ABSTRACT
Although psychoanalysts are seemingly not well placed to pronounce on the question of evil, since they seldom if ever treat criminal or seriously perverse patients, they nevertheless have the good fortune to investigate, systematically, with due involvement and the appropriate degree of distance, some of the boundary conditions entailed by destructive processes. The concept of evil, which traditionally involves a personal responsibility and guilt incompatible with the scientific vision of illness, has thus come to constitute an integral part of an explanation of mental pathology. If pleasure corresponds to the fulfilment of a wish, it is satisfaction, the discharge of the wishful tension, and also the cessation of pain and suffering. What causes pain and dissatisfaction are the unsatisfied wishes, which painfully accumulate and must therefore be discharged. Evil is therefore destructive hate which also corrupts the conscience. Cold destructiveness resembles a passionless murder: evil is insensitive to its own and others' pain.
