Evil occupies a structurally contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. The central tension runs between the classical theological doctrine of privatio boni — evil as mere absence or privation of good, endorsed by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus and transmitted through Patristic writers including John of Damascus and Basil — and the psychodynamic insistence, most forcefully articulated by Jung, that such a formula is empirically and psychologically inadequate. For Jung and his successors, rendering evil a non-substance falsifies the weight of its phenomenological reality and forecloses honest moral reckoning. Von Franz’s extensive work on fairy tales demonstrates how the corpus reads evil as an active, quasi-autonomous force in the psyche and in nature, distinguishable as personal shadow, archetypal shadow, and what David Schoen terms ‘Archetypal Evil’ — a transpersonal order of destructive power irreducible to individual wrongdoing. Hillman refines this further by locating evil in the lacuna of eros, the cold absence of human feeling, rather than in positive demonic possession. The corpus is alert to the dangers of inflation in either direction: denying evil’s reality leads to naïve collapse before it; hypostatizing it absolutely courts paranoid projection. The question of whether evil can be integrated, held at bay, or only contained frames much of the clinical and mythological reflection gathered here.
“good” and “evil” are opposite poles of a moral judgment which, as such, originates in man. A judgment can be made about a thing only if its opposite is equally real and possible.
Jung argues that the privatio boni falsifies psychology by denying evil positive substantiality, which an experientially grounded moral epistemology requires.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
the relative reality of evil is grounded on a real ‘mutilation’ of the soul which must have an equally real cause… when something is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified
Jung systematically dismantles the privatio boni by demonstrating that locating evil in psychic reality gives it greater, not lesser, empirical weight.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
terms in philosophy, theology, and literature such as ‘radical evil,’ ‘real evil,’ ‘absolute evil,’ ‘core evil,’ ‘objective evil,’ ‘transcendent evil,’ and ‘transpersonal evil’ that all point to an aspect of evil… that goes beyond personal sin and weakness
Schoen maps the conceptual landscape of transpersonal or Archetypal Evil as a phenomenon categorically distinct from personal moral failing, essential to understanding addiction’s psychodynamics.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
“There is a deeper evil, which is neither personal nor organizational. It is absolute Evil. This is conceptualized as the archetype of Evil. There is nothing that we as individuals can do to eradicate absolute Evil.”
Schoen cites Harry Wilmer’s formulation of Archetypal Evil as a transpersonal, unintegratable force beyond any individual’s capacity to eliminate.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis
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, drawing on Guggenbuhl-Craig, argues that archetypal evil is categorically beyond therapeutic integration and can only be resisted, not resolved.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967thesis
If one looks at something evil, Plato once said, something evil falls into one’s own soul. One cannot look at evil without something in oneself being aroused in response to it, because evil is an archetype, and every archetype has an infectious impact upon people.
Von Franz articulates the archetypal infectiousness of evil, warning that direct confrontation without an anchoring in the inner center produces participation in the very evil one faces.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
evil is nothing else than absence of goodness and a lapsing from what is natural into what is unnatural: for nothing evil is natural… Evil is not any essence nor a property of essence, but an accident, that is, a voluntary deviation
John of Damascus presents the classical privatio boni doctrine: evil has no independent ontological substance but is a voluntary departure from the natural order of creation.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
Your crimes are not due so much to the presence of the shadow… but rather to a specific absence, the lack of human feeling. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig’s theory calls this missing essential eros. Catholic theology called the absence privatio boni, deprivation of goodness
Hillman reframes the privatio boni psychologically as the absence of eros — the cold lacuna at the core of criminal and destructive character.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily… Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil
Plotinus constructs a graduated ontology of evil in which essential evil is identified with pure measurelessness, while vice is derivative — a secondary participation in that primal absence of form.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Eros is ‘the protective wall of human community’ that Jung says ‘can counteract the evil principle [Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil] prevailing in this world.’
