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What does the cliche “Evil spelled backward is live” mean? Fred Alford wants to know, and with this provocative question he takes the reader on an intellectual journey which is, in his words, a “domestic anthropology” of evil.
Alford is an empiricist. He interviewed fifty “free informants” and spent a year conducting a weekly discussion group on evil with eighteen inmates at the maximum security prison in Patuxent, Maryland. His study sets this monograph apart from other works on evil, and will capture the attention of even the most jaded reader of polemics on the subject, such as myself.
The thesis of Alford's study is that the experience of evil is the experience of formless dread: the emotional knowledge that we are human, vulnerable, alone, and doomed to die. The doing of evil is the evacuation of this experience by intentionally inflicting it on others: a moment of fearless Faustian omnipotence for the evildoer.
Alford supports his thesis, and elegantly argues it, in a text that travels from Ogden's autistic-contiguous organization, through Klein's paranoid-schizoid position, to Kant's categorical imperative, with selected detours into the writings of Winnicott, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Pagels, as well as my own work. He puts flesh to this scholarly bone by quoting the views of his informants—within prison and outside—and discussing contemporary popular icons of evil, such as vampires and several high-profile criminals in the United States. This is, I suspect, but a small sample of Alford's intellectual reach, which surprised me since he is a professor of government and politics, and to my knowledge is neither a psychologist nor a psychoanalyst.
Alford is discussing, in large measure, a kind of projective identification: the placing into others of our own dread through acts of aggression, cruelty, and in some cases sadism, so that we do not