LitArk » Books » Religion

Kellerman - Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior

Here you can read online Kellerman - Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2014, publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior
Author:
Kellerman / Henry
Publisher:
Springer International Publishing, Cham
Genre:
Books / Religion
Year:
2014
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

For all our knowledge of psychopathology and sociopathology--and despite endless examinations of abuse and torture, mass murder and genocide--we still dont have a real handle on why evil exists, where it derives from, or why it is so ubiquitous.

A compelling synthesis of diverse schools of thought, PsychoanalysisofEvil identifies the mental infrastructure of evil and deciphers its path from vile intent to malignant deeds. Evil is defined as manufactured in the psyche: the acting out of repressed wishes stemming from a toxic mix of harmful early experiences such as abuse and neglect, profound anger, negative personality factors, and mechanisms such as projection. This analysis brings startling clarity to seemingly familiar territory, that is, persons and events widely perceived as evil. Strongly implied in this far-reaching understanding is a call for more accurate forms of intervention and prevention as the author:

Reviews representations of evil from theological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic sources.
Locates the construction of evil in psychodynamic aspects of the psyche.
Translates vague abstractions of evil into recognizable concepts.
Exemplifies this theory with the lives and atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.
Applies psychoanalytic perspective to the genocides in Turkey, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Rwanda.
Revisits Hannah Arendts concept of the banality of evil.

PsychoanalysisofEvil holds a unique position in the literature and will gather considerable interest among readers in social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and political anthropology. Historians of mass conflict should find it instructive as well.

Kellerman: author's other books

Who wrote Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Part I
The Garden

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Henry Kellerman Psychoanalysis of Evil SpringerBriefs in Psychology 10.1007/978-3-319-07392-7_1

1. Entering the Domain of Evil

Henry Kellerman 1

(1)

The Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society, Inc., New York, NY, USA

Henry Kellerman

Email:

Keywords

Pleasure Good and evil Wish Symptom Fairness Demon Genocide Nazi Double-self Acting-out Narcissism Paradise Hedonism Serpent Superego Infrastructure of evil

Introduction

In examining evil from a philosophical vantage point, Taylor (2000), in his book Good and Evil , first considers what is traditionally among philosophers considered to be good. In this way, Taylor approaches the issue of evil essentially by the process of identifying basic elements of good, that is, Taylor states that philosophical conceptions of what is good specifically include the consideration of virtue, pleasure , and happiness (p. 19). He means that we need to understand virtue, pleasure, and happiness to get to the true meaning of what good means. As a specific start, the Greeks identified good, with well-being.

To start off then, pleasure and virtue are surprisingly not at all necessarily in lockstep or inevitably reciprocal and, in addition, perhaps more surprisingly, pleasure and virtue are not entirely, absolutely, or even necessarily always considered to be good. The Greeks even added a qualifier to this conflation of nouns (pleasure and virtue) by considering that being good ultimately relates to being efficient especially with respect to function. The idea of efficiency and function in such thinking concerns the satisfaction of goals. Taylor then joins it all by indicating that these early Greek thinkers (in the time of Socrates) correlated the satisfaction of goals, with the adjective good. Such an alignment means that goal satisfaction is a synonym for the gratified wish .

Of course it is obvious that obtaining pleasure by satisfying the wish (the goal) is at times not at all correlated to virtue. As a matter of fact, gratified wishes probably are as much negatively correlated to virtue as they are possibly positively correlated. This brings us to an important notion of contemporary language usage in the formulation of psychopathological concepts. For example, in psychoanalytic thinking, goals and ends along with satisfaction are typically assessed, as hinted, with respect to the persons wish , that is, getting ones goal met, or satisfying ends is really another way of referring to a principle of the psyche that in itself has far-reaching implications. This principle of the psyche, first proposed by Freud (1926), is also explored in many publications including in several of my publications (Kellerman 2007; 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2014). It is a principle that translates goals and ends to this rather central idea of wishes .

Since we are all wish -soaked creatures, the idea is that the pleasure principle (the mother of the wish) captures our undivided attention. It is the pleasure principle represented by the wish that conflates the idea of efficiency, goals, and ends discussed in the tradition of language usage as for example among early Greek philosophers. Then, again, as an encrypted code (particularly operationalized in a persons psyche), the ideas of efficiency, goals, and ends are rendered mostly by psychoanalysts as encrypted messages translated into the pleasure principles chief derivative representative: that of the wish .

