Psychoanalysts, philosophers, and theologians gathered over the weekend for a two-day conference on the topic of evil, sponsored by the Metropolitan Center for Mental Health and the Metropolitan Institute for Training in Psychoanalytic Psychoanalysis. Boston University professor and Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow gave the keynote address, saying “evil is arguably the most powerful word in the language.” It is also the most elusive, mysterious, and, he thought, the most dangerous. Evil, he said, can be used to describe genocide and to incite one.

“How do we approach evil? Who is best qualified? Is it better to talk to the theologian or policeman, archbishop or judge, or to a torturer?” said Mr. Morrow, author of “Evil: An Investigation” (Basic Books). “To call myself an amateur of evil would sound a little unwholesome,” he said, describing himself as “a student of evil.”

He recalled visiting Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, in 1992. Accompanied by Elie Wiesel, Mr. Morrow traveled past guards who were carrying knives and “dripping with grenade loops.” When Mr. Morrow and Mr. Wiesel met a rather theatrical-looking Mr. Karadzic, wearing a beautifully tailored suit, he insisted that he and the Serbs were the victims. Mr. Morrow likewise recalled the Balkan press kit that arrived under the door of his hotel that displayed the logic of “you should see what they do to us.”

Mr. Morrow described CBS radio personnel in Europe in 1937 and 1938 sending back reports of terrible things taking place in Europe and “some idiot in CBS headquarters saying, ‘wait, you’re not giving the other side.'” He said corporate headquarters told Edward R. Morrow “let’s hear it from Hitler’s side.”

He discussed the journalistic problem of knowing when one is looking at evil. He also gave the example of Eddie Adams, whose 1968 photo showed the South Vietnam police chief with a snub nose revolver blowing the brains out of a young Viet Cong man. After it appeared on the front page of newspapers worldwide, the photograph became a symbol of the war’s brutality. But Mr. Morrow said Adams was very regretful about the picture, since the executed man had just wiped out the entire family of the police chief’s best friend. If a photo of that had been published as well, Mr. Morrow said, it would have made things “more complicated.”

Mr. Morrow talked about Hannah Arendt’s description of evil as a fungus, very thin and deadly. He discussed the ordinariness of evil and recalled the horrific My Lai massacre where, amid the killing, a lunch break was called. Mr. Morrow also said sometimes what is described under initial shock as evil sometimes fades to later being described as “merely awful.” He mentioned the fear in the Washington area during the sniper scare as possibly an example of this.

Audience member and clinical psychologist Philip Spivey said he wanted to come away from the conference with a definition of evil. But the talk by Susan Neiman, author of “Evil in Modern Thought” (Princeton), set out to complicate any such task. In her book, she notes that trying to describe evil in a single formula risks being one-sided. Even the distinction between moral evils (what humans do to each other) and natural evils (catastrophic suffering from volcanoes or tsunamis) can be cast into doubt. Albert Camus, she pointed out, in writing a parable of the Nazis used the image of a plague.

In an afternoon panel on psychoanalysis and evil, Dr. Ana-Maria Rizzuto talked about the “domino effect of evil.” “Evil,” she said, is psychologically “contagious,” hatred and revenge are transgenerational, she said. She told of a man compelled to do to others what was done to him. She spoke of a man whose mother was “personally remote” after suffering loss of family in the Holocaust. Her son was sadistic to women: “I always hurt the one I like and I like it.” She said if he couldn’t make his mother respond to him, for him “no other woman would.”

“If we cannot injure the one who harmed us, we find a surrogate,” said Union Theological Seminary professor of psychiatry and religion Ann Ulanov, who said evil is never a solitary venture, it’s more like a contagion. She gave the notorious example of the murderous attack on Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in 1964 in Kew Gardens with little bystander intervention.

When one audience member brought up the fact that men appear to be the majority of aggressors, Ms. Ulanov maintained, “Evil has no gender.”

At the conference, Dr. Daniel Brenner, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, gave a presentation on evil at the movies. “Why do people pay money to see people cut to ribbons from a maniacal stalker?” he asked, acknowledging that there is something pleasurable about viewing destruction and violence.

He said there is power in the act of destruction. Just watch, he said, a 3-year-old playing with building blocks and the pleasure derived from knocking down what is built. He said evil onscreen can “teach us about the function of our own minds.”

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The New York Sun’s City Hall bureau chief, Dina Temple-Raston, spoke last week at Barnes & Noble about her book “Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption” (Free Press).

An audience member asked her to compare her experience writing this book with her earlier book, “A Death in Texas,” about the racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd in that state. Although there were, of course, many differences, she said, she noted a similarity: “I went to a village in southwest Rwanda called Mblizi, where we talked to what was basically left of the Tutsi population there. There was a guy named Claver. I asked him, ‘How did you and the Hutu get along before the genocide?’ He looked at me and said, ‘We always got along all right but we always knew they [the Hutu] were prejudiced.’ What amazed me about the quote was that it was word for word what somebody in the black community [in Jasper] had said to me about whites.”

Ms. Temple-Raston said, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in East Texas or East Africa, the same language is used to describe white-on-black racism as black-on-black prejudice.”