Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘bad’ functions not as a simple moral epithet but as a structurally charged category whose meaning shifts dramatically depending on the theoretical framework invoking it. In object-relations theory—most clearly in Klein and her interpreters—‘bad’ designates one pole of the infant’s earliest splitting operation: the ‘bad breast’ or ‘bad mother’ is not morally corrupt but psychically intolerable, an object the infant must separate from the ‘good’ to preserve its capacity for love while discharging rage. Schore extends this developmental account neurobiologically, mapping the emergence of a ‘bad self’ onto the shame-laden rapprochement phase. Hillman, working from archetypal psychology, interrogates the very concept of the ‘bad seed,’ refusing to reduce radical evil to parental failure or hereditary taint, and instead situating ‘bad’ within a daimonic framework where the acorn’s perversion of its own calling generates demonic single-mindedness. Nietzsche’s genealogical treatment strips the term of naturalistic innocence entirely, showing ‘bad’ to be a construct of power relations—the noble’s contemptuous dismissal of the powerless—distinct from the ressentiment-driven ‘evil.’ Plato’s dialogues add a further paradox: no one truly wills bad things knowingly, yet the good can become bad under circumstantial pressure. These competing positions—developmental, archetypal, genealogical, and Socratic—make ‘bad’ one of the most contested evaluative terms in the corpus.
Whoever has the power to repay good with good, evil with evil, and also actually repays, thus being grateful and vengeful, is called good; whoever is powerless and unable to repay is considered bad.
Nietzsche argues that ‘bad’ originates as an aristocratic designation for the powerless and impotent, entirely distinct from the moralized concept of ‘evil’ generated by ressentiment.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
The child actually ‘splits’ the mother into two different people: the good mother (or good breast) and the bad mother (or bad breast). You love and adore the good mother… and you hate and despise and want to destroy the bad mother.
Drawing on Melanie Klein, Greene explains that the infant’s splitting of the mother into good and bad objects is the earliest psychic defense, enabling love to survive alongside murderous rage.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987thesis
The rapprochement phase may be crucial to the child’s ability to internalize conflict and to reconcile clashes between an ‘all good’ mother and an ‘all bad’ one.
Flores, following object-relations theory, locates the developmental crisis of integrating ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ maternal representations in the rapprochement phase, with lasting consequences for ego organization.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
Shame and the Emergence of the ‘Bad Self’… A fundamental change in affect occurs in the middle of the second year.
Schore neurobiologically grounds the genesis of the ‘bad self’ in the shame affect of the rapprochement phase, linking the evaluative category of badness to early regulatory disruptions between caregiver and infant.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis
Accounts of Charles Manson… also put the prime blame on bad parenting. These accounts locate the seed of his evil in the mother who supposedly ‘sold him to a bar waitress for a pitcher of beer.’
Hillman critiques the reductive parental-fallacy explanation of radical evil, arguing that attributing ‘bad’ character entirely to bad parenting exorcises rather than engages the daimonic reality.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Catholic theology called the absence privatio boni, deprivation of goodness, as we say colloquially, ‘That boy is no good.’ Other traits may fill in the absence: impulsiveness… emotional poverty, stunted intellect, imperviousness to guilt and remorse.
Hillman maps the theological concept of privatio boni onto the clinical phenomenology of characterological deficiency, framing radical badness as the absence of eros rather than the presence of malevolent will.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The good may become bad, as another poet witnesses: ‘The good are sometimes good and sometimes bad.’ But the bad does not become bad; he is always bad.
Plato’s Protagoras presents a paradox central to moral psychology: virtuous persons may be circumstantially overwhelmed into badness, while the constitutively bad person simply is what he always was.
, Protagoras, -390thesis
The very bottom of hell, according to Dante, is a realm of ice… The psychological trait that goes with the iced heart is rigidity, an incapacity to yield, to flow, to let go.
Hillman uses Hitler’s self-described ‘ice-cold’ heart as an archetypal symbol of the bad soul, locating its psychological signature in affective rigidity rather than in acts alone.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
‘Death,’ ‘murder,’ ‘killing,’ had a different connotation for Mary…. For her all of it had been a game.
Through Mary Bell’s case, Hillman probes whether ‘bad’ behavior in a child reflects environmental causation or an irreducible daimonic configuration that defies standard psychological explanation.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Prevention of the demonic must be based in the invisible ground ‘above the world’… inviting the daimon in the acorn to move out from the hard-shell confines of an only-bad seed, so as to recover a fuller image of glory.
Hillman argues that the bad seed is a daimon imprisoned in monotheistic literalism, and that recovery requires not suppression but a ritual seduction that expands the acorn’s truncated vision.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
The idea of a physical taint determining behavior carried great weight in the psychiatry of the last century… A criminal psychopath was the consequence of biophysical forces… The condition is fundamentally unalterable except by physical means.
Hillman surveys and critiques the hereditary-taint model of the bad seed, showing how biological determinism historically justified the most extreme institutional violence against those classified as constitutionally bad.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
No one, then, really wants (boulesthai) bad things, Meno, if he does not really want (boulesthai) to be like that. For what else is being wretched than having an appetite for bad things and getting them?
Sorabji reconstructs the Socratic paradox that no one genuinely wills bad things for themselves, establishing the ancient baseline against which later depth-psychological accounts of self-destructive motivation must contend.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Demonism arises, not because of supposed or actual sexual dysfunction, but because of the dysfunctional relation with the daimon. We strive to fulfill its vision fully, refusing to be restrained by our human limitations.
Hillman reframes the ‘bad’ quality of demonic behavior as a distortion of the daimon’s legitimate call, produced when megalomania closes off any relationship between the soul’s image and human constraint.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
He uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme willfulness. This notion of evil is hardly a startling discovery—supreme willfulness was known to the Greeks as hubris.
Hillman critically engages M. Scott Peck’s clinical use of ‘evil’ as supreme willfulness, connecting it to the classical Greek concept of hubris and querying whether willfulness alone suffices as an explanation of the bad.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
If there is only one kind of value, the pleasant/good, then our wellbeing will depend solely on our ability to calculate which course of action will provide the greatest amount of it… it is absurd to say that a person does what they know to be bad because they are overcome by the pleasant.
Hobbs explicates the Socratic argument that identifying the bad with pain eliminates the possibility of weakness of will, thus making the voluntary pursuit of what one knows to be bad strictly incoherent.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
Everyone has a ‘critic,’ a nasty voice that comes and says something like ‘You’re no good. You’re worthless, nobody would want you around.’
Gendlin notes that an internalized critical voice instils a felt sense of badness or worthlessness, the somatic-experiential correlate of the ‘bad self’ described in object-relations and developmental literature.
, Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge, 2010aside
Sometimes they ‘feel bad about feeling bad’—they think that something is wrong with them because it feels so miserable to give up substances.
Najavits identifies a secondary layer of self-condemnation in addicted patients, where the affective badness of withdrawal is compounded by a meta-judgment that feeling bad is itself a mark of personal deficiency.
, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse, 2002aside