theomachic
Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Archetypal Evil’ designates a category of psychic reality that is irreducible to personal shadow, moral failing, or the Augustinian privatio boni. The major voices converge on a crucial distinction: whereas the personal and collective shadow can be made conscious, integrated, and redeemed, Archetypal Evil—what Guggenbuhl-Craig names simply ‘Evil’ and Schoen systematizes as ‘Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil’—resists all therapeutic assimilation. Hillman articulates the phenomenological core: the more evil is archetypal, the more it presents as impersonal, incomprehensible, and undeserved. Jung’s late position, developed against the tradition of privatio boni, insists on evil as an independent metaphysical reality, represented symbolically by the Devil, Loki, or the alchemical sol niger. Von Franz extends this through fairy-tale amplification, identifying fragments of ‘inassimilable evil’ in the psyche—a terra damnata that defies transformation. Schoen, applying these frameworks to addiction, argues that true addiction requires the presence of a transpersonal archetypal evil that is ‘not educable, healable, or integratable by humans.’ The central tension in the corpus runs between those who accept evil’s irreducible autonomy and those who locate it within the spectrum of integrable shadow—a tension with direct clinical consequences for psychotherapy, ethics, and the phenomenology of possession.
Archetypal evil can neither be cured nor integrated nor humanized. It can only be held at bay.
Hillman states the defining clinical and ontological thesis: archetypal evil is categorically beyond therapeutic integration and can only be contained.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967thesis
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 formally defines Archetypal Evil as a transpersonal, non-integratable psychic phenomenon essential to understanding true addiction.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
A better word for it might be simply ‘Evil,’ although this word conjures up too many collective moral associations. Jung conceived of ‘Evil’ as something independent and not, for example, as a privatio boni, merely the absence of the Good.
Guggenbuhl-Craig establishes the Jungian ontological basis for archetypal evil as an autonomous, independent reality irreducible to the privatio boni tradition.
, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971thesis
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 distinguishes archetypal evil from morally instructive shadow figures, focusing on its purely destructive, transpersonal character as symbolized by Satan, Beelzebub, and possession imagery.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
bits ‘of inassimilable evil in the psyche which resist sublimation and which must be thrown out.’ She also is positing the existence of psychic material that is transpersonal evil, which cannot be integrated, digested, or incorporated by the psyche.
Von Franz, as cited by Schoen, provides alchemical and mythological evidence for psychic material constitutively resistant to integration, supporting the concept of archetypal evil as terra damnata.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
No wonder Jung waited so long—until the end of his life—to throw out the gauntlet implicating Archetypal Evil.
Schoen contextualizes Jung’s late-career reluctance to name archetypal evil explicitly, noting the psychological and cultural risks of that designation.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
Eros is ‘the protective wall of human community’ that Jung says ‘can counteract the evil principle [Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil] prevailing in this world.’
Drawing on Jung’s letter to Bill Wilson, Schoen identifies Eros and human community as the primary counterforces capable of withstanding archetypal evil.
, 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.’
Corbett, as quoted by Schoen, reports Jung’s conviction that historical atrocities of extreme magnitude point to a transpersonal dimension of evil beyond individual moral 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, engaging Scott Peck’s work on human evil and transpersonal possession as parallel frameworks.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
the morally ambiguous Yahweh became an exclusively good God, while everything evil was united in the devil. It seems as if the development of the feeling function in Western man forced a choice on him which led to the moral splitting of the div
Jung traces the historical-theological process by which archetypal evil became personified as the Devil through the West’s moral splitting of a formerly ambivalent divine image.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
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 archetypal infectiousness of evil, arguing that direct engagement or contemplation of evil as an archetype activates its contents within the observer.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
the morally ambiguous Yahweh became an exclusively good God, while everything evil was united in the devil.
Jung identifies the splitting of divine ambivalence into separate good and evil principles as the structural precondition for the archetypal personification of evil in Western culture.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
There is actually not a very good track record of survival for humans who overidentify with the archetypes. It is a very dangerous business.
Schoen notes the danger of archetypal inflation and overidentification, contextualizing the destructive power of archetypes in general as a frame for understanding archetypal evil’s lethal force.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020aside
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 a recurring fairy-tale motif of demonic possession or bewitchment as an archetypal representation of evil transmitted through the anima figure.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside