Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung on “The Problem of Evil”

The “Problem of Evil” is indelibly inscribed into the Table of Contents of our collective memory, conscious and unconscious, and this chapter was deeply read and commented upon by both C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann. It is a critical topic not only for theologians, philosophical ethicists, artists (of all kinds), criminologists, and cultural historians, but also, and today perhaps most of all, for psychologists because of the question of human motivation to commit evil acts.

Perhaps it was due to the excessively cruel times they lived in that Jung and Neumann focused on this issue in their writings with such laser-like energy. Yet it is also an age-old question that has inspired agonized reflections throughout recorded history: What is evil, whence does it come, and how are we to deal with it? These same questions are no less with us today, although our answers tend to be less mythological than in ancient times and more sociological, philosophical, political or psychological (Curatorium, 1967). For psychology, the problem of evil brings the issue of ethics front and center.

Ethics is a product of human consciousness attempting to confront the problem of evil and to contain it by defining it, setting up boundaries for behavior, proposing horizons and perspectives from a variety of cultural settings, and perhaps setting up some specific rules of behavior. The elaboration of ethics is an on-going human project because times and cultural settings change and evolve, which create new issues to consider. Psychology may be able to contribute some insights into the motivation and the psychic roots of evil as defined by ethical contructs, and it may also offer some suggestions for how to deal with evil on an individual and a social/collective level by considering levels of responsibility for actions deemed to be evil and designing methods of containment, punishment, and conditions of atonement that follow a judgment of evil-doing.

A question for us as depth psychologists is: Can ethics be grounded in psychology as we understand it, or is ethics a matter purely of legal considerations, therefore wholly conscious, culturally conditioned, and relative or even arbitrary? Traditionally, ethics has been embedded in mythological and theological foundations and has been seen as derivative from such things as “the will of God, or the gods.” In modernity, this does not wash any longer. We do not live in an age of faith. Yet there is a need for ethics, and the conviction that evil exists continues to occupy us. So, can ethics be rooted in psychological perspectives as it once was in mythological and theological ones? This would be a point for discussion between depth psychology on the one side and theology, philosophy, criminology and other social sciences, as well as neurobiology, on the other.

My attempt at establishing a depth psychological basis for ethics in psychology is represented in Solar Conscience/Lunar Conscience, in which I argue for an archetypal ground for an ethical attitude in two types of innate conscience. In other words, I believe that humans are innately ethical creatures, but not only so: they are also innately given to the opposite, to violations of the laws written in their hearts, and when this force takes charge people become possessed by evil. This is the great theme of Gnosticism and symbolized by the monster god, Yaldabaoth (Stein, 2014, p. 87). This is a problem of inherent opposites embedded in the human psyche itself and therefore not resolvable on a rational and purely conscious level, try as we might to master the problem of evil.

From a depth psychological viewpoint, the problem of evil is connected to the perception that it is largely controlled by unconscious factors. With the exception of out-and-out psychopaths, evil-doing is something people generally try to avoid, at least to some extent. Most people want to be on the side of the good, or at least seen to be so, not on the side of evil. So the enactment of evil is generally much more subtle and insidious than it is consciously malicious. One may in all good conscience serve evil while consciously intending to do good by obeying an evil law, for instance. Evil operates and may be done in perfect innocence, with good intentions and a sense of civic responsibility.

Jesus on the cross praying, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), speaks to this point. Evil’s will is carried out unknowingly and with a sense of duty. It is invisible. Evil uses the ego’s talents, its will, and its powers, to do its malicious work. The ego rationalizes marvelously and indeed infinitely, convinced by its own deceptions and rhetoric. When the ego serves evil, whose hand in the matter is kept hidden, even the "law," which speaks ostensibly for truth and justice, may itself be used to subvert those very values. The ego is unconsciously complicit in this and puts forward the law to cover the handiwork of evil. This is the problem of evil as seen from the perspective of depth psychology.

Erich Neumann brilliantly describes this psychological problem of consciously identifying with the good and remaining unconscious of the evil within ourselves in his book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. An individual or a community identifies itself wholly with the good and projects evil outward, he writes and thus remains free from guilt in consciousness no matter what atrocities might be performed against the perceived “evil other.” This is the well-known scapegoat phenomenon (Neumann, 1969, pp. 50ff.). Neumann’s solution as described in the New Ethic is for the individual or the community to become aware of the shadow within, to take it fully into account in decision-making and behavior, and to consider all the consequences of subsequent actions for oneself and for others.

It is a tall order. The “new ethic” takes the normal ethical position of careful and scrupulous obedience to a moral tradition a step further by making evil conscious as an inner factor and not projecting it exclusively onto the malefactor. This would apply to individuals and collectives (corporations, nations, etc.) alike. It says: Consider your own shadow – your hidden agenda, your most devious motives, your secret desires and inclinations – before you criticize, attack, or condemn the other. This demands the onerous psychological work of recognizing and accepting one’s own shadow as a part of one’s selfhood, thereby relativizing naive claims to purity and virtuous righteousness. Simply being a victim is not good enough to justify retaliatory shadow enactments and revenge. Before claiming the high ground, he says, consider your own shadowy regions. In fact, psychologically considered, there is no high ground without a low ground right beside it.

Jung’s analysis of the problem of evil is somewhat different, although on many points in agreement with Neumann’s. “One of the toughest roots of all evil is unconsciousness,” Jung writes in 1948. After reading Neumann’s New Ethic and praising it, “and I could wish that the saying of Jesus, ‘Man, if thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the law,’ were still in the gospels, even though it has only one authentic source. It might well be the motto for a new morality” (Jung, 1948, par. 291). Here we see Jung advocating with Neumann for a “new morality” based on the same idea of making the unconscious shadow conscious before acting. Jung, however, is skeptical about the human capacity for sustaining such a level of consciousness; moreover, in Answer to Job, his later confrontation with the problem of evil as an archetypal matter, he tells us why even such consciousness of the personal shadow would be insufficient for the absolute solution to the problem of evil. Something more is needed. What would that be?

The background of both Neumann’s and Jung’s reflections on the problem of evil in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s is the grave situation in Europe - the German “schizophrenic episode” as Neumann calls it (Jung-Neumann, 2015, p. 140); the collective state of “possession” (Ergrifenheit) in Germany by the archaic Germanic god, Wotan, as Jung describes it (Jung, 1936, par. 386); the catastrophic aftermath of war and the horrors of the holocaust; the Stalinist atrocities in Russia; and the threat of atomic warfare as the West faced off with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. How to understand this extraordinary rupture in moral consciousness in modern culture and history on a collective level, and how to manage evil on the personal and the collective level – these were the enormous questions that preoccupied them. The proposals they came up with are highly relevant today, too, and will be for as long as humans have to struggle with the problem of evil, which means most likely forever, or as long as human beings as we know ourselves and our psychology continue to exist.

The problem of evil, as we consider it in psychology, results from the problem of opposites built into our very nature. In the course of personality development, the self becomes divided. Ego-consciousness necessarily separates itself out from the original wholeness of the personality as given in the primal self, and it leaves behind in the shadow all the rejected and unacceptable tendencies and everything else that cannot be integrated into this small territory of the psyche that we reference as our personal identity, whether personal or collective. Thus, a counter-will takes form in the psychic system: the one side strives in a certain direction, usually toward attachment to others and adaptation to environmental conditions, while the other goes in a very different one, namely toward isolation and naked self-assertion. On one side we are family people and decent citizens, on the other egoistic monsters and criminals. Or vice versa. This is why we have a secret alliance with the opposite other and collude with the shadow enactments of others, sometimes even cheering them on. The more tension one places on the system by emphasizing the positive features of the conscious side over the negative features of the unconscious shadow, the more the split deepens and thus creates neurotic conflicts, increases the strength of defenses, such as projection, and exacerbates the differences until the one is all light and the other all dark. This sets up the condition for enactments where evil uses the personal shadow to do its will, all the while remaining hidden and unconscious to the doer.

Neumann’s thesis is that this problem can be overcome or at least greatly ameliorated by making the shadow conscious and thereby defusing the power of evil. Jung is not so sure. Evil may be beyond human capacities of conscious containment by this means. This is a point of disagreement between them.

In a late letter, dated 3 June 1957, Jung writes to Neumann:

In relation to the so-called New Ethic we are basically quite in agreement, but I prefer to express this delicate problem in a rather different language. It is not really a question of a “new” ethic. Evil is and always remains the thing one knows one should not do. Man overestimates himself unfortunately in this respect: he thinks it is within his discretion to intend good or evil. He can persuade himself of this, but in reality he is, in view of the greatness of these opposites, simply too small and too unconscious to be able to choose the one or the other in free will and under all circumstances. It is much more the case that he does or does not do the good that he would like to for overwhelming reasons, and that in the same way, evil just happens to him like misfortune.

