The Tyranny of Malice: Exploring the Dark Side of Character and Culture

With examples varied as Iago, John De Lorean, Margaret Thatcher and the IRA, Dr. Berke explores the driving forces behind unusually greedy, spiteful, and destructive behaviour. He also shows how envy, greed and jealousy beget universal impulses to wreak revenge and to seek conformity (for fear of the "evil eye"). Ingrained in our earliest experience, negative states of mind are an essential part of being human, Dr. Berke believes. He goes on to examine how malicious feelings are fostered and expressed in conflicts within families; and how they erupt onto the larger stage of society in vandalism and terrorism. Envy, greed and jealousy can also engender destructive tensions between nations - not least between wealthy, industrialized ones and those of the Third World. In what Dr. Berke calls "the politics of malice," countries both oppress their own citizens and foster aggressive the Holocaust being this centur's most devastating example. The overall purpose of his work is to develop a detailed understanding of our capacity for destruction, as well as for making good. As he demonstrates, when the negative sides of our emotional life are denied or ignored (due to fear or guilt) the positive sides suffer too, for love and hate are inextricably bound. In this bold and redeeming book, Dr. Berke shows us how gratitude, generosity, and compassion act as healing counterparts to the dark emotional forces that complicate our lives. Dr. Joseph Berke has lived and worked in England since 1965, practicing as an individual and family psychotherapist. After completing his medical training in New York, he came to London to advance his studies of the origin and treatment of schizophrenia. In 1970 he became the co-founder and director of the Arbours Association, which sponsors unique facilities including the Crisis Centre, where people in emotional distress can go for help and to live. Dr. Berke is co-author of the critically acclaimed "Mary Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness", as well as numerous other books and articles.

Berke's premise is that envy, greed and jealousy are the hidden engine of human behavior, forged in the crucible of interpersonal conflict between sibling and sibling, parents and children. These destructive impulses are said to ultimately find expression in competing nationalisms and global wars. It is a promising thesis, but this entertaining hodge-podge does not support it. Berke, a British doctor, crams in a wealth of intriguing material on advertising tactics, womb envy, the nurturing breast, phallic amulets, witches and fairy tales as archaic memories of childhood, Victorian attitudes toward child sexuality, and much else. Trenchant observations ("Ivan Boesky was proud of both his financial success and his greed") appear side-by-side with glib generalizations and oversimplifications (" . . . the whole of Genesis is essentially a discourse about sibling rivalry"). In discussing institutionalized envy, Berke betrays his own biases against "ingrateful" Third-World nations, trade unions and welfare recipients.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Berke explores the implications of unacknowledged envy, greed, and jealousy originating in latent feelings of inferiority. These malign influences range from invidious sibling rivalry to journalism's pandering to public envy of the successful and even to the group rancor of unbridled nationalism. But the dark imperative of aggressive envy is Berke's major focus; and the antidote is to acknowledge its narcissistic origins and to acknowledge our fundamental desire to admire. Though there is an extensive and valuable set of bibliographic notes, the book is a conglomeration of unsystematic miscellanea with too few conclusions. For larger collections. William Abrams, Portland State Univ. Lib., Ore.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.