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.

Alford's definition of evil is clear. “Evil is an attack on the good precisely because it is good and not me or mine” (p. 75). Only Klein gets “the real meaning of evil” (p. 75). She alone understands that humans hate before we love and that our psychic lives are a battleground constituted by the constant war between the contradictory impulses of thanatos (death) and eros (love). In Klein's view, these impulses are innate and universal. Infants hate from birth because they want all that is good (originally the contents of the mother's breast) for themselves. Frustration of this desire is inevitable, and in response, the infant wants either to appropriate everything or destroy all that it cannot have. Only later does he or she realize that these impulses are directed toward a real person whom the child also loves. This realization throws the child into the “depressive position” in which he or she feels guilt for these destructive wishes. From love and guilt arises the impulse for reparation, the desire to compensate for harming the good object and to repair or restore its goodness.

Alford claims that all humans experience this hate and desire to destroy the good and that his singular contribution is insisting that natural law must take this pleasure in destruction into account. He also believes that the reparative impulse is innate. Hate causes the violence, destruction, and harm to goodness that pervade our interpersonal worlds, including politics. While the reparative impulse is equally innate, to serve as remedy at the political level, it must be augmented by thinking of a particular sort. Following Wilfred Bion, Alford calls this thinking “linking.” In thinking as linking, one is aware of one's actions and their effects on others. Cultural containment, “a combination of loving personal relationships and a decent social compact” (p. 6), enables cultivation of thinking. A decent social contract entails the provision of an adequate supply of the goods required for human flourishing among all inhabitants of a shared social space. Reparative natural law is a combination of reparation and thinking (p. 113). This law is an elaboration of the traditional injunction of natural law to do good and avoid evil. Understanding the impulse to destroy explains both the necessity of this law and why its enactment must take the form of reparation. Reparative natural law is “natural law” because it binds nature to law. We are obligated to obey it because it is a “natural” expression of a natural human impulse; “reparation” is what we do when we enact our being as loving persons (p. 145).

Three of my most important disagreements with Alford concern discourses of “human nature,” the differences between phantasy and action, and constructions of politics. Despite his occasional use of narrative discourses (p. 21), Alford clearly believes that Klein's is not just another story about human nature, but rather the true one. This belief is problematic for several reasons. Even among psychoanalysts, her account remains controversial. Some analysts have abandoned the impulse-driven view of humans completely; others argue that infants are sociable creatures exquisitely attuned to real (not phantasy) caretakers. It is not clear how any such claims could be empirically adjudicated. My view is that infants, like nonhuman primates, serve as screens upon which adults project contemporary enactments of human subjectivity. Conveniently, babies do not talk and so cannot contest whatever account is offered about them. Marshaling interpretations of adult behavior as evidence for claims about infant psychic life commits the fallacy of a posteriori argument. Even if we suspend this logical problem, Alford's attempt to validate Klein's view by locating a reparative impulse in his adult informants failed. What he finds instead, “metaphysical biology,” or the belief that all humans should be treated equally because we are born the same, bears an uncertain relation to Klein's metapsychology. More importantly, however, despite his gestures toward storytelling, he does not sufficiently question his own metanarrative. It falls within what Michel Foucault calls the philosophy of the subject, a belief that there is something deep inside humans and that this deep inside both constitutes the truth of us and the grounds for normative regulation. Foucault considers this belief itself a discursive effect and one that we ought to subject to the kind of thinking as linking Alford recommends.

Second, for an ethical theory, Alford's (and Klein's) collapse of phantasy and deed is problematic. The dangerous emotions Klein discusses—envy, greed, and so on—are deployed in phantasy against a mostly phantasized object. While many humans may feel such emotions, I do not think such feelings per se are harmful. An important injunction of my version of psychoanalysis is to practice making the unconscious conscious and thereby generate disjunctions among phantasy, deed, and consensual reality. Thus, why we are morally obligated to do reparation for having hate in our hearts or why such hate is intrinsically destructive is unclear.

Third, I do not think politics is correctly understood as the soul writ large. Given the plurality of subjects inhabiting it and the distinctive puzzles it must confront, the differences between individual subjectivity and political life are not mere matters of scale. Alford also assumes that there is some intrinsic goodness to the universe that can be restored through reparative natural law. I share the view of theorists including Niccolo Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt, and Max Weber that Fortuna rules the political world. One consequence of the rule of chance and the plurality of subjects in politics is that no necessary relationships exist between impulse and outcome. Good intentions can produce harmful results. Furthermore, in political life, exactly who or what is innocent or good (and for whom) is not always clear.

In conclusion, I agree with Aristotle and others that justice is a crucial political virtue. An attachment to justice can motivate us to engage in large-scale reparative practices. Or in the narrative of my childhood, our obligation to tikkun (repair the world) rests on the urgent demands of justice.