                                                                                                (Jung-Neumann, 2015, p. 327)

Jung thinks that Neumann is overestimating the capacities of human consciousness in his description of the “new ethic.” Evil is so large and so insidious a force that human consciousness is incapable of encompassing it and escaping its manipulations. We must remember that Jung thought of evil as an archetypal and collective power and not only a personal shadow feature of the personality. Evil is a force with a personality like Satan that is transpersonal and vastly superior to the ego’s ability to know or understand its insidious ways. Always we are tricked by it into doing that which we would not do and not doing that which we would do.

When speaking of the problem of evil, Jung is thinking of Goethe’s Mephisto, of the Antichrist of Christian theology, of Satan in the Book of Job, and other such archetypal figures, and not only or even primarily of the shadow material that is housed in the complexes of the personal unconscious. Evil draws on the power of instinct and archetype and is conceptualized by Jung as an inherent aspect of the self, as a kind of autonomous spiritual force, just as goodness is. They are a pair of opposites resident in the self: Christ and anti-Christ.

For Jung, as he writes in Answer to Job, human consciousness (represented by the figure of Job) may be an instrument for bringing about a reduction of archetypal evil by instigating a development in the Self (represented by Yahweh), but the transformation must be carried out above the ego’s head, so to speak, that is, by the Self in its own progressive unfolding and internal integration process. The problem of evil is just too big for humans to solve by means of their frail conscious powers, as important as consciousness is in instigating evolution in the self. Thus, becoming conscious of the shadow and taking it into account in our decisions and actions will not place us beyond enactments of evil. Humans will always be vulnerable to the wiles and power of the evil one. So, Jung.

Neumann answers Jung’s letter a few days later. In his reply, he tells Jung of an experience in active imagination that lay at the source of his work on ethics and the problem of evil. The New Ethic was the attempt to process a series of phantasies that roughly corresponded, time-wise, with the exterminations of the Jews, and in which the problem of evil and justice was being tossed around in him.

I am still gnawing away at these images at the end of which, in brief, stands the following. I seemed to be commissioned to kill the ape-man in the profound primal hole. As I approached him, he was hanging, by night, sleeping on the cross above the abyss, but his—crooked—single eye was staring into the depths of this abyss. While it at first seemed that I was supposed to blind him, I all of a sudden grasped his “innocence,” his dependence on the single eye of the Godhead [my italics], which was experiencing the depths through him, which was a human eye. Then, very abridged, I sank down in opposite this single eye, jumped into the abyss, but was caught by the Godhead, which carried me on the “wings of his heart.” After that, this single eye opposite the ape-man closed and it opened on my forehead. (Bit difficult to write this, but what should one do.) Working outward from the attempt to process this happening, I arrived at The New Ethic. For me, since then, the world looks different. Your formulations in the letter are also valid for me, but they do not go far enough.

(Jung-Neumann, 2015, p. 331)

Neumann’s moving account of the source of his thinking about the problem of evil and a “new ethic,” which emerged in the period of maximum threat to the Jewish people, answers Jung on a level that seems to go far beyond his more rational theses in New Ethic. I surmise that this letter brought a new level of respect to Jung’s already high estimation of his most gifted student, for he writes back to Neumann that he is changing some paragraphs in a paper he was writing on the problem of conscience at the time

(Jung-Neumann, 2015, p. 334).

In his account of this active imagination, Neumann reveals his ultimately decisive degree of faith in God. He is supposed to kill the ape-man and finds this primitive being (a classic shadow image) staring into the primal hole, an abyss of evil. The ape-man itself is innocent, however, as he discovers when he sees him staring down through the eye of the Godhead, which is at the same time a human eye. God is using the eye placed in the primitive ape-man to look into the depths (to become conscious of His own depths). Then the narrator jumps into the abyss himself! This is a remarkable “leap of faith,” as made famous by Kierkegaard, and as with Abraham, about whom Kierkegaard is writing as the great model for the man of faith, there is a divine intervention, and he is caught and carried on the “wings of his heart.” Neumann says that this experience transformed him and gave him the confidence he needed to find a solution to the problem of evil: “For me, since then, the world looks different.”

There is in Neumann’s writing a kind of rapturous embrace of evil as though by embracing it he is also embracing God, as though evil is a part of God and this is a path to being near to God’s will:

[A]s I see it, I do not fall, but jump, and I know that the danger exists that I will die, but my prayer goes that “wings of the heart” may hold me. This means that I am, in my action, within and not outside of the Godhead, because it is not about an action of the ego, but about a happening that I must hand myself over to. If the issue of “Job” is relevant, according to which the Godhead wishes to come to consciousness, an aspect of its objectivity is evident, then I have to live with the single eye of the Godhead and also to experience the darkness of the abyss. But then evil is not a sin, but part of the world to be experienced.

