The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by M. Scott Peck

Of models and mystery

There are different ways to look at things.

The way psychiatrists are most accustomed to understand human beings is in terms of health and disease. This viewpoint is known as the medical model. It is a very useful and effective way of looking at people.

According to this viewpoint, George was suffering from a very specific disease—namely, an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. We know a good deal about this disease. In many ways George's case was typical. For instance, obsessive-compulsive neuroses have their origins in early childhood, beginning almost always in a less than ideal toilet-training situation. George was not able to remember how he had been toilet-trained. But from the fact that his father beat a kitten to death for making a mess one can guess it was made clear to George that he had better learn to control his bowels or else. It is no accident that George grew up to become a particularly neat and methodical adult, as obsessive-compulsives so often are.

Another typical characteristic of people who are victims of this neurosis is their propensity for what psychiatrists call magical thinking. Magical thinking can take a variety of forms, but basically it is a belief that thoughts in and of themselves may cause events to occur. Young children normally think magically. For instance, a five-year-old boy may have the thought: I wish my baby sister would die. Then he may become anxious, fearing that she actually will die because he wished it. Or if his sister becomes ill, he may be consumed with guilt, feeling that his thought caused her to become ill. Ordinarily we grow out of this tendency to think magically and by adolescence are quite certain that we do not have the power to control external events by our thoughts alone. Frequently, however, children who have been unduly traumatized one way or another do not grow out of their magical-thinking stage. This is particularly true of people with an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Certainly George had not grown out of it. His belief that his thoughts would come true was an essential part of his neurosis. It was because he believed his thoughts would come to pass that he was compelled, time and time again, to travel mile after mile back to the scene of his thoughts so as to nullify or undo their power.

Looked at in this light, George's pact with the devil was simply another manifestation of his magical thinking. The pact seemed to George a feasible manoeuvre to obtain relief from his suffering precisely because he believed it would come true. Although the pact was all in his mind, George believed he and his son would both actually die in accordance with its conditions. Restricting ourselves to the medical model, we might say of George's pact with the devil that it was merely one of the many forms his magical thinking took, and that his magical thinking was a typical feature of the common mental illness from which he suffered. And since the phenomenon can be understood in these terms, there is no need for further analysis. Case closed.

The problem is that, viewed in this light, the relationship between George and the devil seems prosaic and not very significant. How would it seem if we viewed it instead in terms of a traditional Christian religious model?

According to this model, humanity (and perhaps the entire universe) is locked in a titanic struggle between the forces of good and evil, between God and the devil. The battleground of this struggle is the individual human soul. The entire meaning of human life revolves around the battle. The only question of ultimate significance is whether the individual soul will be won to God or won to the devil. By establishing through his pact a relationship with the devil, George had placed his soul in the greatest jeopardy known to man. It was clearly the critical point of his life. And possibly even the fate of all humanity turned upon his decision. Choirs of angels and armies of demons were watching him, hanging on his every thought, praying continually for one outcome or the other. In the end, by renouncing the pact and the relationship, George rescued himself from hell to the glory of God and for the hope for mankind.

Which is the meaning of George's pact: just another neurotic symptom or the crucial turning point of his existence, with cosmic significance?

It is not my intention in this book to decry the medical model. Of all the possible models—and there are many—it remains the most generally useful one for understanding mental illness. In specific instances at specific times, however, another model may be more appropriate.

At such moments we are required to choose a vantage point. When George told me of his pact with the devil, I was faced with the choice of whether to regard it as just another typical neurotic symptom or as a moment of moral crisis. If I chose the first possibility, no immediate action was mandated on my part; if the latter, I owed it to George and the world to throw myself with all the vigour I could muster into the moral fray. Which way to decide? In choosing to see George's pact—even if it was all in his mind—as immoral, and confronting him with his immorality, I certainly picked the more dramatic alternative. Herein lies, I believe, a rule of thumb. If, at a particular moment, we are in a position in which we must choose a particular model, we should probably choose the most dramatic one—that is, the one that imparts to the event being studied the greatest possible significance.

It is usually neither necessary nor advisable, however, to adopt a single model. We North Americans see a man in the moon; some Central Americans, I am told, perceive a rabbit. Who is right? Both, of course, since each has a different vantage point, cultural as well as geographical. What we call models are simply alternative points of view. And if we want to know the moon—or any phenomenon—as best we can, we need to inspect it from as many diverse vantage points as possible.

Thus the approach of this book will be a multifaceted one. Readers who prefer their fare simple (or simplistic) will likely be uncomfortable. But the subject deserves more than incomplete clarity. Human evil is too important for a one-sided understanding. And it is too large a reality to be grasped within a single frame of reference. Indeed, it is so basic as to be inherently and inevitably mysterious. The understanding of basic reality is never something we achieve; it is only something that can be approached. And, in fact, the closer we approach it the more we realize we do not understand—the more we stand in awe of its mystery.

Then why try to understand? The very question speaks the language of nihilism, since time immemorial a diabolic voice. Why do or learn anything? The answer is simply that it is far better—both more fulfilling and constructive—to have some glimmer of understanding of what we are about than to flounder around in total darkness. We can neither comprehend nor control it all, but as J. R. R. Tolkien said: It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

So science seeks, as far as it might, to penetrate the mystery of the world. And ever so gradually scientists are beginning to become comfortable embracing multiple models. Physicists are no longer disheartened to look at light as both a particle and a wave. As for psychology, models abound: the biological, the psychological, the psychobiological, the sociological, the sociobiological, the Freudian, the rational-emotive, the behavioural, the existential, and so on. And while science needs those innovators who will champion a single new model as the most advanced understanding, the patient who seeks to be understood as wholly as possible would be well advised to seek a therapist capable of approaching the mystery of the human soul from all angles.

Science has not yet, however, become exactly broad-minded. This [chapter] is entitled Toward a Psychology of Evil precisely because we do not yet have a body of scientific knowledge about human evil deserving of being called a psychology. Why not? The concept of evil has been central to religious thought for millennia. Yet it is virtually absent from our science of psychology—which one might think would be vitally concerned with the matter. The major reason for this strange state of affairs is that the scientific and the religious models have hitherto been considered totally immiscible—like oil and water, mutually incompatible and rejecting.

In the late seventeenth century, after the Galileo affair proved hurtful to both, science and religion worked out an unwritten social contract of nonrelationship. The world was quite arbitrarily divided into the natural and the supernatural. Religion agreed that the natural world was the sole province of the scientists. And science agreed, in turn, to keep its nose out of the spiritual—or for that matter, anything to do with values. Indeed, science defined itself as value-free.

So for the past three hundred years there has been a state of profound separation between religion and science. This divorce—sometimes acrimonious, more often remarkably amicable—has decreed that the problem of evil should remain in the custody of religious thinkers. With few exceptions, scientists have not even sought visitation rights, if for no other reason than the fact that science is supposed to be value-free. The very word evil requires an a priori value judgment. Hence it is not even permissible for a strictly value-free science to deal with the subject.

All this is changing, however. The end result of a science without religious values and verities would appear to be the Strangelovian lunacy of the arms race; the end result of a religion without scientific self-doubt and scrutiny, the Rasputinian lunacy of Jonestown. For a whole variety of factors, the separation of religion and science no longer works. There are many compelling reasons today for their reintegration—one of them being the problem of evil itself—even to the point of the creation of a science that is no longer value-free. In the past decade this reintegration has already begun. It is, in fact, the most exciting event in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century.

Science has also steered clear of the problem of evil because of the immensity of the mystery involved. It is not that scientists have no taste for mystery so much as that their attitude and methodology in approaching it is generally reductionistic. Theirs is a left brain, analytical style. Their standard procedure is to bite off tiny little pieces at a time and then to examine such pieces in relative isolation. They prefer little mysteries to big ones.

Theologians suffer under no such compunction. Their appetite is as large as God. The fact that God is invariably larger than their digestion does not deter them in the least. To the contrary, while some seek in religion an escape from mystery, for others religion is a way to approach mystery. The latter are not loath to employ the reductionistic methods of science, but they are also not reluctant to use more integrative right brain means of exploration: meditation, intuition, feeling, faith, and revelation. For them the bigger the mystery, the better.

The problem of evil is a very big mystery indeed. It does not submit itself easily to reductionism. We shall, however, find that some questions about human evil can be reduced to a size manageable for proper scientific investigation. Nonetheless, the pieces of the puzzle are so interlocking, it is both difficult and distorting to pry them apart. Moreover, the size of the puzzle is so grand, we cannot truly hope to obtain more than glimmerings of the big picture. In common with any early attempt at scientific exploration, we shall end up with more questions than answers.

The problem of evil, for instance, can hardly be separated from the problem of goodness. Were there no goodness in the world, we would not even be considering the problem of evil.

