The Case of ‘The Young Butler’. Pyschoanalytic Reflections regarding the Complexity of Evil.

Abstract

This article establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between several disciplines, including journalism, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The case analysis proposes the existence in individuals of a feared unconscious phantasy in which, under certain conditions, the individual seeks to avoid deep anxieties generated by contact with dead internal objects. The authors explore how submission to an authority of tyrannical characteristics may become a way of escaping these anxieties. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil is presented and analyzed as a means of understanding this mental process, leading to the notion that not thinking allows the avoidance of catastrophic emotions that have already been experienced in a traumatic infancy.