ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and ’70s a romantic sensibility emphasising the themes of instinctual liberation, de-repression, and the validation and indulgence of narcissistic needs was influential in popular culture and psychoanalysis alike. Building on the work of H. M. Cleckley, R. D. Hare, and others, J. Reid Meloy has developed what he calls a psychoanalytic view of psychopathy. Conscience and superego insist upon our agency and hold us to account; often the superego does so to an irrational degree. In famously referring to “the banality of evil”, Hannah Arendt did not mean to suggest that evil is banal, only that certain of its perpetrators, thoughtless bureaucrats like Eichmann, are. Terry Eagleton associates the aching absence in the self, the inner deadness that the evil seek to inflict on the other, with the Freudian death drive. But Eagleton’s version of Thanatos is a long way from Sigmund Freud’s for whom it was a literal biologically-given drive to return to an inorganic state.