(Jung-Neumann, 2015, p. 332)

The leap is a mystical moment of encounter and realization, and this ultimately leads to complete acceptance of reality as it unfolds before us in history. This is Neumann’s solution to the problem of evil. Evil is a part of God, and so paradoxically by participating in history, even if evil-doing is part of it, humans are participating in God’s will. I believe that when Jung read this, he realized that he was dealing with a human being of profound and bold religious imagination and intuitions quite similar to his own.

Jung had been preoccupied with the problem of evil and ethics from very early on in his professional life. In part, this was due to his friendly but quite sharp exchanges with religious professionals like his Zurich friend, Adolf Keller, the pastor of the St. Peter’s church in Zurich and a founder of the World Council of Churches (Jehle-Wildberger, 2014). Jung was often challenged by his religiously-minded colleagues about the ethics of individuation, and he had to formulate a response to this question. It touched upon the question of responsibility, to oneself, to others, and to the social world. Is individuation itself morally defensible? The argument that it is not has been made by some of his critics, such as Martin Buber.

In Answer to Job, written in a feverish few months during a mild illness in early 1951, Jung takes up the problem of evil in both a highly personal way but also speaking to and for all of Christendom. He offers a stinging critique of Christianity and its cultural effects in history. Christianity, by one-sidedly supporting and affirming the good (“God is light and in Him there is no darkness”) and denying the reality of evil in the pernicious (to Jung) doctrine of evil as privatio boni (absence of good) and by relegating Satan to eternal damnation, in the end split good and evil even further apart than it had been heretofore, and this played into the hands of Evil, paradoxically. Identifying itself with the good, Christianity projected evil outward (onto the Jews, among others), just as Neumann describes the old ethic in his “new ethic” book, and now, “after the catastrophe” of WWII and the tragic breakdown of moral fabric in the 20th century, it must answer for its dogmatic choices.

To solve the problem of evil in the Christian theological set-up, Jung proposes a further step in the evolution of Christian doctrine and theology – namely, the integration of evil into the Godhead. This would overcome the split and draw evil into a more realistic relationship with the equally archetypal good where dialogue and mutual effects would be possible. This is something already suggested in Neumann’s New Ethic and strongly advocated in his later letter to Jung in which he describes the origins of his work. Evil must be integrated into the whole, Jung is saying, though, that a process of integration must take place in the pleromatic state, in the Godhead, which could then be reflected in theological dogmas. Dogma does not create the God image of a religion; it reflects it. Mankind can participate in this only to a degree, perhaps like Job stimulating the development through greater consciousness (through the “eye of the Godhead” in a human frame, as shown in Neumann’s active imagination).

Is this possible? At the end of his letter to Neumann in 1957, Jung writes: “I feel myself very uncertain in relation to the question of pessimism and optimism and must leave the solution to fate. The only one who could decide this dilemma, that is dear God himself, has withheld his answer from me so far.” Then he goes on to quote from Candide: “Hopefully you are well dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles. Tous cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultivar notre jardin” (Jung-Neumann, 2015, pp. 329-30). As ever, Jung is ironical when speaking of God (Neumann had pointed this out to him already when he first read the draft of Answer to Job), and so he remained undecided. Unlike Neumann, he was not carried on “the wings of his [i.e., God’s] heart.”

Will the problem of evil ever be solved? Will good prevail over evil by integrating it into the larger whole? Or will evil prevail by remaining outside the whole and causing endless trouble from this position as outsider to the Godhead? In the end, each of us is left with this question. Neumann seems to cast his ballot on the side of the faithful; Jung seems to remain skeptical, but perhaps hopeful, in a slightly ironic way.

References

Curatorium of C.G. Jung Institute (Ed.). (1967). Evil. R. Manheim and H. Nagel (trs.). Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press.

Jehle-Wildberger, M. (2014). C.G. Jung und Adolf Keller. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag.

Jung, C.G. (1948). “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity.” In Collected Works 11, paras. 169-295. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1969.

Jung, C.G. (1936). “Wotan.” In Collected Works 10, paras. 371-399. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Jung, C.G. (1952). “Answer to Job.” In Collected Works 11, paras. 553-758. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Jung, C.G. and Neumann, E. (2015). Analytical Psychology in Exile: The Correspondence between C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann. M. Liebscher (ed.) and H. McCartney (tr.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Neumann, E. (1969). Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. E. Rolfe (tr.). New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Stein, M. (1993). Solar Conscience/Lunar Conscience. Wilmette, IL.: Chiron Publications.

Stein, M. (2014). Minding the Self: Jungian Meditations on Contemporary Spirituality. London and New York: Routledge.