Following the recent incarcerations of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the murderer Ian Huntley in the UK I want to express a notion of how so called evil might manage to concentrate itself as it does. This is essentially a Jungian concept.

When there is a concentration of bad acts in any place at a particular time, either the actions of an individual or, as in the case of the Nazis, a regime, Jung’s analysis would suggest that the perpetrators have in some way become receptacles for an aggregate of their repressed psychic conditions - i.e. they become inheritors of all the dumped emotion of the wider group, its psychic garbage if you will.

According to Jung, these repressions take hold in the collective unconscious before re-appearing transformed as actual manifestations. There is no trace or obvious connection to the original source, no path that can be detected easily by simple means to lead back to the route of the problem. Only through intuition and speculative imagination can their process be identified.

Unfortunately unlike Einstein’s early hypotheses in science which evidence could in future prove or disprove, the same cannot be said for the Jungian perspective which has more in common with a belief system. It would be taken as a matter of faith and judged by how it contributed to the lives of those who adopted it.

For me it’s a fairly plausible account if not a provable one. But it’s also an imperative in the sense that it makes a recommendation for how to behave. It tells us that if every individual repressed less the darker side of character and actually integrated that side by accepting it and thereby shedding light on it, the resultant offending psychic energy wouldn’t be empowered in the collective realm from where it can gather momentum and seek out receptor personalities like Saddam or Huntley.

It’s an alternative notion this and requires lateral thought. I think it has contemporary merit in that it situates evil in ourselves and not in an external being with a separate identity as traditional religion would have it.