Abstract

This dissertation in pastoral psychology offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the theological and philosophical problem of evil, using Donald Winnicott's developmentally-oriented object relations theory. Philosophical and theological scholarship, both classical and contemporary, has identified two complementary dimensions of evil: the active disruption of a potential for good and the passive absence or lack of necessary good, However, the traditionally abstract and formal analyses of evil are generally divorced from the lived immediate experience of human wickedness and consequent suffering, and, as such, provide limited incentive to mitigate the effects of evil. ;An analysis of various theological, philosophical, literary and anthropological perspectives on evil reveals descriptive themes of theodicy and metaphysical conflict, of human limitation and finitude, of deprivation and destructiveness. Against this background the analysis of Winnicott's psychoanalytic writings discloses themes---aggression and destructiveness on the one hand, and deprivation on the other---that bear a remarkable resemblance to those considered in the traditional literature on evil. Winnicott provides perspectives by which evil may be intimated as something that evolves from missed connections between the baby's needs and inadequate parental response. In addition, he demonstrates how even minor mismatches between need and care, occurring both within and outside of the infant's awareness, have deleterious consequences for the child. ;Three implicit models of how the dynamics of evil unfold are identified in Winnicott's writings. These models illustrate patterns by which negative and positive evil, reflected in Winnicott's themes of deprivation and destructiveness, interact, and make concrete the mismatches between infant need and parental care which then become embedded in the person's self and eventuate in future wickedness. ;The study leads to a formulation of a pastoral psychological response as an attempt to mend the failures to meet the individual's needs, failures which were not repaired when they occurred in infancy. This response is made in terms of a dialectics of hope that both counters the structure of the dynamics of evil and opens up the prospect of alleviating at least some of its effects