The Problem of Evil in the Analytic Process

America’s catastrophic losses on September 11, 2001, turn my thoughts to the biblical book of Job, a religious myth about a person in a moral developmental process. As the story opens, Job’s God is a giver of sons, daughters, flocks, and vineyards. Then suddenly, not unlike Othello testing Desdemona, Job’s familiar God transforms into a jealous lover who contrives a series of mad challenges to Job’s faithful devotion. Like Job, many Americans have been accustomed from childhood to interpret daily reality through a lens of belief in a benevolent God. But this worldview is strained by events such as the attack on the World Trade Center. The evil in the world weighs down the spirit; the youthful sense of invulnerability is gone; the bell tolls, not for another, but for the self. The biblical writer obviously has religious faith in mind but Job’s (and our) suffering also tests what a number of writers have called “human faith,” or a disposition toward meaning-making with regard to life events. For example, Winnicott speaks of the baby who is willing to go on living because of a (non-religious) faith in the mother’s goodness.

Is a psychoanalytic viewpoint an acceptable way to deal with discouragement and alienation due to sin and evil in the world? At the beginning of my own psychoanalysis, my analyst said to me that analysis has only two rules: every-

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thing has meaning and we always want to know more. This implies that the evil which we perceive that we do and which we perceive that others do has meaning for our self-analysis and that it does lie within the scope of psychoanalysis to deal with evil, sin, and moral alienation.

In the beginning, the analysand’s faith is not in the self, or in the goodness of life, but only in the potential goodness of the psychoanalytic process. For a substantial period of time, the analysand is able to go on living through faith in the analyst and the analytic process, just as the baby is able to go on living through faith in the mother. But eventually, the analysand figuratively removes the self from the analyst’s lap and sits companionably side by side with the analyst. From this position, the analysand poses to the analyst this conundrum: Do you see the evil that I see and what am I to make of it?

Most analysts consider it a strategic error to answer direct questions from the analysand about personal views. Yet for the analyst to remain both effective and mentally healthy, “being an observer/commentator” versus “being a participant” always remains in a dynamic tension. The observer/commentator analytic relationship is partly fictive: in truth, the analyst is also a fellow participant with the analysand in the struggle against evil. The analyst must always want to know more about his or her own intrapsychic processing of the evil in the self and in the world, as well as in the analysand’s material. It is my perception that these internal tasks are sometimes avoided because of the analyst’s fear of feeling helpless, of not having all the answers, or, at least, all the good theories.

Analysands often invoke defensively the great historical metaphors such as slavery, the Holocaust, or terrorism to keep the evil out there. Evil may also be recognized in known persons of current daily life but the analysand and analyst are perceived as personally free from it. However, as the process continues, attention turns to the evil within the analysand. In the immortal words of the comic strip character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” For some braver analysands, there is yet a third stage: attention turns to the potential for evil within the analyst. In reality, all human beings contain within them at least an attenuated potential for evil, for example, dissimulation or false altruism. The ability to tolerate the thought of evil in the analyst may be an achievement rather than an attack on the therapeutic process.

Whether or not the analysand reaches explicitly the question of the analyst’s evil, such evil belongs in the self-analysis of any analyst who is realistic. For example, let us consider wishes to exploit the analysand’s dependency by increasing sessions and income, or to use a talented or prominent analysand to build up the analyst’s own self-esteem, or to prolong unnecessarily an interesting treatment. The wise analyst is not blind to his or her own potential to sin against the analysand. If we pursue our analytic stance faithfully, what we hope for is a more nuanced understanding of evil and sin in self and others. At this point it becomes bearable and therefore possible to assume true responsibility for our own actions.

It has been heartening to see Americans both wanting to know the worldviews of Arab extremists who attacked them and being able to weigh extremist charges thoughtfully against their own moral standards. We have not been afraid to listen but neither have we been frightened into abdicating our own moral discernment process, even in the light of continuing threats. We have been able to recognize that we, like all human communities, are capable of both good and evil, and that we ourselves bear the ultimate responsibility for determining our ongoing moral way of being in the world.

In the conclusion of the Book of Job, there is an intriguing literary device. This important story about radical belief in the meaning of life and in the meaning of suffering ends without an explanation of either life or suffering. It ends, instead, in a personal encounter between Job and God, in which God refuses to communicate to Job what, as the omniscient, omnipotent deity of this story, God certainly knows. I find myself left with the conclusion that “the medium is the message”: that meaning-making resides within the struggle against evil, the refusal of each human spirit to succumb to the rule of evil, and not in a definitive explanation of evil, nor in the successful conquest of evil.

First we undertake to analyze ourselves by saying, “Everything has meaning and I always want to know more.” Then we come to a place where we say, “I want to know more but I accept not knowing all I wish to know, at least at this time. And I go on in hope toward the unknowable future.” From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, this stance is a healthy abdication of infantile omnipotence. In more theological terms, for the religious person, it is an expression of pietas, a reverent acceptance of God’s incomprehensible Otherness.

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