What Freud proposed was that although in life wishes are frequently thwarted or unrequited, nevertheless:

In the psyche, no wish will ever be denied.

In the psyche, wishes always prevail. However, the trick of the psyche is that such wishes prevail in disguise, in the form of psychological/emotional symptoms that come to represent each wish . Therefore, in the psyche, wishes become expressed symbolically as symptomsas

psychological/emotional symptoms . This is why Freud proclaimed that this sort of symbolic representation of the wish -as-symptom is correspondingly why we all love our symptomseven those that are painfulbecause the symptom represents our wish fully gratified, albeit in symbolic form.

In addition, the Greeks associated goodness with rationality and considered virtue and rationality also to be intimately connected. Nevertheless, and perhaps even not so surprisingly, it seems quite clear in the light of historical hindsight that such a correlation of virtue and rationality is not at all rational, that is, that things can be done with rather perfect rational acuity, and yet these rational things can still be of a negative or nefarious nature, and not at all virtuous. It is not simply that vice is the corruption of reason. There are times when the corruption of reason is also exemplified in an evil attempt to rescue the so-called civil social fabric. This can be seen in the highly rational strategies in all sorts of genocides where certainly it would have been a good thing for any nefarious strategic genocidal reason and rationality to be overturnedto have that genocide be completely contaminated in order to end the genocide.

Therefore, is good always good and never evil?

Is Good Always Good and Never Evil?

Taylor also cites Socrates insofar as Socrates claimed that if one knows good then that person can never choose evil (p. 76). On the face of it, such a statement seems noble and even correct. Yet, the statement seems clearly not sufficiently scrutinized by Socrates. The point is that it depends on who it is that is proclaiming the goodness. From a perpetrators genocidal point of view, the victim-target is an entirely justified target, that is, to eliminate the one judged to be subhuman is considered good by the accuser or by the accusers group and yet we see that in this particular example, good and evil can be one and the samejust as Paradise and the Serpent are also apparently one and the samehinging on whether ones wish is gratified or thwarted. Even then, it depends on whether the wish is reflective of the aggressors wish or of the wish of the victim. If the aggressor/oppressors wish is gratified, it would simply mean that the Serpent triumphs in Paradise. If the victim (the one who is discriminated against) prevails, then Paradise remains pure and the Serpent is nullified.

Socrates apparently felt that no one ever voluntarily chooses evil (Taylor 2000, p. 77). In the contemporary literature of social theoryespecially for example, in the social psychiatric literature, Robert J. Lifton (1979), in his towering study of the underpinnings of evil ( The Broken Connection )analyzes in detail this entire issue of the vicissitudes of good and evil, Liften enlarges the issue by introducing the idea of death imagery. This entire analysis by Lifton leads to a more elaborate understanding of Socratess pronouncement that no one ever voluntarily chooses evil.

Again, of course, it seems that Socrates was not quite on his game with the proposition that no one ever chooses evil. This is seemingly a nave yet hopeful peroration on the issue of evil. For example, I have pointed out elsewhere (Kellerman 2013), that Dennis Rader, who was for 30 years a member of the Christ Lutheran Church, serving as President of its Congressional Council, took pleasure in strangling women to death while simultaneously participating in sustained devotional supplication at his church (p. 29). Rader knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what good meant and yet he chose evil (while also knowing what evil meant). He knew what he was doing was wrong, immoral, cruel, sadistic, and monstrous, and yet he infused all of it within what he chose he wanted ( wished ). He wished for pleasure so then pleasure triumphed over any other consideration. In this sense, Dennis Rader voluntarily knowing (or conscious of what he was doing and what he wanted), seemsno matter how one turns itto have chosen evil in the face of knowing the difference between good and bad!

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior»

Look at similar books to Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

K Parker

Evil for Evil

Ernie Rohrbacher

Evil: A Concept in Crisis

Lynne Fallwell

Gender and the Representation of Evil

Christopher T. Burris

Evil in Mind: The Psychology of Harming Others

Rachman

Elizabeth Severn: The Evil Genius of Psychoanalysis

Michael H. Stone

The Anatomy of Evil

Dews

The Idea of Evil

Bernstein

The Abuse of Evil The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11

Michael H. Stone

The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime

Rodney Castleden

The Worlds Most Evil People. The Epitome of Evil

Richard J. Bernstein

The Abuse of Evil. The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11

Adam Morton

On evil

Reviews about «Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior»

Discussion, reviews of the book Psychoanalysis of evil : perspectives on destructive behavior and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.