EVIL EXISTS. IT WALKS AMONG US

Beyond the Shadow and Rationalizations

Adriana Tanese Nogueira | Psychoanalyst and researcher of human nature | AELLA Institute (founder) | adrianatns@icloud.com | @cleoadriana

Evil exists.
Not as a metaphor, not as a late symbolic construction, nor as a mere side effect of trauma or misunderstanding. It exists as practice, as choice, as commitment.

Over the past decades, psychological language — especially the notion of the Shadow — has often come to function as a buffer against this recognition. In the name of integration, unprocessed impulses are justified; in the name of understanding, cruelty is romanticized; in the name of “the process,” destruction is excused.

The result is an anesthesia of consciousness.
Integration turns into permissiveness, and the pain of the “process” is interpreted as inevitable rather than as a warning that we are facing destructive forces that are ends in themselves. Since everything is symbolic — including pain — it is tolerated, explained away, endured. Even when it wounds.

This text arises from the recognition that the symbolic, when isolated and absolutized, ceases to illuminate and begins to protect what should instead be faced and transformed. When one remains within the symbolic longer than is necessary for its elaboration, one does not cross to the other side of reality. One becomes trapped in a convenient symbolic fiction that shields from naked truth — from concreteness with all its weight and pain.

At a certain point, insisting exclusively on symbolic interpretation becomes a sophisticated form of defense: an elegant and treacherous rationalization.

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