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Confronting and coming to terms with the existential problem of evil is essential today.

Evil is inevitably one of life's "ultimate concerns."

Denying or minimizing the existential reality of evil in the world renders us even more vulnerable to it.

This post is Part 1 of a series.

In my view, the problem of human evil has, with few exceptions (see, for example, Jung, Frankl, Lifton, May, Milgram, Fromm, Peck, Becker, Baumeister, and Zimbardo, among others), been ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology but can no longer be denied or avoided without serious consequences. As C.G. Jung (1961) presciently put it, "Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. . . . We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us let alone what to pit against it." I propose that the perennial and increasingly ubiquitous problem of evil must be given its proper due in psychology and psychotherapy, placing it alongside isolation, meaninglessness, suffering, freedom, responsibility, spirituality, and death or mortality as one of life's "ultimate concerns" (see Yalom, 1980).

When evil strikes suddenly and unexpectedly in the form of mass shootings, psychopathic serial killings, racism, antisemitism, bullying, domestic violence, genocide, terrorism, fascism, or war, or in cataclysmic cosmic occurrences like cyclones, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, pandemics, floods, and tragic accidents that wreak untimely death, destruction, and suffering on multitudes of innocent beings, how can we constructively cope with it? Human suffering stemming from the trauma of evil takes myriad forms, such as grief, rage, sorrow, anxiety, alienation, guilt, and various neurotic or psychotic symptoms like depression, mania, delusions, hallucinations, etc.

Close encounters with evil can evoke an existential crisis. Such traumatic evils psychologically (and sometimes........

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