In this world, which is both kind and cruel to man, we human beings find ourselves supported by a complex physical, social, and psychological environment in a way we are only beginning to know. It is only in the past centuries, as man has come to study these intricate and interrelated elements of his environment, that he could really know the complexity and purposefulness in it that make possible the strange product known as conscious psychic life. In reacting to this total environment, man has called good those aspects that help him sustain his life and enjoy it fully and creatively. But there are also elements of this world around and within man that appear to be anything but helpful or creative. These destructive and disruptive aspects, which man calls evil, break in upon him in many ways. There are natural catastrophes that engulf us?earthquake, fire, flood, plague, famine. There are such social evils as war, murder, oppression by tyrants; there are poverty, social condemnation, and betrayal. And then there are the more personal and intimate evils that may or may not be associated with these others. Here we find physical and mental illness, and those more internal ills that have had to wait for their full bloom in our time, with our increased self-consciousness. With man's ability to control so many of the obvious, outer plagues, he has not found himself free, at peace; instead he has awakened to a host of new and intangible evils: to loneliness and loss of meaning, to anxiety and depression, to guilt, hostility, and compulsion and neurosis. As man has come to distinguish the good and evil in his environment, he has inevitably looked for ways to control the aspects of reality that threaten him. This search, in which the work of the psychiatrist is only the most recent endeavor, leads to the most basic question of our discussion : What ?s the nature of evil and from whence does it come? We find that there are three essentially different ways of approaching this question. In the first way, we see no connection between the misfortunes that happen to us, no malignant purpose or central cause. Both good and evil are