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This slim volume represents an informal research project, in which C. Fred Alford interviewed 20 men and 20 women, some 10 prison staff members, and approximately 18 prisoners in a maximum security institution to search out their concept of evil. The free informants, that is, those not imprisoned, were interviewed for about two hours and, with one exception, appeared to Alford not clinically disturbed. The prisoners, however, were very different. They had all been selected from those considered mentally ill and met once a week for approximately one year. Alford does not attempt to draw any statistical conclusions from this study, nor need any be drawn, since most of the time he is simply using the insights of his subjects to explore the range and extent of the human notion of evil. His writing has a rich quality that one often sees in psychoanalytically informed nonmedical people. That is, his approach is not medically reductionistic. He uses the ideas to explore the full range, extent, and implications of the subjects' responses instead of narrowly pursuing a medical taxonomy explainable by an unconscious algorithm.
Alford ranges widely through literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to characterize his concept of evil. He begins the preface with a quote from Goethe's Faustus, in many ways setting the scene for the ambiance of the book. As in Faustus, he constructs a complex dialogue between a human being, although more perceptive