It is a strange thing. Dozens of times I have been asked by patients or acquaintances: Dr Peck, why is there evil in the world? Yet no one has ever asked me in all these years: Why is there good in the world? Is is as if we automatically assume this is a naturally good world that has somehow been contaminated by evil. In terms of what we know of science, however, it is actually easier to explain evil. That things decay is quite explainable in accord with the natural law of physics. That life should evolve into more and more complex forms is not so easily understandable. That children generally lie and steal and cheat is routinely observable. The fact that sometimes they grow up to become truly honest adults is what seems the more remarkable. Laziness is more the rule than diligence. If we seriously think about it, it probably makes more sense to assume this is a naturally evil world that has somehow been mysteriously contaminated by goodness, rather than the other way around. The mystery of goodness is even greater than the mystery of evil.

And these mysteries are inextricable. The title of this [chapter] is itself a distortion. It should more properly read Toward a Psychology of Good and Evil. We cannot legitimately investigate the problem of human evil without simultaneously investigating the problem of human goodness. Indeed, as I shall make clear in the final chapter, an exclusive focus on the problem of evil is actually extremely dangerous to the soul of the investigator.

Bear in mind also that just as the issue of evil inevitably raises the question of the devil, so the inextricable issue of goodness raises the question of God and creation. While we can—and, I believe, should—bite off little pieces of mystery upon which to gnash our scientific teeth, we are approaching matters vast and magnificent beyond our comprehension. Whether we know it or not, we are literally treading upon holy ground. A sense of awe is quite befitting. In the face of such holy mystery it is best we remember to walk with the kind of care that is born both of fear and love.

A life-and-death issue

To proceed we need at least a working definition. It is a reflection of the enormous mystery of the subject that we do not have a generally accepted definition of evil. Yet in our hearts I think we all have some understanding of its nature. For the moment I can do no better than to heed my son, who, with the characteristic vision of eight-year-olds, explained simply, Why, Daddy, evil is "live" spelled backward. Evil is in opposition to life. It is that which opposes the life force. It has, in short, to do with killing. Specifically, it has to do with murder—namely, unnecessary killing, killing that is not required for biological survival.

Let us not forget this. There are some who have written about evil so intellectually that it comes out sounding abstract to the point of irrelevancy. Murder is not abstract. Let us not forget that George was actually willing to sacrifice the very life of his own child.

When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is also that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life — particularly human life—such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may break a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others—to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a biophilic person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a necrophilic character type, whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.

Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.

I do a lot of speaking and preaching these days. Recently I asked myself what it is I am basically trying to say. In all my talks and sermons, is there a theme, a central message?

There is. Thinking about it, I realized that one way or another, no matter what my topic, I am always trying in whatever way I can to help people take God, Christ, and themselves far more seriously than they generally do.

From the very beginning we are told that God created us in His own image. Are we going to take that seriously? Accept the responsibility that we are godly beings? And that human life is of sacred importance?

Speaking of his relationship to us human beings, Jesus said, I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Abundantly. What a wonderful word! This strange man, who obviously relished weddings and wine, fine oils and good companionship, and yet allowed himself to be killed, was not so concerned with the length of life as with its vitality. He was not interested in human puppets, of whom he once said, Let the dead bury their dead. Rather, he was interested in the spirit of life, in liveliness. And of Satan, the very spirit of evil, Jesus said, He was a murderer from the beginning. Evil has nothing to do with natural death; it is concerned only with unnatural death, with murder of the body or the spirit.

The purpose of this book is to encourage us to take our human life so seriously that we also take human evil far more seriously—seriously enough to study it with all the means at our command, including the methods of science. It is my intention to encourage us to recognize evil for what it is, in all its ghastly reality. There is nothing morbid about my purpose. To the contrary, it is in dedication to life … more abundantly. The only valid reason to recognize human evil is to heal it wherever we can, and (as is currently most often the case) when we cannot, to study it further that we might discover how to heal it in specific instances and eventually wipe its ugliness off the face of the earth.

It is presumably clear, then, that in encouraging us toward the development of a psychology of evil, I am talking of neither a study of evil in the abstract nor of an abstract psychology divorced from the values of life and liveliness. One cannot study a disease without the intention to heal it, unless one is some kind of a Nazi. A psychology of evil must be a healing psychology.

Healing is the result of love. It is a function of love. Wherever there is love there is healing. And wherever there is no love there is precious little—if any—healing. Paradoxically, a psychology of evil must be a loving psychology. It must be brimful of the love of life. Every step of the way its methodology must be submitted not only to the love of truth but also to the love of life: of warmth and light and laughter, and spontaneity and joy, and service and human caring.

Perhaps I am thus already contaminating science. Let me contaminate it further. The scientific psychology I am suggesting—if it is to be anything other than sterile and dead and evil itself—if it is to be rich and fertile and humanely productive—must succeed in integrating much that is not currently or generally considered scientific. It must, for instance, pay serious attention to literature, particularly mythology. As human beings battled against evil through the ages, they consciously or unconsciously incorporated the lessons they learned into mythic stories. The body of mythology is a vast storehouse of such lessons—to which we are still adding. The character of the Gollum, for instance, in Tolkien's recently popular The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is perhaps the finest depiction of evil ever written. Its author, J. R. R. Tolkien, a professor of literature, clearly knew at least as much about human evil as any psychiatrist or psychologist.

At the other end of the spectrum, the methods of hard science also need to be applied to the study of evil: not merely Rorschachs but the most advanced biochemical procedures and sophisticated statistical analyses of hereditary patterns. One editor who reviewed a primitive manuscript version of this work exclaimed, Surely, Scotty, you don't mean to imply that evil might be genetic or biochemical or physical in some way! Yet this same editor well knew that we are coming to learn that almost all diseases have both physical and emotional roots. Good science, good psychology, cannot be narrow-minded. All avenues should be explored, all stones turned.

Finally, of course, a psychology of evil must be a religious psychology. By this I do not mean it must embrace a specific theology. I do mean, however, that it must not only embrace valid insights from all religious traditions but must also recognize the reality of the supernatural. And, as I have said, it must be a science in submission to love and the sacredness of life. It cannot be a purely secular psychology.

There are a number of different theological models of evil. Perhaps the one thing they all have in common is a failure to adequately distinguish between human evil, such as murder, and natural evil, such as the death and destruction resulting from fire, flood, and earthquake. Knowing I was writing a book on evil, a friend said, Maybe you will help me to understand my son's cerebral palsy. I cannot. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People deals as well as possible with the problem of natural evil. This book will concern itself solely with the subject of human evil, and its primary focus will be on bad people.

Nor is this book intended to be an exhaustive survey of the subject. My desire is not to be scholarly or thorough but to strike as well as I can at the heart of the matter, so as to encourage us toward scientific scholarship and thoroughness. While other religious traditions have much to offer a psychology of evil, in moving toward that psychology I shall be speaking with my specifically Christian voice.

Similarly, it is not my intention to review all the extant psychological theories on the subject. Suffice it to acknowledge that although we do not yet have a body of scientific knowledge about human evil worthy of being dignified by the term psychology, behavioural scientists have laid a foundation that makes the development of such a psychology possible. Freud's discovery of the unconscious and Jung's concept of the Shadow are both basic.

The work of one psychologist, however, requires greater mention. Having fled the Jewish persecution of the Hitler regime, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm spent much of the rest of his life studying the evil of Naziism. He was the first and only scientist to clearly identify an evil personality type, to attempt to examine evil people in depth, and to suggest that they be studied still further.

Fromm's work is based on his study of certain of the Nazi leaders of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. It has the advantage over my own in that his subjects can surely be certified as evil by the judgment of history. But his work is weakened for the same reason. Because he never actually met his subjects, because they were all men in positions of high political power in a particular regime of a particular culture at a particular time, one is left with the impression that truly evil human beings were over there and back then. The reader is led to believe that real evil does not have anything to do with the mother of three next door or the deacon in the church down the street. My own experience, however, is that evil human beings are quite common and usually appear quite ordinary to the superficial observer.

The great Jewish theologian Martin Buber distinguished between two types of myths about evil. One type concerns people in the process of sliding into evil. The other concerns those who have already slid, fallen victim to and been taken over by radical evil.

In George we have a real-life story that corresponds to the first type of myth. He had not yet become evil, but he was at the point of doing so. His dealing with the devil represented the moral turning point of his life. Had he not renounced the pact, he would have eventually become evil. But he was not yet evil and, blessed by guilt, he managed to turn away from it.

Let us now consider a couple who, like Fromm's subjects, conform to the second type of myth—people who have crossed the line and descended into radical, likely inescapable, evil.

