuation itself.
Archetypal evil can neither be cured nor integrated nor humanized. It can only be held at bay... The more that evil is archetypal, the more we experience it as impersonal. It is incomprehensible and we do not deserve it.
Hillman argues that archetypal evil is categorically distinct from the demonic or the personal shadow — it is absolute, impersonal, and admits only of containment, never integration or cure.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967thesis
A better word for it might be simply 'Evil'... Jung conceived of 'Evil' as something independent and not, for example, as a privatio boni, merely the absence of the Good. In his terms it may be understood as 'the murderer and suicide within us.'
Guggenbuhl-Craig distinguishes the archetypal shadow from the personal or collective shadow, positioning it as an autonomous archetype of evil irreducible to the mere absence of good — a position he attributes directly to Jung.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971thesis
there is a transpersonal (beyond the individual), deadly archetypal phenomenon that is not educable, healable, or integratable by humans, which I have chosen to label Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil.
Schoen makes his central phenomenological claim that addiction requires positing a transpersonal, inassimilable destructive archetype that operates beyond the reach of ordinary psychotherapeutic or educational intervention.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
I'm looking for images and representations of the Prince of Darkness, the supernatural source of evil, the one who seeks to destroy and wreak havoc in the souls of human beings.
Schoen explicitly delimits Archetypal Evil from its more tractable shadow-variants — the trickster, the adversary, the catalyst of growth — insisting on a category that names absolute, transpersonal destructiveness.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
Von Franz makes her own case for unintegratable aspects of the psyche when she talks about images in myth, fairy tales, and alchemy that point to bits 'of inassimilable evil in the psyche which resist sublimation and which must be thrown out.'
Schoen marshals von Franz's alchemical concept of terra damnata as independent corroboration that certain psychic contents embodying archetypal evil are beyond transformation and must be consciously rejected.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
No wonder Jung waited so long — until the end of his life — to throw out the gauntlet implicating Archetypal Evil... Trying to describe and define Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil feels a lot like trying to come up with a description of God.
Schoen contextualizes the lateness and difficulty of Jung's engagement with archetypal evil, noting the conceptual and social risks of positing a transpersonal principle of destructiveness.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
Jung says 'the protective wall of human community' can counteract the evil principle [Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil] prevailing in this world.
Schoen identifies Eros — human relational love — as the primary psychic countermeasure to archetypal evil, drawing on Jung's letter to Bill Wilson and multiple mythological and fairy-tale examples.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
Jung believed that the power of evil is more than simply human... that occurrences such as the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima... [were] of such magnitude... [that they] are far too terrible to be of purely human origin.
Schoen cites Corbett's reading of Jung to support the thesis that historical atrocities of sufficient scale demand recourse to a transpersonal or archetypal account of evil beyond human agency.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
The phenomenon of evil, especially of Archetypal Evil, is too important and too powerful for us not to try to explore and understand it.
Schoen argues for the clinical and ethical urgency of theorizing archetypal evil, reviewing Scott Peck's account of Satanic possession as supplementary evidence for the reality of transpersonal destructive forces.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
the real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of an infimum malum.
Jung traces the theological genealogy of the devil figure to a psychic need for symmetry, arguing that the summum bonum conception of God logically generates an independently existent principle of absolute evil.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
The clearest expression of this is the Christian reformation of the Jewish concept of the Deity: the morally ambiguous Yahweh became an exclusively good God, while everything evil was united in the devil.
Jung situates the Western polarization of the divine into absolute good and absolute evil as a cultural-psychological development driven by the differentiation of the feeling function, giving archetypal evil its own hypostatic figure.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
evil is an archetype, and every archetype has an infectious impact upon people. To look at it means to become infected by it.
Von Franz articulates the numinous, contagious quality of evil as archetype, arguing that direct confrontation with archetypal evil courts psychic infection and that the only safe posture is maintaining connection with a center beyond the opposition of good and evil.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
The theme is archetypal, and the idea of a beautiful girl who in some way has been bewitched, or has a poisonous body which kills anyone who comes near her unless he knows how to exorcise her, seems to be a common element in Oriental legends.
Von Franz identifies in fairy-tale motifs a recurring archetypal pattern of bewitched destructiveness linked to demonic possession, illustrating how archetypal evil enters human experience through contamination of the anima.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside