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Facing the Evil Within
an interview with John Sanford |
Ever since the tragedy of 9/11, America has seemed ever more convinced that all evil lies outside its borders, and only goodness within. In fact we initiated a war on Iraq predicated largely on that assumption — while most of the world looks askance on the US predilection for enforcing its notions of goodness far outside its borders. The ironies are plentiful: We threaten and attack other nations for harboring weapons of mass destruction while testing “superbombs” in public view, and we criticize the development of killing technologies in less powerful nations while remaining the #1 arms merchant to the world.
To depth psychologists, such contradictions are no surprise; in fact they characterize the human condition of carrying our own “shadow,” or evil within. While many may fear or resist recognizing their shadow, the fact is that it is a necessary process of psychological and spiritual growth, as well as the key to understanding and undoing evil itself. Psychologist Carl Jung once suggested that the most important political act any individual could undertake was to stop projecting his or her own shadow upon the world. But it is not a simple or short process, and the wisdom of those who have studied it is invaluable.
John Sanford is a Jungian analyst and Episcopalian priest who took on the questions of evil in several books including Jung and the Problem of Evil: The Strange Trial of Mr. Hyde. In the latter work, Sanford addressed the questions of psychological guilt and responsibility in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novelette, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which remains a classic and popular study of human evil as addressed in the modern Western psyche. Sanford’s conclusion is one that is only slowly dawning in our culture: that the staging of sanctimony is rehearsed in the devil’s workshop.
Sanford wrote his first book, Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language, while studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1962, and a few years later completed The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Sayings. By 1974 he had decided that his work should no longer be confined to a church environment, and he entered private practice as a Jungian analyst, while continuing to develop his interests in philosophy and history. Of his many books, his most successful has been Invisible Partners: How the Male and Female in Each of Us Affects Our Relationships. Sanford has retired from counseling and writing since this interview was conducted, but his insights into “the evil that men would do” seem more relevant than ever.
Stevenson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde metaphor has been such a powerful one for our society that I wonder if it marked a turning point for Western civilization — where our collective shadow entered a new phase, or became more identifiable. Do you think Stevenson recognized that our inner split was becoming more dramatic, or did he just pick up on the same old human story?
SANFORD: I think it’s probably the same old human story. I read a tremendous amount of history, which makes one realize that things have always been dreadful. If you ever conclude that we live in the worst of all possible ages, you can check the history books and find that’s probably not the case. People have always done horrible things to each other; I don’t think the human race today is better or worse than in previous eras.I think Stevenson just jumped the gun on Freud by about a decade. His story is a psychological jewel, and while almost everyone has heard of Jekyll and Hyde, very few people have actually read the novelette. The popularizations of Jekyll and Hyde definitely lost a lot of the finer points of the original, which is full of subtle psychological insights that lead me to regard Stevenson as a genius. He really recognized the shadow first, and essentially grasped the whole of depth psychology. He based the story on a dream, you know; he dreamt the most important scenes.
Jung said, “I would rather be whole than good,” a statement that would probably mystify many people. Why do most people fail to recognize the relationship between evil and excessive “goodness”?
SANFORD: This is really the problem of the ego and the shadow, a problem that’s most sharply discernible in the Christian tradition. In the Bible the differences between good and evil are sharply drawn: there’s God, who is good, and the Devil, who is evil. God desires human beings to be good, and evil is punished. The New Testament point of view is that if an individual gives in to evil and does evil things, then the soul is corrupted and destroyed; that is, a negative psychological process sets in. So there’s always held up to the Christian the goal or model of “being a good person,” and there’s something to be said for that.But originally the Christian tradition recognized that one carries an opposite within oneself. St. Paul said, “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” That’s the statement of a depth psychologist; he knew he had the shadow, and he thought only God could save him from such a condition. But knowing what his condition was sort of held things together.
Later, that in-depth perspective was lost and people simply felt compelled to identify with being good, or at least the pretense of being good. Doing that, you will quickly lose contact with the shadow. Also, somewhere along the line — it became obvious by the Middle Ages — the church made a very bad mistake. Now not only were some actions evil, but fantasies were evil, too. You were a bad person simply by having fantasies about evil; adultery was a sin, and thinking about adultery was a sin, too. Both had to be confessed and forgiven. As a result, people began to repress their fantasy life, and the shadow was driven even further underground. The split became greater.
Did this process parallel the loss of the feminine element in conventional religion?
SANFORD: Yes, I would say so. In feminine reality, contrasts are not so sharply seen and drawn. The masculine element sees things in bright sunlight; this is this and that is that. The feminine is like seeing in the moonlight; things kind of blend together, and they’re not so distinct from one another. The whole matter of the shadow is very subtle and complex; it’s not nearly as simple as the subject of good-and-evil may appear to be.So the feminine element would have mitigated this complete split of the shadow and the ego. Early on, the church was the leader in a sort of feminist movement, but it later became quite patriarchal. The ego and the shadow became progressively further apart, setting the stage for the Jekyll-and-Hyde phenomenon. If you study Christian history, you see the development quite clearly. Those people who professed to be doing very good things were leading the Inquisition, for instance.
Christians have no exclusive ownership of the shadow, of course. Everybody does horrible things. But the split is drawn quite starkly in the Christian tradition. The good thing that came out of all this was the return of depth psychology. Even though the church attempted to ban fantasies, it was still aware of the interior life, and has always valued introspection....