The case of Bobby and his parents*

It was February in the middle of my first year of psychiatric training. I was working on the inpatient service. Bobby, a fifteen-year-old boy, had been admitted the night before from the emergency room with a diagnosis of depression. Before seeing Bobby for the first time I read the note written in his chart by the admitting psychiatrist:

Bobby's older brother, Stuart, 16, committed suicide this past June, shooting himself in the head with his .22 caliber rifle. Bobby initially seemed to handle his only sibling's death rather well. But from the beginning of school in September, his academic performnce has been poor. Once a B student, he is now failing all his courses. By Thanksgiving he had become obviously depressed. His parents, who seem very concerned, tried to talk to him, but he has become more and more uncommunicative, particularly since Christmas. Although there is no previous history of antisocial behaviour, yesterday Bobby stole a car by himself, crashed it (he had never driven before), and was apprehended by the police. His court date is set for March 24th. Because of his age he was released into his parents' custody, and they were advised to seek immediate psychiatric evaluation for him.

The aide brought Bobby into my office. He had that typical body type of fifteen-year-old boys who have just undergone their early adolescent growth spurt: long, spindly arms and legs, like sticks, and a skinny torso that had not yet begun to fill out. His badly fitting clothes were nondescript. His slightly long, unwashed hair fell forward over his eyes so that it was difficult to see his face, particularly as he kept his gaze riveted on the floor. I shook his limp hand and motioned him to sit down. I'm Dr Peck, Bobby, I said. I'm going to be your doctor. How are you feeling?

Bobby did not answer. He simply sat staring at the floor.

Did you have a good night's sleep? I asked.

Okay, I guess, Bobby mumbled. He started picking at a small sore on the back of his hand. I noticed that there were a number of such sores on both his forearms and hands.

Are you nervous being here in the hospital?

No answer. Bobby was really digging into that sore. Inwardly I winced at the damage he was doing to his flesh. Pretty much everyone's nervous when they first come to the hospital, I commented, but you'll find that it's a safe place. Can you tell me how you happened to come here?

My parents brought me.

Why did they do that?

Because I stole a car and the police said I had to come here.

I don't think the police said you had to come to the hospital, I explained. They just wanted you to see a doctor. Then the doctor who saw you last night thought you were so depressed, it would be better for you to be in the hospital. How did you happen to steal the car?

I don't know.

It's a pretty scary thing to steal a car, especially when you're alone and when you're not used to driving and don't even have a driver's licence. Something very strong had to be pushing you to do it. Do you know what that something was?

No answer. I didn't really expect one. Fifteen-year-old boys who are in trouble and seeing a psychiatrist for the first time aren't likely to be very verbal—particularly when they're depressed, and Bobby was clearly very depressed. By this time I had had a chance to catch several quick glimpses of his face when he inadvertently raised his gaze from the floor. It was dull, expressionless. There was no life in his eyes or mouth. It was the kind of face I had seen in the movies of concentration camp survivors or victims of natural disasters who had seen their homes destroyed and their families wiped out: dazed, apathetic, hopeless.

Do you feel sad? I asked.

I don't know.

Probably he didn't, I thought. Young adolescents are just beginning to learn how to identify their feelings. The stronger the feelings, the more overwhelmed they will be by them and the less able to name them. I suspect you have some very good reasons to feel sad, I told him. I know that your brother, Stuart, committed suicide last summer. Were you close to him?

Yes.

Tell me about the two of you.

There's nothing to tell.

His death must have made you hurt and confused, I said.

No reaction. Except that maybe he dug a little deeper into one of the sores on his forearm. He was clearly not able to talk yet in this first session about his brother's suicide. I decided to drop the issue for the present. How about your parents? I asked. What can you tell me about them?

They're good to me.

That's nice. How are they good to you?

They drive me to scout meetings.

Yes, that's good, I commented. Of course that's the kind of thing parents are supposed to do when they can. How do you get along with them?

Okay.

No problems?

Sometimes I'm mean to them.

Oh, like how?

I hurt them.

How do you hurt them, Bobby? I asked.

Like when I stole the car, that hurt them, Bobby said, not with triumph but with a dreary, hopeless heaviness.

Do you think maybe that's why you stole the car—to hurt them?

No.

I guess you didn't want to hurt them. Can you think of any other ways you've hurt your parents?

Bobby didn't answer. After a long pause I said, Well?

I just know I hurt them.

But how do you know? I asked.

I don't know.

Do they punish you?

No, they're good to me.

Then how do you know you hurt them?

They yell at me.

Oh? What are some of the things they yell at you for?

I don't know.

Bobby was feverishly picking at his sores now and his head had drooped as far as it would go. I felt it would be best if I steered my questions to more neutral subjects. Perhaps then he would open up a bit more and we could begin developing a relationship. Do you have any pets at home? I asked.

A dog.

What kind of dog?

A German shepherd.

What's his name?

Her name, Bobby corrected me. Inge.

That sounds like a German name.

Yes.

A German name for a German shepherd, I commented, hoping somehow to get out of my interrogational role. Do you and Inge do a lot together?

No.

Do you take care of her?

Yes.

But you don't seem very enthusiastic about her.

She's my father's dog.

Oh—but you still have to take care of her?

Yes.

That doesn't seem quite fair. Does it make you angry?

No.

Do you have a pet of your own?

No.

We clearly weren't getting very far on the topic of pets, so I decided to switch to another topic, which often elicits some enthusiasm from young people. It's not long since Christmas, I said. What did you get for Christmas?

Nothing much.

Your parents must have given you something. What did they give you?

A gun.

A gun? I repeated stupidly.

Yes.

What kind of gun? I asked slowly.

A twenty-two.

A twenty-two pistol?

No, a twenty-two rifle.

There was a long moment of silence. I felt as if I had lost my bearings. I wanted to stop the interview. I wanted to go home. Finally I pushed myself to say what had to be said. I understand that it was with a twenty-two rifle that your brother killed himself.

Yes.

Was that what you asked for for Christmas?

No.

What did you ask for?

A tennis racket.

But you got the gun instead?

Yes.

How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?

It wasn't the same kind of gun.

I began to feel better. Maybe I was just confused. I'm sorry, I said. I thought they were the same kind of gun.

It wasn't the same kind of gun, Bobby replied. It was the gun.

The gun?

Yes.

You mean, it was your brother's gun? I wanted to go home very badly now.

Yes.

You mean your parents gave you your brother's gun for Christmas, the one he shot himself with?

Yes.

How did it make you feel getting your brother's gun for Christmas?’ I asked.

I don't know.

I almost regretted the question. How could he know? How could he answer such a thing? I looked at him. There had been no change in his appearance as we had talked about the gun. He had continued to pick away at his sores. Otherwise it was as if he were already dead—dull-eyed, listless, apathetic to the point of lifelessness, beyond terror. No, I don't expect you could know, I said. Tell me, do you ever see your grandparents?

No, they live in South Dakota.

Do you have any relatives that you see?

Some.

Any that you like?

I like my aunt Helen.

I thought perhaps I detected a faint sign of enthusiasm in his reply. Would you like it if your aunt Helen came to visit you here while you're in the hospital? I asked.

She lives quite far away.

But if she came anyway?

If she wanted to.

Again I felt in him the faintest glimmer of hope—and in myself. I would be getting in touch with Aunt Helen. Now I had to end the interview. I couldn't tolerate any more. I told Bobby about the hospital routines and explained that I would see him the next day, that the nurses would be watching him quite closely and that they'd give him a sleeping pill at bedtime. Then I took him back to the nurses' station. After writing his orders I walked out of the building into the courtyard. It was snowing. I was glad of that. I just let it snow on me for a few minutes. Then I went back to my office and became very busy with dull, routine paper work. I was glad of that also.

The next day I saw Bobby's parents. They were, they told me, hard-working people. He was a tool-and-diemaker, an expert machinist who took pride in the great precision of his craft. She had a job as a secretary in an insurance company, and took pride in the neatness of their home. They went to the Lutheran church every Sunday. He drank beer in moderation on the weekends. She belonged to a Thursday-night women's bowling league. Of average stature, neither handsome nor ugly, they were the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the tragedy that had befallen them. First Stuart and now Bobby.

I've cried myself out, Doctor, the mother said.

Stuart's suicide was a surprise to you? I asked.

Totally. A complete shock, the father answered. He was such a well-adjusted boy. He did well in school. He was into scouting. He liked to hunt woodchucks in the fields behind the house. He was a quiet boy, but everyone liked him.

Had he seemed depressed before he killed himself?

No, not at all. He seemed just like his old self. Of course, he was quiet and didn't tell us much of what was on his mind.

Did he leave a note?

No.

Have any of you relatives on either side had a mental illness or serious depression or killed themselves?

Nobody in my family, the father responded. My parents emigrated from Germany, so I have quite a few relatives over there I don't know much about, and I can't tell you about them.

My grandmother became senile and had to be put in a hospital, but no one else had any mental difficulty, the mother added. Certainly no one committed suicide. Oh, Doctor, you don't think that there's any chance that Bobby might … might also do something to himself, do you?

Yes, I replied. I think there's a very significant chance.

O God, I don't think I could bear it, the mother wailed softly. Does this sort of thing—I mean, hurting yourself—does it run in families?

