Is the Devil Real? What Psychology Avoided for a Century

In July 2026, Issue No. 157 of Donne Chiesa Mondo — the monthly supplement of L'Osservatore Romano — appeared under the theme "The Devil Within Us." Within days it had generated a theological dispute reaching well beyond Italy. ZENIT News reported the core concern on July 7: contributors to the issue approached evil from angles that ranged across scripture, the social sciences, and cultural analysis, and critics argued that in covering that much ground, the issue never got around to affirming what the Church actually teaches about Satan as a real, personal adversary.[^1] The concern, as the report framed it, was less about what contributors affirmed than about what they did not. The controversy is not only about a single publication. It surfaces a question psychology has been avoiding for roughly a century: whether the figure the tradition calls the devil names something real, and what the clinical and pastoral consequences are of answering no.

Psychology's century-long dismissal

The dominant trajectory of Western psychology from Freud onward treated religious categories of evil as projections, mythological residue, or developmental artifacts. Freud framed the devil as an externalization of the ambivalent father-imago, useful for understanding folk belief but not for understanding reality. The tradition's adversary became, in clinical translation, the superego in costume. Mid-century humanistic and behavioral psychology largely agreed on the conclusion while changing the explanation. The devil was not the father-imago but the social environment, the conditioning history, the oppressive structure. The locus of evil was always somewhere interior to the human system or explainable by it. A genuinely external spiritual adversary did not fit the ontological furniture of the discipline's foundational assumptions, most of which were built by thinkers who regarded demonology as a relic of pre-Enlightenment credulity.

By the late twentieth century, the category of evil had migrated almost entirely into personality disorder, trauma sequelae, and neurobiological dysfunction. These explanations are not wrong about what they describe. The problem is what they exclude. When every experience a person names as spiritual attack or diabolical harassment is reclassified as a symptom of dissociation, psychosis, or religious ideation requiring correction, the clinician has made a philosophical commitment that is not itself clinically derived: that the category of an external spiritual adversary is empty.

The 2023 film Nefarious dramatizes that commitment's costs. A secular psychiatrist, tasked with evaluating a death-row inmate for competency to be executed, clings to his clinical framework even as the inmate demonstrates knowledge of the psychiatrist's private life that no natural explanation accounts for, along with physical capacities inconsistent with his stated condition. The psychiatrist's scientific commitments function not as neutral instruments of inquiry but as a prior ruling that forecloses one category of cause before the evidence is weighed. The film shows how that prior ruling is itself a kind of moral choice, one with consequences the clinician did not fully reckon.

What the tradition claims, and why it matters clinically

The Catechism of the Catholic Church presents Satan in paragraphs 391 through 395 as a fallen angel of genuine ontological reality, not a symbol of human disorder. The explicit identification of the "ancient serpent" with the devil appears most forcefully in the Book of Revelation. The doctrinal claim is not that every form of suffering has a diabolical cause, but that a personal adversary exists whose opposition to human flourishing is real, and that the human person therefore bears genuine moral responsibility in how they respond to that opposition.

That responsibility is the other side of the doctrine's clinical significance. Acknowledging a genuine external adversary is not an excuse for abdication. Temptation, however externally sourced, requires the person's own cooperation to take hold. Moral culpability remains. What the doctrine clarifies is the structure of the struggle: the person is not the sole author of every impulse toward disorder they experience, but they remain responsible for what they do with those impulses.

Royo Marín's account of spiritual combat treats sustained engagement with temptation — arguing with it, negotiating with it, staying in dialogue with it — as itself the danger, distinct from simply lacking the coping skills to resist it.[^2] This is not a claim that psychology is useless. It is a claim about the structure of certain kinds of vulnerability, that some of what the suffering person encounters exceeds what intrapsychic and interpersonal explanations alone can account for, while the person's own choices remain the decisive hinge. Aumann makes a complementary point in his own treatment of the ascetical life: a soul earnestly pursuing holiness draws real opposition, not merely internal resistance.[^3] That claim is coherent only if the adversary drawing that opposition is real. The target of that opposition is a person in relationship with God, not a projection generated by the person's own psychology.

The need for which forgiveness and exorcism are evidence

Two features of human experience have resisted psychology's reductionist trajectory more stubbornly than most: the need for genuine forgiveness and the persistence of what the Church calls diabolical obsession or possession.

The need for forgiveness is not simply the need for self-acceptance or the resolution of guilt feelings. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have experienced wrongdoing as requiring repair with something beyond themselves, not merely a readjustment of internal states. Psychology can describe the phenomenology of guilt and the relief that follows reconciliation. It has never satisfactorily explained why forgiveness requires a vertical dimension, why the person who has genuinely been absolved experiences something qualitatively different from the person who has merely been reassured. The Catholic tradition's answer is that the vertical dimension is real: sin is committed against God, forgiveness is received from God, and the adversary who exploits guilt is genuinely opposed to that reception.

The ministry of exorcism presents a harder case for the reductionist. The Church's rite is a structured pastoral intervention for a specific category of diabolical influence that is distinguished from mental illness, requiring medical evaluation prior to any consideration of exorcism and recognizing that most presentations attributed to the devil are psychological in origin. Those distinctions are themselves evidence of a sophisticated anthropology that takes both dimensions seriously rather than collapsing one into the other. A Catholic mental health framework grounded in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person holds that the human being is simultaneously body, psyche, and spirit, each dimension needing appropriate care.[^4] When psychology dismisses the exorcism literature entirely, it does not resolve the cases. It re-labels them. The question is whether the re-labeling is accurate or whether it imports an unexamined philosophical assumption about what kinds of causes are permissible.

The interpretive frame and its signal

Marinella Perroni's essay in Donne Chiesa Mondo argued that Genesis does not explicitly identify the serpent with the devil and that the association developed progressively through later Jewish tradition before being fully worked out in Christian interpretation.[^1] From a historical-critical standpoint this observation is not novel. What generated the controversy was not the historical observation itself but the interpretive frame: an essay of that kind, published in a Vatican-affiliated journal without accompanying doctrinal orientation, allows the silence to function as its own signal.

Ignatius of Loyola's rules for discernment of spirits offer a map of interior movements that assumes the full complexity of Catholic anthropology: genuine freedom, genuine woundedness, genuine grace, and genuine external influence. That map's usefulness depends on the doctrinal clarity that makes it coherent. A framework unable to say whether the adversary named is real or metaphorical cannot reliably guide anyone through the territory it claims to map.

Psychology's century of avoidance has not made the question go away. The need for forgiveness, the persistence of experiences that exceed intrapsychic explanation, and the ministry the Church has maintained across that century all point toward the conclusion the tradition has held: the adversary is real, the human person retains moral responsibility in every encounter with that adversary, and the clinical and pastoral costs of treating a personal reality as a metaphor fall on the people least equipped to carry them.

References

[^1]: Valentina di Giorgio, "Does the Devil Exist? The Vatican Newspaper Unnecessarily Suggests That He Does Not. A Controversy in the Middle of Summer," ZENIT News, July 7, 2026, zenit.org.

[^2]: Antonio Royo Marín, Teología de la Perfección Cristiana (Madrid: BAC, 1962), Libro I, cap. 3, on spiritual combat against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

[^3]: Jordan Aumann, OP, Spiritual Theology (London: Sheed & Ward, 1980), section on diabolical obsession.

[^4]: William Nordling, Paul C. Vitz, and Craig S. Titus, "Introduction to a Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person for Mental Health Practice," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Sterling, VA: Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 3–19.