The term ‘Good and Bad’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along at least three distinct axes: the metaphysical, the developmental, and the genealogical. Jung’s engagement is most insistent and technically precise, centering on his repudiation of the privatio boni — the Augustinian doctrine that evil is merely an absence of good — on empirical grounds: psychology, as a science of realities, must affirm evil’s substantive existence in psychic life. For Jung, the self itself is a complexio oppositorum, and good and bad acquire their moral force only within the sphere of human action; no absolute definition of either is finally possible. Nietzsche provides the genealogical counterpoint, tracing the ‘dual prehistory’ of good and bad to aristocratic social structures in which the terms were social and political before they were moral. The object-relations tradition — Klein and Liz Greene via Klein — approaches the polarity developmentally, locating its earliest form in the infant’s splitting of the mother into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects, a defensive maneuver with lasting structural consequences for the ego. McGilchrist brings the coincidentia oppositorum into the contemporary frame, insisting that good and evil must be both united and kept distinct — neither collapsed nor permanently sundered. The tension between these positions — empirical psychology, genealogy, developmental object-relations, and dialectical metaphysics — makes ‘Good and Bad’ one of the most contested polarities in the entire library.
all archetypes spontaneously develop favourable and unfavourable, light and dark, good and bad effects. In the end we have to acknowledge that the self is a complexio oppositorum precisely because there can be no reality without polarity.
Jung argues that the polarity of good and bad is ontologically irreducible, rooted in the archetypal structure of the self, which is itself a union of opposites.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities.
Jung mounts his central empirical objection to the privatio boni, insisting that depth psychology cannot relegate evil to mere absence of good.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
it is more to the point to say things are both good and evil; and you can be doubtful whether they are as favorable as all that, because everything tends more to evil than to good.
Jung, commenting on Nietzsche, argues that any deity or supreme principle must transcend the good/evil dichotomy, and that restricting God to pure goodness fatally diminishes divine omnipotence.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
The concept of good and evil has a dual prehistory; first, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. Whoever has the power to repay good with good, evil with evil, and also actually repays, thus being grateful and vengeful, is called good.
Nietzsche proposes that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ originate not in moral reasoning but in social power relations between ruling castes and the powerless.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
the coincidentia oppositorum involves both the union and separation of good and evil. It is not possible to get round that.
McGilchrist insists, against Buddhist non-duality, that good and evil must be simultaneously united and distinguished — short-circuiting either pole is philosophically and ethically insufficient.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
we cannot know what good may flow from what we now call evil, or what evil may flow from what we now call good – Jung’s enantiodromia – my response to ‘not two’ is ‘yes, but …two’.
McGilchrist invokes Jungian enantiodromia to argue that good and evil are dynamically reversible yet not simply identical — the polarity is irreducible despite its permeability.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
evil has no substance or existence in itself, since it is merely a diminution of good, which alone has substance. Evil is a vitium, a bad use of things as a result of erroneous decisions of the will.
Jung quotes the Augustinian-Thomistic doctrine of privatio boni in order to subject it to empirical critique, exposing the circular reasoning that privileges ‘good’ as the only substance.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
when something — I must stress this with all possible emphasis — is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified, but is shifted on to the plane of psychic reality.
Jung argues that grounding evil in psychic reality — rather than metaphysical privation — is an amplification, not a reduction, affirming evil’s genuine ontological status.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
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 Kleinian object-relations theory, Greene maps the earliest experiential origin of the good/bad polarity to infantile splitting of the maternal object.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
the orthodox Christian view, first, that good and evil represent polar opposites, seemingly irreconcilable with each other, and, secondly, that evil does not exist in the same sense as good, but is rather the negation of the latter — the doctrine of privatio boni.
Clarke traces Jung’s dissatisfaction with the Christian privatio boni and his turn toward Eastern yin/yang complementarity as a more adequate model of the good/evil polarity.
, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting
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 applies Kleinian splitting theory to addictive development, identifying the failure to integrate ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ object representations as a key vulnerability.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
We must learn to think of something good which may be bad, or of something bad which may be good. When you think of good you must think in terms of
Jung argues that the unconscious demands a paradoxical mode of thought in which good and bad are not fixed polarities but mutually implicating qualities.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Of the two types of known karma, one is bad, but it can be destroyed by deeds that are good. Therefore desire to perform good deeds in this world.
The Yoga Sutra tradition offers an asymmetric karmic model: good karma can annihilate bad karma, but the reverse does not hold, reflecting a hierarchical rather than purely symmetrical valuation.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
Greek thinking begins with and for a long time holds to the proposition that mankind is divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and these terms are quite as much social, political, and economic as they are moral.
A classical philological source cited in Nietzsche’s Genealogy establishes that the Homeric good/bad dichotomy was an aristocratic social classification before it became a moral one.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
the devil is there too — Q. E. D. This situation gives rise to a quaternity… the fallen angel. He is the fourth, ‘recalcitrant’ figure in our symbolical series.
Jung argues that the inclusion of the devil as an autonomous eternal figure logically necessitates a quaternity in which evil has equal metaphysical standing alongside the divine good.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
I strongly advocate, therefore, a revision of our religious formulas with the aid of psychological insight.
Jung calls for a psychological revision of dogmatic formulations about good, arguing that only a living, changing theology can accommodate the empirical reality of evil.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
the good is not the same as the pleasant, or the evil the same as the painful; there is a cessation of pleasure and pain at the same moment; but not of good and evil, for they are different.
Plato’s Socrates establishes the logical independence of good/evil from pleasure/pain, a foundational move separating moral valuation from hedonic calculus.
, Gorgias, -380supporting
A Protestant theologian has even had the temerity to assert that ‘God can only be good.’ Yahweh could certainly have taught him a thing or two in this respect.
Jung critiques the theological restriction of God to pure goodness as an intellectually presumptuous constraint that distorts both Scripture and psychological reality.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
All goods are common to the virtuous, and all that is bad to the inferior. Therefore a man who benefits someone also benefits himself, and one who does harm also harms himself.
The Stoic doctrine collapses the distinction between benefiting self and other under a unified framework of virtue as the only genuine good.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
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 cites a poetic authority to distinguish the contingent virtue of the genuinely good person from the fixed depravity of the bad — an early formulation of moral instability as a feature of excellence.
, Protagoras, -390aside
it is not germane to this discussion of good and evil to consider the contention of the Southern Buddhists that their Pāli Canon is the only true canon.
Evans-Wentz briefly frames a cross-canonical dispute within a discussion of good and evil, noting that sectarian debates do not resolve the deeper ethical questions at stake.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954aside
its dualistic valuations: good and evil. But the ‘esthetical’ approach is still a mystery for an overwhelming majority of astrological students.
Rudhyar situates good/evil dualism as a product of physiological-level consciousness, arguing that a higher aesthetic mode of valuation transcends the moral binary.