Apophis 

–Diane Stanley

The problem of evil is one of the most persistent themes in Jung’s writings. In his correspondence with Fr. Victor White, it comes to a head and leads directly to his critique of evil as privatio boni (the absence of good) in his controversial late work, Answer to Job.

   Jung found the Catholic doctrine of evil as privatio boni to be dangerously inadequate and morally offensive because it did not account for the active presence of evil in the psyche and in the world. And yet, Jung’s use of the term “shadow” in reference to evil suggests that evil lies precisely where light is absent. And a shadow is passive, not active.

What can we say about the shadow of passivity when evil abounds?

Murray Stein, Ph. D. lives and works in Switzerland, the home of Jungian psychology. He is a training and supervising analyst at the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in Zürich. Currently he is working on Volume 8 of his Collected Writings, to be titled “Psychology and Spirituality." 

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With the moral authority of both church leaders and politicians at an all-time low, people now look to psychology for guidance concerning their interior lives as well as their public lives. A rich source of such guidance is Erich Neumann, one of C. G. Jung’s most prestigious student associates, who fled Nazi Germany to live in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Surviving two world wars and the Holocaust, he published his first book in 1949 to help avoid even worse disasters in the future. His explanation of shadow projection as a central ingredient of war and racism sheds important light on today’s global disasters and suggests some possible solutions.

Father Otto Betler OSB studied theology at The Catholic University of America in the 1980s, was for seven years Novice Master of Europe's largest monastery of men, practices analytical psychology in Bavaria, and teaches at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zürich, Switzerland. His coming book, Analyzing the Church's Shadow–and Ours, revisits Neumann's "New Ethic" and will appear in 2024 from Texas A & M University Press.