Definitely. Statistically, the highest risk of suicide exists in people who have a brother or sister who's committed suicide.

O God, the mother wailed again. You mean Bobby might really do it too?

You hadn't thought of Bobby being in danger? I asked.

No, not until now, the father replied.

But I understand that Bobby's been depressed for some time, I remarked. Didn't that worry you?

Well, it worried us, of course, the father responded. But we thought it was natural, what with his brother's death and all. We thought he'd get over it in time.

You didn't think of taking him to see someone like a psychiatrist? I continued.

No, of course not, the father replied again, this time with an edge of annoyance. We told you we thought he would get over it. We had no idea that it might be this serious.

I understand that Bobby's grades have gone way down in school, I remarked.

Yes. It's a shame, the mother responded. He used to be such a good student.

The school must have been a bit concerned about him, I commented. Did they get in touch with you about the problem?

The mother looked slightly uncomfortable. Yes, they did. And of course I was concerned too. I even took time off from my job to go in for a conference.

I'd like to have your permission for me to communicate with the school about Bobby if it seems necessary. It might be quite helpful.

Of course.

In that conference you had, I asked, did anyone from the school suggest that Bobby see a psychiatrist?

No, the mother answered. She seemed to have so rapidly regained her composure, I wasn't sure she'd ever lost it. They did suggest he might get some counselling. But not a psychiatrist. Of course if they had suggested a psychiatrist, we would have done something about it.

Yes. Then we would have known it was something serious, the father added. But because they said counselling, we thought they were just concerned about his grades. Not that we weren't concerned about his grades too. But we've never been ones to push the children unless we had to. It's not good to push children too hard, is it, Doctor?

I'm not sure that taking Bobby to a counsellor would have been the same as pushing him, I commented.

Well, that's another thing, Doctor, the mother continued, more on the offensive than the defensive. It's not that easy for us to take Bobby here or there during weekdays. We're both working people, you know. And these counselling people, they don't work on weekends. We can't be just taking off from our jobs every day. We've got a living to make, you know.

It didn't seem as if it would be fruitful for me to engage Bobby's parents in an argument over whether they could or could not have discovered available counselling services in the evenings or on weekends. I decided to raise the issue of Aunt Helen. You know, I said, it's possible that my supervisors and I may decide that Bobby will need more than a brief hospitalization—that he may need a complete change of scene for a good while. Do you have any relatives with whom he might stay?

I'm afraid not, the father responded immediately. I don't think any of them would be interested in having an adolescent boy on their hands. They've all got their lives to live.

Bobby mentioned to me his aunt Helen, I suggested. Perhaps she might be willing to take him.

The mother jumped in. Did Bobby tell you he doesn't want to live with us? she demanded.

No, we haven't even talked about the subject yet, I replied. I'm only seeing what all the options are. Who is Aunt Helen?

She's my sister, the mother answered. But she'd be out of the question. She lives at least several hundred miles away.

That's not far, I responded. And I'm thinking in terms of a change of scene for Bobby. That distance might be just right. It's close enough so that he could visit you but far enough so that he'd be away from where his brother committed suicide and perhaps away from some of the other pressures that he's experiencing.

I just don't think it would work out, the mother said.

Oh?

Well, Helen and I aren't close. No, not close at all.

Why is that?

We've just never gotten along well together. She's stuck up, that's what she is. Although what she's got to be so stuck up about, I don't know. All she is is a cleaning lady. She and her husband—he's not very bright, you know—all they have is a little house-cleaning service. I don't know what makes them think they can go around acting superior all the time.

I can understand that you and she don't get on too well together, I acknowledged. Are there any other relatives with whom it would be better for Bobby to live?

No.

Even though you don't like your sister, Bobby seems to have some positive feeling for her, and that's important.

Look, Doctor, the father interjected, I don't know what you're insinuating. You're asking all these questions like you were a policeman or something. We haven't done anything wrong. You don't have any right to take a boy from his parents, if that's what you're thinking of. We've worked hard for that boy. We've been good parents.

My stomach was feeling queasier moment by moment. I'm concerned about the Christmas present you gave Bobby, I said.

Christmas present? The parents seemed confused.

Yes. I understand you gave him a gun.

That's right.

Was that what he asked for?

How should I know what he asked for? the father demanded belligerently. Then immediately his manner turned plaintive. I can't remember what he asked for. A lot's happened to us, you know. This has been a difficult year for us.

I can believe it has been, I said, but why did you give him a gun?

Why? Why not? It's a good present for a boy his age. Most boys his age would give their eyeteeth for a gun.

I should think, I said slowly, that since your only other child had killed himself with a gun that you wouldn't feel so kindly toward guns.

You're one of these antigun people, are you? the father asked me, faintly belligerent again. Well, that's all right. You can be that way. I'm no gun nut myself, but it does seem to me that guns aren't the problem; it's the people who use them.

To an extent, I agree with you, I said. Stuart didn't kill himself simply because he had a gun. There must have been some other reason more important. Do you know what that reason might have been?

No. We've already told you we didn't even know that Stuart was depressed.

That's right. Stuart was depressed. People don't commit suicide unless they're depressed. Since you didn't know Stuart was depressed, there was perhaps no reason for you to worry about him having a gun. But you did know Bobby was depressed. You knew he was depressed well before Christmas, well before you gave him the gun.

Please, Doctor, you don't seem to understand, the mother said ingratiatingly, taking over from her husband. We really didn't know it was this serious. We just thought he was upset over his brother.

So you gave him his brother's suicide weapon. Not any gun. That particular gun.

The father took the lead again. We couldn't afford to get him a new gun. I don't know why you're picking on us. We gave him the best present we could. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. We're just ordinary working people. We could have sold the gun and made money. But we didn't. We kept it so we could give Bobby a good present.

Did you think how that present might seem to Bobby? I asked.

What do you mean?

I mean that giving him his brother's suicide weapon was like telling him to walk in his brother's shoes, like telling him to go out and kill himself too.

We didn't tell him anything of the sort.

Of couse not. But did you think that it might possibly seem that way to Bobby?

No, we didn't think about that. We're not educated people like you. We haven't been to college and learned all kinds of fancy ways of thinking. We're just simple working people. We can't be expected to think of all these things.

Perhaps not, I said. But that's what worries me. Because these things need to be thought of.

We stared at each other for a long moment. How did they feel, I wondered. Certainly they didn't seem to feel guilty. Angry? Frightened? Victimized? I didn't know. I didn't feel any empathy for them. I only knew how I felt. I felt repelled by them. And I felt very tired.

I would like you to sign permission for me to communicate with your sister Helen about Bobby and his situation. I said, turning to the mother. And yours also, turning back to the father.

Well, you'll not have mine, he said. I'll not have you taking this out of the family, you acting so superior, like you're some kind of judge or something.

To the contrary, I explained with cold rationality. What I am trying to do is my best to keep it in the family as far as possible. Right now you and Bobby and I are the only people involved. I feel it is necessary to involve Bobby's aunt, at least to the extent necessary to find out if she can be of help. If you tie my hands in doing so, then I will have to discuss the issues thoroughly with my supervisors. I suspect we would conclude we have an obligation to refer Bobby's case to the State Children's Protective Agency. If we do that, then you'll have a real judge on your hands. We may have to do it anyway. It seems to me, however, if she is able to help, that approaching Helen is a way that we can avoid notifying the state. But it's up to you. It's completely your choice whether you want to give me permission to communicate with Helen.

Oh, my husband's just being silly, Doctor, Bobby's mother exclaimed with a gay, charming smile. It's just been very upsetting to him to have to see our son in a mental hospital, and we're not used to talking to highly educated people like yourself. Of course we'll sign permission. I have no objection whatsoever to my sister being involved. We want to do whatever we can to help. All we care about is what's best for Bobby.

They signed permission and left. That night my wife and I went to a staff party. I drank a bit more than I ordinarily do.

The next day I got in touch with Aunt Helen. She and her husband came to see me right away. They understood the situation quickly and seemed quite caring. They too were working people but were willing to have Bobby live with them as long as his psychiatric care could be paid for. Fortunately, through their employment Bobby's parents had insurance coverage with unusually good psychiatric benefits. I contacted a most competent psychiatrist in Helen's town, who agreed to take on Bobby's case for long-term outpatient psychotherapy. Bobby himself had no understanding of why it was necessary for him to live with his aunt and uncle, and I didn't feel he was ready to deal with my real explanation. I simply told him it would be better for him that way.

Within a couple of days Bobby was quite amenable to the change. Indeed, he improved rapidly with several visits from Helen, the prospect of a new living situation, and the care he received from the aides and nurses. By the time he was discharged to Helen's care, three weeks after his admission to the hospital, the sores on his arms and hands were only scars, and he was able to joke with the staff. Six months later I heard from Helen that he seemed to be doing well and that his grades had come up again. From his psychiatrist I heard that he had developed a trusting therapeutic relationship but was only barely beginning to approach facing the psychological reality of his parents and their treatment of him. After that I had no more follow-up. As to Bobby's parents, I saw them only twice more after that initial meeting, and then only for a couple of minutes each time, while Bobby was still in the hospital. That was all that seemed necessary.