Schoen synthesizes Jung’s correspondence with Bill W. to establish Eros — relational love — as the primary counter-force to archetypal evil in the psyche.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
you can no longer separate good and evil conclusively, neither through feeling nor through knowledge, but that you can discern the direction of growth only from below to above. You thus forget the distinction between good and evil
In the Red Book Jung proposes that the moral binary of good and evil dissolves only within the living process of psychic growth, reconstituting itself at every arrest of that movement.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
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 documents Jung’s late position that certain historical catastrophes implicate a transpersonal dimension of evil exceeding individual human agency.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
Jung waited so long — until the end of his life — to throw out the gauntlet implicating Archetypal Evil. Some will argue that Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil will only lead to even more evasion of personal psychological responsibility
Schoen addresses the clinical and ethical dangers of the Archetypal Evil concept, particularly its potential to license moral evasion under the rubric of transpersonal forces.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
If we ask ourselves to what type these powers of evil belong in these primitive stories, we see that some are definite, known spirits, like Kurupira, the spirit of the woods… These are known figures in folklore who are called evil spirits
Von Franz classifies mythological manifestations of evil into determinate spirit-figures versus amorphous destructive forces, grounding a comparative phenomenology of evil in fairy tale material.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
the stepmother and the stepsisters are destroyed, not by the girl, but by bad conscience, their own evil, so to speak, in an immediate form… She gives it up; she doesn’t keep its power.
Von Franz reads the fairy tale’s resolution as demonstrating that evil ultimately destroys itself through bad conscience, and that the heroine’s moral integrity requires relinquishing retributive power.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
Arendt believes in resisting evil. Although she admires Jesus of Nazareth enormously, she nowhere accepts his admonition ‘resist not evil,’ either in private or public life.
This passage places Arendt’s active political resistance to totalitarian evil in dialogue with depth-psychological and theological frameworks for engaging rather than absorbing destructive forces.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
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 contextualizes Scott Peck’s clinical diagnosis of evil as willfulness within the deeper Western tradition of hubris, linking modern psychopathology to classical moral philosophy.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
as a superior Nature transcends the duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature falls below it… The duality begins with conscious life
Aurobindo locates the emergence of the good/evil duality specifically within the domain of conscious life, arguing that material nature is morally neutral while transcendent nature supersedes the polarity.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Evil is the contrary to Good… the less good hold no such standing, are nearer to Non-Being… there is a question in what precise way Good is contrary to Evil — whether it is as First-Principle to last of things or as Ideal-Form to utter Lack
Plotinus carefully suspends the precise ontological relationship between good and evil, distinguishing the question of privation from that of pure contrariety within his hierarchical metaphysics.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
if you feel you have lost your mission, your oomph, if you feel confused, slightly off, then look for the Devil, the ambusher of the soul within your own psyche
Estés identifies intrapsychic evil with a Devil-complex that operates by ambush and disappearance, counselling vigilance over direct confrontation as the appropriate clinical stance.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
I feel as if I have the weight of the world on my shoulders as I walk… to contain and neutralize the archetypal evil, as in a crucible, and which would protect humanity from being destroyed by it.
Schoen renders the therapeutic task with respect to archetypal evil as containment within a sacred vessel rather than elimination, framing it as a vocation of individuation.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020supporting
He is possessed, and what possesses him is Evil… evil can best be combated by the law. Not until several years later… does he see the ambiguity of his position
This literary-psychological commentary illustrates how the ego’s encounter with evil moves from naive legal containment toward recognition of evil’s dual reality as both inner condition and external force.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting
Breaking all commandments frees you from human bondage, opening a door to a suprahuman condition where devil and divinity are indistinguishable.
Hillman notes the antinomian logic by which radical transgression is experienced as a path to transcendence, blurring the boundary between the demonic and the divine.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside
the word ‘evil’ is used in two ways… sometimes it means what is evil by nature… and sometimes it means that which is evil and oppressive to our sensation, that is to say, afflictions and calamities
John of Damascus introduces a crucial semantic distinction between moral evil (contrary to virtue) and experiential evil (affliction), arguing the latter serves divine pedagogical purposes.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021aside
we can be as deplorably overcome by a virtue as by a vice. There is a frenzied, orgiastic virtuousness which is just as infamous as vice and leads to just as much injustice and violence.
Jung’s comment, cited by Nichols, warns that unconscious possession by virtue is as psychically dangerous as possession by vice — a key counter-intuitive claim in the Jungian treatment of evil.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss
Jung proposes that the genuine response to evil is not flight through activity but a deliberate descent into formlessness — a kenotic encounter with the abyss as the ground of authentic renewal.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside