Annual Meeting

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Understanding Evil

presented by Lionel Corbett, MD

Sunday, June 16, 2024, 11 am - 1 pm PDT (UTC - 7)

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This program will be recorded and made available publicly on our YouTube channel.

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This lecture will discuss the sources of evil from the point of view of both individual and social factors. We will compare traditional religious views of evil with psychological approaches. In particular, we will look at the developmental factors that predispose someone to evil behavior from the point of view of Jungian theory and psychoanalytic theory. We will discuss Jung’s notion of the dark side of the Self, or archetypal evil, and its relationship to the personal shadow.

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Lionel Corbett, MD, trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is a professor of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of seven books: Psyche and the Sacred: The Religious Function of the Psyche; The Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice; The Soul in Anguish: Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Suffering; Understanding Evil: A Guide for Psychotherapists; The God-Image: From Antiquity to Jung; and, his latest book, Jung’s Philosophy: Controversies, Quantum Mechanics, and the Self. He is the co-editor of four volumes of collected papers: Psyche's Stories; Depth Psychology, Meditations in the Field; Psychology at the Threshold; and Jung and Aging.

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Learning objectives:  

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• ​Differentiate Jung's approach to the problem of evil from theological approaches.

• Explain how early childhood abuse and trauma predisposes one to evil behavior later in life.

• Explain how psychoanalytic theory accounts for evil behavior.