Whenever a child is brought for psychiatric treatment, it is customary to refer to her or him as the identified patient. By this term we psychotherapists mean that the parents—or other identifiers—have labelled the child as a patient — namely, someone who has something wrong and is in need of treatment. The reason we use the term is that we have learned to become sceptical of the validity of this identification process. More often than not, as we proceed with the evaluation of the problem, we discover that the source of the problem lies not in the child but rather in his or her parents, family, school, or society. Put most simply, we usually find that the child is not as sick as its parents. Although the parents have identified the child as the one requiring correction, it is usually they, the identifiers, who are themselves most in need of correction. They are the ones who should be the patients.

This was exemplified in the case of Bobby. Although he was seriously depressed and desperately in need of help, the source, the cause of his depression, lay not in him but in his parents' behaviour toward him. Although depressed, there was nothing sick about his depression. Any fifteen-year-old boy would have been depressed in his circumstances. The essential sickness of the situation lay not in his depression but in the family environment to which his depression was a natural enough response.

To children—even adolescents—their parents are like gods. The way their parents do things seems the way they should be done. Children are seldom able to objectively compare their parents to other parents. They are not able to make realistic assessments of their parents' behaviour. Treated badly by its parents, a child will usually assume that it is bad. If treated as an ugly, stupid second-class citizen, it will grow up with an image of itself as ugly, stupid and second-class. Raised without love, children come to believe themselves unlovable. We may express this as a general law of child development: Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.

Bobby, when he first came to the hospital, was literally gouging holes in himself, destroying the surface of himself piece by piece. It was as if he felt there was something bad, something evil, inside him underneath the surface of his skin, and he was digging at himself in order to get it out. Why?

If it happens that someone close to us commits suicide, our first response after the initial shock—if we are normally human, with a normal human conscience—will be to wonder what we did wrong. So it must have been for Bobby. In the days immediately following Stuart's death he would have remembered all manner of little incidents: that only a week before he had called his brother a stupid slob; that a month before he had kicked him in the midst of a fight; that when Stuart picked on him, he often wished that his brother would somehow be removed from the face of the earth. Bobby felt responsible, at least to some degree, for Stuart's death.

What should have happened at this point—and what would have happened in a healthy home—would have been for his parents to begin reassuring him. They should have talked with him about Stuart's suicide. They should have explained that even though they themselves did not realize it, Stuart must have been mentally ill. They should have told him that people don't commit suicide because of everyday squabbles or sibling rivalry. They ought to have said that if anyone was responsible, it was they, the parents, the ones who had had the biggest influence on Stuart's life. But as far as I could ascertain, Bobby had been given none of this reassurance.

When the reassurance he needed was not forthcoming, Bobby became visibly depressed. His grades fell. At this point his parents should have rectified the situation or, lacking the insight to do so themselves, should have sought professional help. But they failed to do so, despite its actually having been suggested to them by the school. It was likely that Bobby even interpreted the lack of attention his depression was receiving as a confirmation of his guilt. Of course no one was concerned about his depression, he felt; he deserved it. He deserved to feel miserable. It was appropriate that he should feel guilty.

Consequently by Christmas Bobby was already judging himself to be an evil criminal. Then, unsolicited, he was given his brother's murder weapon. How was he to understand the meaning of this gift? Was he to think: My parents are evil people, and out of their evil, desire my destruction, just as they probably destroyed my brother? Hardly. Nor could he, even with his fifteen-year-old mind, think to himself: My parents gave me the gun out of a mixture of laziness, thoughtlessness, and cheapness. So they don't love me very well—so what? Since he already believed himself to be evil and lacked the maturity to see his parents with any clarity, there was but one interpretation open to him: to believe the gun an appropriate message telling him: Take your brother's suicide weapon and do likewise. You deserve to die.

Fortunately Bobby did not immediately do likewise. He chose what was probably his only other psychological option: to publicly label himself a criminal so that he might be punished for his evil and society might be protected from him by means of his imprisonment. He stole a car. In a very real sense he stole it that he might live.

All this has been supposition. I had no way of knowing precisely what had occurred in Bobby's mind. First of all, adolescents are the most private people. They are not apt to confide the inner workings of their minds to anyone, much less a strange, frightening white-coated adult. But even if he had been willing and able to confide in me, Bobby still would not have been able to tell me such things, for his own awareness of them would have been dim indeed. When we are adults, the greater part of our thought life proceeds on an unconscious level. For children and young adolescents, almost all mental activity is unconscious. They feel, they conclude, and they act with precious little awareness of what they are about. So we must deduce from their behaviour what is going on. Yet we have learned enough to know that such deductions can be remarkably accurate.

From such deductions we can arrive at another law of child development, this one specific to the problem of evil: When a child is grossly confronted by significant evil in its parents, it will most likely misinterpret the situation and believe that the evil resides in itself.

When confronted by evil, the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion. Imagine, then, what it must be like for a naïve child who encounters evil in the ones it most loves and upon whom it depends. Add to this the fact that evil people, refusing to acknowledge their own failures, actually desire to project their evil onto others, and it is no wonder that children will misinterpret the process by hating themselves. And no wonder that Bobby was gouging holes in himself.

We can see, then, that Bobby, the identified patient, was not himself so much sick as he was responding, in the way that most children would, in a predictable fashion, to the peculiar, evil sickness of his parents. Although identified as the one who had something wrong with him, the locus of evil in the total situation lay not in him but elsewhere. This is why his most immediate need was not so much for treatment as for protection. Real treatment would come later, and would be long and difficult, as it always is for the reversal of a self-image that does not correspond to reality.

Let us turn now from the identified patient to the parents, the true source of the problem. Appropriately, they should have been formally identified as the sick ones. They should have been the ones to receive treatment. Yet they did not. Why not? There are three reasons.

The first, and perhaps most compelling, is that they did not want it. To receive treatment one must want it, at least on some level. And to want it one must consider oneself to be in need of it. One must, at least on some level, acknowledge his or her imperfection. There are an enormous number of people in this world with serious and identifiable psychiatric problems who, in a psychiatrist's eyes, are quite desperately in need of treatment but who fail to recognize this need. So they don't get treatment, even when it is offered on a silver platter. Not all such people are evil. In fact, the vast majority are not. But it is into this category of persons most intensely resistant to psychiatric treatment that the thoroughly evil fall.

Bobby's parents gave many indications that they would have rejected any type of therapy I might have offered them. They did not even pretend to demonstrate any guilt over Stuart's suicide. They reacted only with rationalization and belligerence to my intimations that they had been remiss in not earlier seeking professional help for Bobby and that their judgment had been poor, at best, in their choice of his Christmas present. Although I sensed in them no genuine desire to care for Bobby, the idea that it would be better for him to live elsewhere was anathema to them because of its implied criticism of their ability as parents. Rather than acknowledging any deficit, they refused to assume any blame on the grounds that they were working people.

Still, I might at least have offered them therapy. Just because in all probability they would have rejected the offer, this was insufficient reason not to make it—not to at least make the attempt to help them grow toward understanding and compassion. But I sensed that even if by some miracle they had been willing to undergo psychotherapy, in their case it would have failed.

It is a sad state of affairs, but the fact of the matter is that the healthiest people—the most honest, whose patterns of thinking are least distorted—are the very ones easiest to treat with psychotherapy and most likely to benefit from it. Conversely, the sicker the patients—the more dishonest in their behaviour and distorted in their thinking—the less able we are to help them with any degree of success. When they are very distorted and dishonest, it seems impossible. Among themselves therapists will not infrequenty refer to a patient's psychopathology as being overwhelming. We mean this literally. We literally feel overwhelmed by the labyrinthine mass of lies and twisted motives and distorted communication into which we will be drawn if we attempt to work with such people in the intimate relatonship of psychotherapy. We feel, usually quite accurately, that not only will we fail in our attempts to pull them out of the morass of their sickness but that we may also be pulled down into it ourselves. We are too weak to help such patients—too blind to see an end to the twisted corridors into which we will be led, too small to maintain our love in the face of their hatred. This was the case in dealing with Bobby's parents. I felt overwhelmed by the sickness I sensed in them. Not only would they likely reject any offer I made to help them but I also knew I lacked the power to succeed in any attempt at healing.

