Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation. By C. Fred
Alford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 182p. $70.00.
What is evil, why do people do it, and what might restrict or remedy
its harms? C. Fred Alford's answers here derive from Melaine
Klein's ideas about the psychic lives of infants. Unfortunately, even
for a reader sympathetic to psychoanalytic approaches, his argument is
unpersuasive. Alford orchestrates interactions among his favorite
intellectual objects. In addition to Klein, these include St. Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Maritain, Wilfred Bion, D. W.
Winnicott, John Milton (Paradise Lost) and Sophocles
(Antigone). However, to an external other, often the salience of
his objects or their congruence appears more a function of Alford's
attachment to them than to their logical cogency. Furthermore, despite his
attempts to reconcile their disparities, his simultaneous use of
conflicting discourses of “natural” and
“narrative” render the epistemological and ethical status of
his “natural law” of reparation ambiguous. His treatment of
the political as merely a larger-scale version of the psychic obviates
unique qualities of and important differences between these spheres.