Dr Coline Covington, a member of the SAP, has recently published a book on the evils committed by “ordinary” people in different contexts
Evil is a word that is used to cover many of the horrors we hear or see every day in the media. After writing a regular column for The Week online for nearly a decade about current events, many of them covering atrocities committed by individuals or groups, I repeatedly asked myself the question, “How could anyone do something like that?”
I discovered that psychoanalytic theory only provides a partial answer to this question and in order to understand evil phenomena I needed to turn to other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, political philosophy, sociology and literature. Everyday Evils is my attempt to answer this important question through a synthesis of different perspectives.
Intending to make the unthinkable thinkable, I hope this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and anyone who has ever asked the question: “How could anyone do something like that?”
Coline Covington