There is one other reason I didn't try to work with Bobby's parents. I simply didn't like them. It was even more than that; they revolted me. To help people in psychotherapy it is necessary to have at least a germ of positive feeling for them, a touch of sympathy for their predicaments, a smidgen of empathy for their sufferings, a certain regard for their personhood and hope for their potentials as human beings. I didn't feel these things. I could not envision sitting with Bobby's parents hour after hour, week after week, month after month, dedicating myself to their care. To the contrary, I could hardly stand being in the same room with them. I felt unclean in their presence. I couldn't get them out of my office fast enough. From time to time I will attempt to work with someone whose case I suspect to be hopeless on the off chance that my judgment is wrong, and for the learning value to me, if nothing else. But not Bobby's parents. Not only would they have rejected my therapy; I rejected them.

People have feelings about each other. When psychotherapists have feelings about their patients, they label those feelings countertransference. Countertransference can run the whole gamut of human emotions from the most intense love to the most intense hatred. Volumes have been written on the subject of countertransference; it can be either extremely helpful or extremely hurtful to therapeutic relationships. If therapists' feelings are inappropriate, the countertransference will distort, confuse, and sidetrack the healing process. Should the countertransference be an appropriate one, however, it can be the most useful tool there is to understand a patient's problem.

A crucial task of any psychotherapist is to recognize whether the countertransference is or is not appropriate. To fulfill this task therapists must continually analyze themselves as well as their patients. If the countertransference is inappropriate, it is the therapist's responsibility to either heal himself/herself or refer the patient to another therapist, one capable of being more objective in that particular case.

The feeling that a healthy person often experiences in a relationship with an evil one is revulsion. The feeling of revulsion may be almost instant if the evil encountered is blatant. If the evil is more subtle, the revulsion may develop only gradually as the relationship with the evil one slowly deepens.

The feeling of revulsion can be extremely useful to a therapist. It can be a diagnostic tool par excellence. It can signify more truly and rapidly than anything else that the therapist is in the presence of an evil human being. Yet, like a sharp scalpel, it is a tool that must be used with the greatest care. Should the revulsion result not from something in the patient but from some sickness in the therapist, all manner of harm will likely be done unless the therapist is humble enough to recognize it as his or her own problem.

But what would make revulsion a healthy response? Why might it be an appropriate countertransference for an emotionally healthy therapist? Revulsion is a powerful emotion that causes us to immediately want to avoid, to escape, the revolting presence. And that is exactly the most appropriate thing for a healthy person to do under ordinary circumstances when confronted with an evil presence: to get away from it. Evil is revolting because it is dangerous. It will contaminate or otherwise destroy a person who remains too long in its presence. Unless you know very well what you are doing, the best thing you can do when faced with evil is to run the other way. The revulsion countertransference is an instinctive or, if you will, God-given and saving early-warning radar system.

Despite the volume of professional literature on the subject of countertransference, I have never read anything in it specifically about revulsion. There are several reasons for this absence. The revulsion countertransference is so specific to evil, it is hardly possible to write about one without the other; and since evil has been generally thus far off-limits to psychiatric investigation, so has this specific countertransference. Moreover, psychotherapists are usually kindly people, and such a dramatically negative reaction on their part would be rather threatening to their self-image. Then, because of the intense negativity of the reaction, there is a profound tendency for psychotherapists to avoid sustaining relationships with evil clients. Finally, as I have mentioned, very few evil people are willing to be psychotherapy clients in the first place. Except under extraordinary circumstances, they will do everything possible to flee the light-shedding process of therapy. So it has been difficult for psychotherapists to get together with evil people long enough to study them or their own reactions.

There is another reaction that the evil frequently engender in us: confusion. Describing an encounter with an evil person, one woman wrote, it was as if I'd suddenly lost my ability to think. Once again, this reaction is quite appropriate. Lies confuse. The evil are the people of the lie, deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception. If confused in response to a patient, the therapist must wonder if this is not the result of her or his own ignorance. But it also behooves the therapist to question: Could the patient be doing something to confuse me?

I have stated that the revulsion countertransference is an appropriate—even saving—response to evil people. There is one exception. If the confusion can be penetrated—if the diagnosis of evil can be made, and if the therapist, knowing with what he or she is dealing, decides to attempt to relate with the evil person in a healing manner—then, and only then, the revulsion countertransference can and should be set aside. That is a lot of ifs. The attempt to heal the evil should not be lightly undertaken. It must be done from a position of remarkable psychological and spiritual strength.

The only reason that it can be done at all is that a therapist who is in a position of such strength will know that while the evil people are still to be feared, they are also to be pitied. Forever fleeing the light of self-exposure and the voice of their own conscience, they are the most frightened of human beings. They live their lives in sheer terror. They need not be consigned to any hell; they are already in it.

It is therefore not only for the sake of society but also for their own sakes that the attempt should be made to rescue the evil from their living hell. Knowing so little about the nature of evil, we currently lack the skill to heal it. Our therapeutic ineptness is hardly remarkable, however, in view of the fact that we have not even yet discerned evil as a specific disease. It is a thesis of this book that evil can be defined as a specific form of mental illness and should be subject to at least the same intensity of scientific investigation that we would devote to some other major psychiatric disease.

It is natural and wise that under ordinary circumstances we should steer clear of the viper's den. Yet it is also proper that the scientist—the experienced herpetologist—should approach that very same place in order to learn, to obtain venom for the development of an antitoxin that will serve to protect humankind, and perhaps even to assist the serpent in its evolution. Serpents can grow wings to become dragons, and dragons can be tamed to become simultaneously fierce and gentle servants of God. If we can see the evil as ill and pitiable—albeit still dangerous—and if we know what we are doing, it is appropriate that we should transform our revulsion into careful compassion so as to approach them in healing.

As I review the case of Bobby and his parents after a span of twenty years, I doubt that I would today, with all my additional experience, handle the case much differently. I would still envision it as my initial task to rescue Bobby from his parents, and I would still resort, as I did then, to the use of temporal power to accomplish that task. I have learned nothing in twenty years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar. But one thing has changed in twenty years. I know now that Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no name for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.

To name something correctly gives us a certain amount of power of it. At the time I saw Bobby's parents I did not know the nature of the force with which I was dealing. I was revolted by it but not curious about it. I avoided dealing with them not simply out of a healthy respect for that force but also because I was afraid of it—unknowingly afraid. Today I am afraid of it still, but it is not a blind fear. Knowing its name, I know something of the dimensions of that force. Because I have that much of safe ground on which to stand, I can afford to be curious as to its nature. I can afford to move toward it. So I would do something differently today. Having succeeded in getting Bobby out of his parents' home, I would, if I had the opportunity today, attempt to gently tell them in the vaguest of terms that they were possessed by a kind of force destructive not only to their children but also to themselves. And if I happened to have the available time and energy, I would offer to work with them in an attempt to conquer that force. If by some remote chance they agreed, I would proceed to work with them, not because I would like them better now—not even because I would have significant confidence in my power to heal them—but simply because, knowing the name, I have grown strong enough to do the learning and attempt the work. And it is our task to work the fields that we know.

Evil and sin

To more fully understand Bobby's parents—and others like them, who will be described in the next chapter—it is necessary that we first draw the distinction between evil and ordinary sin. It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people, rather it is the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins. This is because the central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.

Bobby's parents and the people described in the next chapter, except for their evil, are most ordinary. They live down the street—on any street. They may be rich or poor, educated or uneducated. There is little that is dramatic about them. They are not designated criminals. More often than not they will be solid citizens—Sunday school teachers, policemen, or bankers, and active in the PTA.

How can this be? How can they be evil and not designated as criminals? The key lies in the word designated. They are criminals in that they commit crimes against life and liveliness. But except in rare instances—such as the case of a Hitler—when they might achieve extraordinary degrees of political power that remove them from ordinary restraints, their crimes are so subtle and covert that they cannot clearly be designated as crimes. The theme of hiding and covertness will occur again and again throughout the rest of the book. It is the basis for the title People of the Lie.

I have spent a good deal of time working in prisons with designated criminals. Almost never have I experienced them as evil people. Obviously they are destructive, and usually repetitively so. But there is a kind of randomness to their destructiveness. Moreover, although to the authorities they generally deny responsibility for their evil deeds, there is still a quality of openness to their wickedness. They themselves are quick to point this out, claiming that they have been caught precisely because they are the honest criminals. The truly evil, they will tell you, always reside outside of jail. Clearly these proclamations are self-justifying. They are also, I believe, generally accurate.

People in jail can almost always be assigned a standard psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. The diagnoses range all over the map and correspond, in layman's terms, to such qualities as craziness or impulsiveness or aggressiveness or lack of conscience. The men and women I shall be talking about such as Bobby's parents have no such obvious defects and do not fall clearly into our routine psychiatric pigeonholes. This is not because the evil are healthy. It is simply because we have not yet developed a definition for their disease.

Since I distinguish between evil people and ordinary criminals, I also obviously make the distinction between evil as a personality characteristic and evil deeds. In other words, evil deeds do not an evil person make. Otherwise we should all be evil, because we all do evil things.

