ABSTRACT
The essence of evil in the psyche is the destruction of the good which is the creative and life-giving in our species. There can even be pleasure or satisfaction in evil since human beings have a vast capacity to indulge the appetites, sexual pleasures, desires, and aggressions. Badness and evil, perhaps better termed as human negativity, are as real as part of our nature as is love and goodness. Consciousness and the shadow tend to grow in parallel, especially as mankind moved from nature worship to patriarchal religions, which have extensive rules, laws, taboos, prohibition, and sins. The way to work with the shadow in psychotherapy is totally different to the traditional repressive stance of religion. The shadow in individual psychology is also the material repressed into the deeper psyche, not only by social structures and ideologies but also by automatic defence mechanisms that try to deal with the painful, repressed, or traumatic material in infancy and childhood.
