Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation

Extract

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.