Sinning is most broadly defined as missing the mark. This means that we sin every time we fail to hit the bull's-eye. Sin is nothing more and nothing less than a failure to be continually perfect. Because it is impossible for us to be continually perfect, we are all sinners. We routinely fail to do the very best of which we are capable, and with each failure we commit a crime of sorts—against God, our neighbours, or ourselves, if not frankly against the law.

Of course there are crimes of greater and lesser magnitude. It is a mistake, however, to think of sin or evil as a matter of degree. It may seem less odious to cheat the rich than the poor, but it is still cheating. There are differences before the law between defrauding a business, claiming a false deduction on your income tax, using a crib sheet in an examination, telling your wife that you have to work late when you are unfaithful, or telling your husband (or yourself) that you didn't have time to pick up his clothes at the cleaner, when you spent an hour on the phone with your neighbour. Surely one is more excusable than the other — and perhaps all the more so under certain circumstances—but the fact remains that they are all lies and betrayals. If you are sufficiently scrupulous not to have done any such thing recently, then ask whether there is any way in which you have lied to yourself. Or have kidded yourself. Or have been less than you could be—which is a self-betrayal. Be perfectly honest with yourself, and you will realize that you sin. If you do not realize it, then you are not perfectly honest with yourself, which is itself a sin. It is inescapable: we are all sinners.19

If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. This is because those who have crossed over the line are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness.

I commented that George, blessed by guilt, managed to turn away from becoming evil. Because he was willing—at least to a rudimentary degree—to tolerate the sense of his own sinfulness, he was able to reject his pact with the devil. Had he nor borne the pain of the guilties he experienced over the pact, his moral deterioration would have continued. More than anything else, it is the sense of our own sinfulness that prevents any of us from undergoing a similar deterioration. As I have written elsewhere:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus began when the time came for him to address the multitudes. What did he mean by this opener? … What is so great about feeling down on yourself—about having this sense of personal sin? If you ask that, it might help to remember the Pharisees. They were the fat cats of Jesus' day. They didn't feel poor in spirit. They felt they had it all together, that they were the ones who knew the score, who deserved to be the culture leaders in Jerusalem and Palestine. And they were the ones who murdered Jesus.

The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.

Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand. It is quite painful at times, but it is a very great blessing because it is our one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux put it so nicely in her gentle way: If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.

The evil do not serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to themselves. In fact, they don't bear it at all. I could not, for instance, detect a hint of self-recrimination in Bobby's parents. And it is out of their failure to put themselves on trial that their evil arises.

The varieties of people's wickedness are manifold. As a result of their refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness, the evil ones become uncorrectable grab bags of sin. They are, for instance, in my experience, remarkably greedy people. Thus they are cheap—so cheap that their gifts may be murderous. In The Road Less Travelled, I suggested the most basic sin is laziness. In the next subsection I suggest it may be pride—because all sins are reparable except the sin of believing one is without sin. But perhaps the question of which sin is the greatest is, on a certain level, a moot issue. All sins betray—and isolate us from—both the divine and our fellow creatures. As one deep religious thinker put it, any sin can harden into hell:

… There can be a state of soul against which Love itself is powerless because it has hardened itself against Love. Hell is essentially a state of being which we fashion for ourselves: a state of final separateness from God which is the result not of God's repudiation of man, but of man's repudiation of God, and a repudiation which is eternal precisely because it has become, in itself, immovable. There are analogies in human experience: the hate which is so blind, so dark, that Love only makes it the more violent; the pride which is so stony that humility only makes it more scornful; the inertia—last but not least the inertia—which has so taken possession of the personality that no crisis, no appeal, no inducement whatsoever, can stir it into activity, but on the contrary makes it bury itself the more deeply in its immobility. So with the soul and God; pride can become hardened into hell, hatred can become hardened into hell, any of the seven root forms of wrongdoing can harden into hell, and not least that sloth which is boredom with divine things, the inertial that cannot be troubled to repent, even though it sees the abyss into which the soul is falling, because for so long, in little ways perhaps, it has accustomed itself to refuse whatever might cost it an effort. May God in his mercy save us from that.

A predominant characteristic, however, of the behaviour of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. Take a simple example of a six-year-old boy who asks his father, Daddy, why did you call Grand-mommy a bitch? I told you to stop bothering me, the father roars. Now you're going to get it. I'm going to teach you not to use such filthy language, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap. Maybe that will teach you to clean up what you say and keep your mouth shut when you're told. Dragging the boy upstairs to the soap dish, the father inflicts this punishment on him. In the name of proper discipline evil has been committed.

Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others. The father perceived the profanity and uncleanliness as existing in his son and took action to cleanse his son's filthiness. Yet we know it was the father who was profane and unclean. The father projected his own filth onto his son and then assaulted his son in the name of good parenting.

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters. In The Road Less Travelled I defined evil as the exercise of political power—that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion—in order to avoid … spiritual growth. In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgement of one's need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgement, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection.

Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life—usually in the name of righteousness. The fault, however, may not be so much that they hate life as that they do not hate the sinful part of themselves. I doubt that Bobby's parents deliberately wanted to kill Stuart or him. I suspect if I had gotten to know them well enough, I would have found their murderous behaviour totally dictated by an extreme form of self-protectiveness which invariably sacrificed others rather than themselves.

What is the cause of this failure of self-hatred, this failure to be displeasing to oneself, which seems to be the central sin at the root of the scapegoating behaviour of those I call evil? The cause is not, I believe, an absent conscience. There are people, both in and out of jail, who seem utterly lacking in conscience or super-ego. Psychiatrists call them psychopaths or sociopaths. Guiltless, they not only commit crimes but may often do so with a kind of reckless abandon. There is little pattern or meaning to their criminality; it is not particularly characterized by scapegoating. Conscienceless, psychopaths appear to be bothered or worried by very little—including their own criminality. They seem to be about as happy inside a jail as out. They do attempt to hide their crimes, but their efforts to do so are often feeble and careless and poorly planned. They have sometimes been referred to as moral imbeciles, and there is almost a quality of innocence to their lack of worry and concern.

This is hardly the case with those I call evil. Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social norms and what others might think of them. Like Bobby's parents, they dress well, go to work on time, pay their taxes, and outwardly seem to live lives that are above reproach.

The words image, appearance, and outwardly are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their goodness is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the people of the lie.

Actually, the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves. They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach. The decorum with which they lead their lives is maintained as a mirror in which they can see themselves reflected righteously. Yet the self-deceit would be unnecessary if the evil had no sense of right and wrong. We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. Some rudimentary form of conscience must precede the act of lying. There is no need to hide unless we first feel that something needs to be hidden.

We come now to a sort of paradox. I have said that evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness. For everything they did, Bobby's parents had a rationalization—a whitewash good enough for themselves even if not for me. The problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.

It often happens, then, that the evil may be recognized by its very disguise. The lie can be perceived before the misdeed it is designed to hide—the cover-up before the fact. We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury, the velvet glove that covers the fist. Because they are such experts at disguise, it is seldom possible to pinpoint the maliciousness of the evil. The disguise is usually impenetrable. But what we can catch are glimpses of The uncanny game of hide-and-seek in the obscurity of the soul, in which it, the single human soul, evades itself, avoids itself, hides from itself.

In The Road Less Travelled I suggested that laziness or the desire to escape legitimate suffering lies at the root of all mental illness. Here we are also talking about avoidance and evasion of pain. What distinguishes the evil, however, from the rest of us mentally ill sinners is the specific type of pain they are running away from. They are not pain avoiders or lazy people in general. To the contrary, they are likely to exert themselves more than most in their continuing effort to obtain and maintain an image of high respectability. They may willingly, even eagerly, undergo great hardships in their search for status. It is only one particular kind of pain they cannot tolerate: the pain of their own conscience, the pain of the realization of their own sinfulness and imperfection.

Since they will do almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from self-examination, under ordinary circumstances the evil are the last people who would ever come to psychotherapy. The evil hate the light—the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception. Psychotherapy is a light-shedding process par excellence. Except for the most twisted motives, an evil person would be more likely to choose any other conceivable route than the psychiatrist's couch. The submission to the discipline of self-observation required by psychoanalysis does, in fact, seem to them like suicide. The most significant reason we know so little scientifically about human evil is simply that the evil are so extremely reluctant to be studied.

If the central defect of the evil is not one of conscience, then where does it reside? The essential psychological problem of human evil, I believe, is a particular variety of narcissism.

Narcissism and will

Narcissism, or self-absorption, takes many forms. Some are normal. Some are normal in childhood but not in adulthood. Some are more distinctly pathological than others. The subject is as complex as it is important. It is not the purpose of this book, however, to give a balanced view of the whole topic, so we will proceed immediately to that particular pathologic variant that Erich Fromm called malignant narcissism.

