What Evil Means to Us

by C. Fred Alford

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students to discover how we experience evil - in ourselves, in others, and in the world. What his informants meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire." Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination - in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative - offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

200 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's taken me a while to work through this book; it wasn't always an easy read. But it was very useful. I agree with Alford's idea that evil is sourced in our own overwhelming feeling of dread. And his idea about us needing cultural works or concepts onto which to project that dread (rather than inflicting it on other people) makes good sense to me. It reinforced and further clarified what I was trying to do in my own writing when exploring the character John Garrett in the first novel I wrote.

Having said that, I didn't always grasp Alford's meanings or intentions when he pondered over these matters. I feel I grasped his central thesis, but wasn't able to follow him down every path. Perhaps in time I will.

[JøRgen Rudshaug]

Veldig spennende utforskning av temaet ondskap fra mange forskjellige synsvinkler (hovedsakelig psykoanalytisk). Veldig godt skrevet mesteparten av veien, men et ønske om å bli ferdig gjorde perspektivhoppingen hodet mer til grøt enn beriket av de siste sidene.

[Juno D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

amei mudou minha vida melhor coisa que eu já li deus abençoe esse homem