We all know what evil looks like but what exactly is it? Is it the potential that exists within every human being to ‘do bad things’ or is it a supernatural force that can possess people and cause them to harm others? Is it both or none of these?
Mick Peelo visits Jim and Rose Callaly whose daughter Rachel was brutally murdered by her husband Joe O’Reilly in 2004. To this day they still believe that Joe contains within him the characteristics of evil. “I don’t think he has a conscience. Like when you look into his eyes there’s nothing there,” says Rose. Jim believes that … “He’s empty, he had nothing inside him. There’s something amiss in the brain or he may be possessed by someone. He arranged for Rose to find her body that day…that was pure evil.” But is Joe O’Reilly evil or is what he did evil? Mick talks to psychotherapist Christine Louise de Cannonville who has clinical and personal experience of Evil and its malevolence. She believes there are three faces of evil and they have their roots in narcissism, self love. There’s the narcissist, the malignant narcissist who is quintessentially evil and then there’s the psychopath, the most dangerous face of evil. With the help of neurologist, Dr Clare Kelly from Trinity College, Dublin, Mick discovers that the source of evil is a mental disorder, bad wiring in the brain, the result of brain damage and worse, a conscious choice made by people who know right from wrong? Can an MRI scan locate it in the brain? Is there an evil spot? If so, how did it get there?
Is it possible to get inside the criminal mind to find out what makes some people do the awful things they do? Mick meets Professor Colin Sumner, from the department of Criminology in University College Cork and attends one of his lectures on the sociology of Evil. “The roots of evil are actually quite simple. It’s in moral outrage. Moral outrage comes out of conflict situations. We’re digging into the social conditions rather than the psychological or any other conditions which bring about actions that we’d be morally outraged by.” Professor Sumner believes you can’t really blame one single individual, Hitler for the Holocaust. “You’re talking about layer upon layer of pathological social conditions which produced a terrible series of events which many of us regard as evil.”
Then Mick visits eminent and controversial psychiatrist Dr Ivor Browne to see if can he shed any light on the source of evil. He doesn’t believe it’s supernatural. “It only comes into existence when we fail to take responsibility for the negative side of ourselves. I’m thinking of Carl Jung’s notion of the Shadow, or the negative.” Ivor believes we often refuse to acknowledge the Shadow side of ourselves and project this negativity on to people we don’t like – that’s what the Nazis did with the Jews and the Church did in the Spanish Inquisition.
The one dissenting voice that Mick meets among all the others is that of Fr Pat Collins. He’s a Catholic priest and a trained psychologist who claims he has experience of dealing with evil spirits. He doesn’t rule out the human explanations of evil but thinks it’s utterly naïve of us to exclude the supernatural dimension. He claims that as belief in God declines the Evil One is exploiting the vulnerabilities of people today as he’s never seen before. “We are living in dangerous times. Be alert to the evil that is crouching in the shadows.” And just when you think that Fr Pat would say that wouldn’t he, given he’s a Catholic priest, Psychotherapist Christine Louise de Cannonville puts a spanner in the works when she tells Mick of her personal experience with the demonic!
________________________________________________________________________________
For Further information contact Mick Peelo, mob. 0879240227 or Mick.Peelo@rte.ie and Alan Robinson, mob. 087 2350531 or Alan.Robinson@rte.ie