“The crucial thing is the story.”

That is what I claim in A Good Look at Evil, my book which holds that the person who would live a good life finds her own story while the evil-doer may be detected by her deliberate efforts to undermine and spoil the defining stories of her victim.

At the time I first presented the embryo of this idea to the colleagues at my philosophy department, they scoffed and said I was confusing real life with fiction. Some years later, the term “story” did become philosophically fashionable but now it meant that the very distinction between fact and fantasy was either not worth drawing or else undiscoverable.

But by “story” I did not mean something made up or indistinguishable from fiction. I meant the plotline of one’s real-life efforts to live meaningfully and optimally. 

Also, when I defined an evil-doer as someone who accurately discerns the narrative that the victim has been trying to live, I meant what really happens when a persistent attempt is made to harm a person in the worst way. 

These definitions (with the examples I gave) were useful because evil can be thwarted if its aim and pathway is discerned. Likewise targeted individuals can be forewarned or helped if the dangers they confront are accurately acknowledged.

By contrast, if someone sets out – deliberately and intelligently – to harm you, psychologizing determinism and relativism, however fashionable, will provide no help at all.

By the way, the sentence quoted at the top of this column is not mine but belongs to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961) in his final work, the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections. At the time of his finding about stories, he was working as a young assistant at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich. 

There was nothing story-like about the training he received there. Jung describes the world of his colleagues and professors as “a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, accidents without coherence, knowledge that shrank to ever smaller circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine.”

The patients in Jung’s section had been assigned labels without regard to the person’s story or any possibility of remission or cure. For one example, he describes the case of a young woman diagnosed as suffering from “schizophrenia or ‘dementia praecox.’” 

Starting with an initial discussion of her dreams, Jung “succeeded in uncovering her past … .” There was a story. Having first fallen for a wealthy and attractive young man whom she thought was not interested in her, she then settled for another, far less appealing man. By the time she learned from a friend that in fact she’d given up prematurely on her first love, she’d already had two children by the husband whom she’d never loved.

In consequence, she plunged into a depressed condition. At that point, while bathing her two children, she’d allowed each child to drink some tainted river water – the little girl from a sponge and the little boy from a drinking glass. Her favorite child, the little girl, had subsequently contracted typhoid fever and died. The boy remained unharmed. 

This young woman, Jung’s patient, had become insomniac and suicidal. Narcotics treated the first condition and she was under guard for the latter. Her prognosis had been deemed “poor.”

Despite professional risks involved, Jung decided to confront her with what he had discovered (from her dreams and other evidences) about her story. “To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was never again institutionalized.” 

I am not saying that every psychological problem can be treated by finding out what was sabotaged or self-sabotaged in the person’s story. There are, no doubt, biochemical conditions affecting the psyche that might best be meliorated chemically. I even know of one case where Freudian theory turned out to be the specific that cured a person’s profound sense of “Oedipal” guilt. Okay. Different cures for different ailments.

But I personally have talked two friends out of each one’s determination to commit suicide. How did I do that? By first finding out what the story was that lay back of each one’s decision and then considering together whether suicide would actually be the most effective way to solve the problem presented by her story.

For Carl Jung at least, effective therapy can only begin once one knows the patient’s story. 

“It is the patient’s secret,

the rock against which he is shattered.”

When the disrupted story, the self-spoiled story, or the stolen story can be – to the extent possible – repaired and restored – 

the shattering too

can safely be outlived.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | The Meanings of Our Lives | Must Our Stories Come Out Right? | How to Live One’s Story