Malignant narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will. All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They do what God wants them to do rather than what they would desire. Thy will, not mine, be done, the God-submitted person says. They believe in what is true rather than what they would like to be true. Unlike Bobby's parents, what their beloved needs becomes more important to them than their own gratification. In summary, to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience. Not so the evil, however. In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win.

The reader will be struck by the extraordinary wilfulness of evil people. They are men and women of obviously strong will, determined to have their own way. There is a remarkable power in the manner in which they attempt to control others.

Theologians speak of evil being a consequence of free will. When God, creating us in His own image, gave us free will, He had to allow us humans the option of evil. The problem can also be envisioned in the secular terms of evolution theory. The will of less evolved creatures seems largely under the control of their instincts. When humans evolved from the apes, however, they largely evolved out from under such instinctual controls and hence into free will. This evolution leaves humans in the position of being either totally wilful or having to seek new ways of self-control through submission to higher principles. But this still leaves us with the question of why some human beings are able to achieve such submission while others are not.

Indeed, it is almost tempting to think that the problem of evil lies in the will itself. Perhaps the evil are born so inherently strong-willed that it is impossible for them ever to submit their will. Yet I think it is characteristic of all great people that they are extremely strong-willed — whether their greatness be for good or for evil. The strong will—the power and authority—of Jesus radiates from the Gospels, just as Hitler's did from Mein Kampf. But Jesus' will was that of his Father, and Hitler's that of his own. The crucial distinction is between willingness and wilfulness.

This wilful failure of submission that characterizes malignant narcissism is depicted in both the stories of Satan and of Cain and Abel. Satan refused to submit to God's judgment that Christ was superior to him. For Christ to be preferred meant that Satan was not. Satan was less than Christ in God's eyes. For Satan to have accepted God's judgment, he would have had to accept his own imperfection. This he could not or would not do. It was unthinkable that he was imperfect. Consequently submission was impossible and both the rebellion and fall inevitable. So also God's acceptance of Abel's sacrifice implied a criticism of Cain: Cain was less than Abel in God's eyes. Since he refused to acknowledge his imperfection, it was inevitable that Cain, like Satan, should take the law into his own hands and commit murder. In some similar, although usually more subtle fashion, all who are evil also take the law into their own hands, to destroy life or liveliness in defence of their narcissistic self-image.

Pride goeth before the fall, it is said, and of course laymen simply call pride what we have labelled with the fancy psychiatric term of malignant narcissism. Being at the very root of evil, it is no accident that Church authorities have generally considered pride first among the sins. By the sin of pride they do not generally mean the sense of legitimate achievement one might enjoy after a job well done. While such pride, like normal narcissism, may have its pitfalls, it is also part of healthy self-confidence and a realistic sense of self-worth. What is meant is, rather, a kind of pride that unrealistically denies our inherent sinfulness and imperfection—a kind of overweening pride or arrogance that prompts people to reject and even attack the judgment implied by the day-to-day evidence of their own inadequacy. Despite its fruits, Bobby's parents saw no fault in their child care. In Buber's words, the malignantly narcissistic insist upon affirmation independent of all findings.

What is the cause of this overweening pride, this arrogant self-image of perfection, this particularly malignant type of narcissism? Why does it afflict a few when most seem to escape its clutches? We do not know. In the past fifteen years psychiatrists have begun to pay increasing attention to the phenomenon of narcissism, but our understanding of the subject is still in its infancy. We have not yet succeeded, for instance, in distinguishing the different types of excessive self-absorption. There are many who are clearly—even grossly—narcissistic in one way or another but are not evil. All I can say at this point is that the particular brand of narcissism that characterizes evil people seems to be one that particularly afflicts the will. Why a person should be a victim of this type and not another or none at all, I can only vaguely surmise.

It is my experience that evil seems to run in families. The person to be described had evil parents. But the familial pattern, if accurate, does nothing to resolve the old nature versus nurture controversy. Does evil run in families because it is genetic and inherited? Or because it is learned by the child in imitation of its parents? Or even as a defence against its parents? And how are we to explain the fact that many of the children of evil parents, although usually scarred, are not evil? We do not know, and we will not know until an enormous amount of painstaking scientific work has been accomplished.

Nonetheless, a leading theory of the genesis of pathological narcissism is that it is a defensive phenomenon. Since almost all young children demonstrate a formidable array of narcissistic characteristics, it is assumed that narcissism is something we generally grow out of in the course of normal development, through a stable childhood, under the care of loving and understanding parents. If the parents are cruel and unloving, however, or the childhood otherwise traumatic, it is believed that the infantile narcissism will be preserved as a kind of psychological fortress to protect the child against the vicissitudes of its intolerable life. This theory might well apply to the genesis of human evil. The builders of the medieval cathedrals placed upon their buttresses the figures of gargoyles—themselves symbols of evil—in order to ward off the spirits of greater evil. Thus children may become evil in order to defend themselves against the onslaughts of parents who are evil. It is possible, therefore, to think of human evil—or some of it—as a kind of psychological gargoylism.

There are other ways, however, to look at the genesis of human evil. The fact of the matter is that some of us are very good and some of us very evil, and most of us are somewhere in between. We might therefore think of human good and evil as a kind of continuum. As individuals we can move ourselves one way or another along the continuum. Just as there is a tendency for the rich to get richer, however, and the poor to get poorer, so there seems to be a tendency for the good to get better and the bad to get worse. Erich Fromm spoke of these matters at some length:

Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens—or better perhaps, comes alive. … Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the exteme when I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice. In the practice of life the degree of freedom to choose is different at any given moment. If the degree of freedom to choose the good is great, it needs less effort to choose the good. If it is small, it takes a great effort, help from others, and favourable circumstances. … Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Fromm saw the genesis of human evil as a developmental process: we are not created evil or forced to be evil, but we become evil slowly over time through a long series of choices. I applaud his view—particularly its emphasis upon choice and will. I think it is correct as far as it goes. But I do not think it is the whole truth of the matter. On the one hand, it does not take into account the tremendous forces that tend to shape the being of a young child before it has much opportunity to exercise its will in true freedom of choice. On the other hand, it perhaps under-estimates the very power of the will itself.

I have seen cases in which an individual made an evil choice for no apparent reason other than the pure desire to exercise the freedom of his or her will. It is as if such people say to themselves, I know what is supposed to be the right action in this situation, but I am damned if I am going to be bound to notions of morality or even to my own conscience. Were I to do the good thing, it would be because it is good. But if I do the bad thing, it will be solely because I want to. Therefore I shall do the bad, because it is my freedom to do so.

Malachi Martin, depicting the struggle of a man to free himself from possession, gives the best description I know of the free human will in action:

All at once he knew what that strength was. It was his will. His autonomous will. He himself as a freely-choosing being. With a sidelong glance of his mind, he dismissed once and for all that fabric of mental illusions about psychological motivations, behavioural stimulations, rationales, mentalistic hedges, situational ethics, social loyalties and communal shibboleths. All was dross and already eaten up and disintegrated in the flames of this experience which still might consume him. Only his will remained. Only his freedom of spirit to choose held firm. Only the agony of free choice remained … afterwards he wondered for a long time how many real choices he had made freely in his life before that night. For it was that agony of choosing freely—totally freely—that was now his. Just for the sake of choosing. Without any outside stimuli. Without any background in memory. Without any push from acquired tastes and persuasions. Without any reason or cause or motive deciding his choice. Without any gravamen from a desire to live or die—for at this moment he was indifferent to both. He was, in a sense, like the donkey medieval philosophers had fantasized as helpless, immobilized, and destined to starve because it stood equidistant from two equivalent bales of hay and could not decide which one to approach and eat. Totally free choice … He had to choose. The freedom to accept or reject. A proposed step into a darkness … All seemed waiting on his next step. His own. Only his.

In my own view, the issue of free will, like so many great truths, is a paradox. On the one hand, free will is a reality. We can be free to choose without shibboleths or conditioning or many other factors. On the other hand, we cannot choose freedom. There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will—which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong either to God or the devil. This paradox was, of course, expressed by Christ when he said, Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, shall find it. It was also expressed by the hero, Dysert, in the final lines of Peter Shaffer's play Equus: I cannot call it ordained of God: I can't get that far. I will, however, pay it so much homage. There is now in my mouth this sharp chain. And it no longer comes out. As C. S. Lewis put it, There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. I suppose the only true state of freedom is to stand exactly halfway between God and the devil, uncommitted either to goodness or to utter selfishness. But that freedom is to be torn apart. It is intolerable. As Martin indicates, we must choose. One enslavement or the other.

It is fitting that at the conclusion of this section dealing with concepts from the science of psychology we should be left face-to-face with the notion of will. We have considered various possible factors in the genesis of human evil. I do not think we need to pick one as the right one and discard the others. There is a rule in psychiatry that all significant psychological problems are overdetermined—that is, that they have more than one and usually many different causes, just as plants will often have many roots. The problem of evil, I am sure, is no exception. But it is good to remember that among these factors is the mysterious freedom of the human will.