The depth-psychology corpus approaches ‘Good and Evil’ not as a settled moral taxonomy but as one of the most consequential and contested structural polarities in both the psyche and the metaphysical imagination. The dominant tension runs between the classical theological doctrine of the privatio boni — evil as mere absence or diminution of good, articulated from Augustine through Aquinas and codified in Orthodox thought by John of Damascus — and the Jungian counter-position that treats evil as a positive, autonomous psychic reality whose denial produces catastrophic one-sidedness. Jung’s sustained critique of the privatio boni, developed across Aion, the Collected Works, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections, insists that psychological experience demands that good and evil be recognised as equally real poles of moral judgment; to subordinate evil ontologically is, for Jung, to drive its energy into the shadow. Nietzsche’s genealogical excavation of how the good/evil binary was historically constructed complicates the picture further, while Sri Aurobindo situates the duality as a transitional feature of evolving consciousness rather than a permanent metaphysical fixture. The Tantric and Buddhist perspectives introduced through Evans-Wentz dissolve the polarity from a different direction. McGilchrist’s coincidentia oppositorum framework insists the duality cannot be short-circuited without moral cost. The term thus anchors debates about the shadow, the self, the summum bonum, and the completeness of God.
‘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 is psychologically untenable because moral judgment requires that good and evil be symmetrically real, not one substantial and one merely privative.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
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 insists that grounding evil in a psychic condition does not nullify it but relocates it to the equally real plane of psychic reality, thus refuting the privatio boni’s erasure of evil’s substance.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
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 concludes that the self as complexio oppositorum necessitates the polarity of good and evil as a structural condition of psychic reality, not a moral deficiency to be overcome.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
I am indeed convinced that evil is as positive a factor as good.
Jung states his mature position plainly: evil is not a shadow of good but an equally positive force, requiring revision of traditional theological formulas.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
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.
In the Red Book, Jung articulates a vision in which the good/evil distinction dissolves during growth but reasserts itself when growth ceases, framing the polarity as dynamically operative rather than statically ontological.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
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.
In the Zarathustra seminars, Jung argues that a deity or ultimate reality confined to pure goodness is psychologically incoherent; authentic wholeness requires encompassing both poles.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
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 ‘not-two’ dissolving of the distinction, that the coincidentia oppositorum requires holding the tension between union and separation of good and evil rather than short-circuiting it.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
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 provides a genealogical account exposing good and evil as historically constructed categories rooted in power relations between ruling and subject castes, not timeless moral essences.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
what were previously conceived to be extrapsychic and nonhuman sources of good and evil in reality reside in the human psyche itself. Thus God and Devil are revealed as mighty oppositional principles operating within us.
Hoeller argues that depth psychology relocated good and evil from external cosmic agencies (God/Devil) to intrapsychic oppositional forces, a shift both Freud and Jung accomplished in parallel.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being. … by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.
Jung cites Thomas Aquinas as the scholastic apex of the privatio boni tradition, establishing the theological position his own psychology directly contests.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
evil is nothing else than absence of goodness and a lapsing from what is natural into what is unnatural: for nothing evil is natural.
John of Damascus articulates the Orthodox formulation of the privatio boni: evil has no positive essence but consists entirely in voluntary deviation from natural good.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
I saw that Indian spirituality contains as much of evil as of good. The Christian strives for good and succumbs to evil; the Indian feels himself to be outside good and evil.
Jung contrasts the Christian engagement with the good/evil polarity against the Indian pursuit of nirdvandva, arguing that transcending the distinction produces a problematic stasis rather than genuine resolution.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting
As Krishna teaches in the Bhagavad-Gītā, life is a conflict between two opposing forces, good and evil; or, as the Mahābhārata esoterically implies, between light and darkness.
Evans-Wentz situates good and evil within the Tantric and Vedantic framework as fundamental cosmic opposing forces, providing a non-Western comparative frame for the polarity.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
goodness is no substitute for wholeness; he frequently said that in the long run what matters is not goodness or obed—
Hoeller summarises Jung’s Gnostic-inflected position that moral goodness is subordinate to psychological wholeness, meaning that good alone cannot constitute the goal of individuation.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
there is no absolute of falsehood, no absolute of evil; these things are a by-product of the world-movement: the sombre flowers of falsehood and suffering and evil have their root in the black soil of the Inconscient.
Aurobindo argues that evil has no ultimate absolute status but is a contingent by-product of the Inconscient, dissolving when true consciousness replaces Ignorance — a position distinct from both the privatio boni and Jungian parity.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
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 good/evil duality as emerging with conscious life rather than inhering in matter or ultimate Spirit, situating the polarity as a transitional feature of evolving consciousness.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
No one knew, and apparently (with a few commendable exceptions) no one knows even now, that the hybris of the speculative intellect had already emboldened the ancients to propound a philosophical definition of God that more or less obliged him to be the Summum Bonum.
Jung attributes the theological restriction of God to the summum bonum to intellectual hubris, arguing that this obligation to pure goodness creates a one-sided God-image that depth psychology must correct.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal-primarily, the darkness; secondarily, the darkened.
Plotinus grounds evil in the Measureless and formless — a metaphysical privation prior to soul — providing the Neoplatonic framework from which later Christian privatio boni theology partly derives.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
instead of a reconciliation of opposites taking place, and a wholeness emerging, a one-sidely ‘perfect’ man is held up to the Christian as the conscious goal of his religious life. But this leaves the unredeemed shadow side of man in a chaotic condition.
Sanford applies the Jungian critique of moral one-sidedness to Christian soteriology, arguing that idealization of pure goodness leaves the shadow unredeemed and perpetuates the war of opposites.
, Dreams: Gods Forgotten Language, 1968supporting
The transformation of the negative was the basic psychological problem of alchemy. As Jung has shown the transformation of lead, the basest, into gold, the most precious, metal, was understood as a psychic process by the alchemists themselves.
Neumann locates the ethical challenge of transforming the negative — rather than simply suppressing evil — as the foundational psychological problem that alchemy addressed symbolically.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting
the word ‘evil’ is used in two ways, with two meanings. For sometimes it means what is evil by nature, and this is the opposite of virtue and the will of God: and sometimes it means that which is evil and oppressive to our sensation, that is to say, afflictions and calamities.
John of Damascus distinguishes intrinsic moral evil from apparent evil (affliction/calamity), arguing that God authors only the latter instrumentally for salvific purposes, not the former.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
if God is living Goodness and the Quickener of living things, clearly the devil is deadly and death-dealing evil. God possesses goodness as His essence and by nature does not admit of its opposite.
Gregory Palamas articulates the patristic position that God’s essence is pure goodness admitting no evil, with the devil as its absolute opponent — the theological pole against which Jungian quaternary thinking directly pushes.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
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.
Socrates in the Gorgias establishes the non-identity of good/evil with pleasure/pain, an early philosophical insistence that good and evil are categorically distinct from hedonic states.
, Gorgias, -380aside
their happiness, the beauty of their city … depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery … one day, sooner or later, they become the ones who walk away from Omelas.
McGilchrist invokes LeGuin’s Omelas parable to dramatise the moral impossibility of founding collective good on the deliberate perpetuation of evil, illustrating the irreducibility of the polarity to utilitarian calculus.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
the Creator—Who, in the eyes of those who had been delivered from darkness, cast off His dark qualities and became the summum bonum.
Jung traces the historical moment when the God-image was consciously purified into the summum bonum, identifying this as a developmental transformation with profound and ultimately destabilising psychological consequences.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963aside