C. Fred Alford: Professor of Government and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher

Charles Frederick Alford was born on May 12, 1947 as an only child in Bombay, India and lived in various places as his father pursued a career in the oil industry. As his lower middle class Protestant family prospered he lived in England from his seventh to his eleventh years. Back in the U.S. Fred went to junior high and high school in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, New York. He received his

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BA in political science from Austin College in Sherman, Texas. In 1979 Alford earned a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1979 he began his career at the University of Maryland in College Park where he became Professor of Government in 1991 and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 1995.

Professor Alford is the author of fourteen books, including a novel entitled Ashes of the Moon: Environment and Evil in the Amazon (2000). His academic books include Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation (2006), Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It (2005), Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School (2002), and What Evil Means to Us (1997). His 1999 book, Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization, was translated into Korean as Report on the Psychology of the Korean People in 2000. He is also the author of numerous professional articles, book chapters, encyclopedia articles, and book reviews. Throughout the course of his scholarship, he has presented more than 125 academic papers and chaired dozens of panels.

Professor Alford has served on the editorial boards of several publications related to the study of psychology and psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, the Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, Political Psychology, Psychoanalytic Studies, and our journal. He currently serves as the Associate Editor of Organisational & Social Dynamics and Corresponding Editor of Theory and Society. He is Co-Editor of the Psychoanalysis and Society Book Series, published by Cornell University Press.

Recently, Alford delivered the Erikson Lecture, “The Natural Law of Reparation” to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 2004, he was the invited speaker at the University of the West of England’s Psycho-Social Studies Research Center where he presented on “Levinas and Psychoanalysis.” Currently, Professor Alford serves as the Executive Director of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. From 2003 until 2004 he was the President of the Political Psychology section of the American Political Science Association.

In 2003, he received both the Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science, presented by the American Political Science Association, and the Teaching Excellence Award from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the University of Maryland. In the twenty-first century he has been interviewed by over 100 representatives of the electronic and print media. Alford received three Fulbright Awards, one as a graduate student in 1977 to Germany, and the second as a senior scholar in 1987, also to Germany. In 1997 he received a Senior Fulbright Research Award to study the Korean concept of evil (or rather its absence).

Professor Alford lives in Maryland with his wife Elly, an ethnomethodologist who teaches sociology at Towson State University. They have two children and two grandchildren. Charles Fred Alford (CFA) may be reached at and Paul Elovitz (PHE) at . The interview took place in January, 2007.

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PHE: What brought you to psychoanalysis?

CFA: Personally or intellectually? Personally, I was brought to psychoanalysis by deep personal unhappiness crystallized by a short, sad first marriage. Intellectually, I was brought to psychoanalysis just a couple of years later, in graduate school, when it seemed to me that if what I had learned about myself was

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true, then most of the theories of political behavior, from the theory of the rational voter (then very much in vogue) to the analysis of political systems, ignored the needs and drives and fears that I had discovered, through psychoanalysis and reading (mostly Freud, with some Marcuse thrown in). In other words, if my own experiences were to make sense, then political science as it was currently taught (and still is) didn’t, and couldn’t, make sense. Some thirty-five years have passed, I think I’m more sophisticated, but this basic equation still holds, and stands behind much of my work.

PHE: What then brought you to political psychology and ultimately to psychohistory?

CFA: Part of the answer is that I really don’t think I’d make a very good psychotherapist. I’d feel confined, sitting with patients all day. This way I can make the whole world my subject, even though I understand the tremendous problems of attributing psychological motives to groups, which have no mind of their own. In fact, it is this problem that makes the work of Wilfred Bion and the Tavistock Institute in London, which developed the implications of his work, so important to me. For me, psychohistory is about making sense of the often strange and pathological relationships that develop between groups and leaders. My emphasis has always been on the followers. Look, there have always been glib, messianic, crazy leaders around, just waiting in the wings. The question is under what circumstances groups choose them. Bion said that small, unstructured study groups generally choose the sickest member (generally the most paranoid) as its leader. Larger groups choose the most average, except when under great stress; then they too choose a sick man. I don’t for a moment think it’s so simple, and one reason is because institutional structure intervenes. Consider, for example, the selection of the President of the United States. While there is often an element of mob psychology, the influence of party structure, moneyed interests, the media, and (as we saw in 2000) the courts mediate group psychology, so that a complete explanation has to take all this and more into account. Notice that I said “mediate,” not “buffer.” Group psychology works in and through the institutions I just mentioned, where it is both filtered (for example, the influence of money) and magnified (the media). My point, of course, is that group psychology operates in a complex institutional context, and one must understand both. It’s very difficult. But this is what I’m interested in.

PHE: You have published extensively on subjects of general issues such as the environment, evil, freedom, hatred, natural law, and whistleblowers. Is your goal to reach a broader audience than is usual for academics?

CFA: No, my goal is to write about topics that interest me. With the exception of my book on whistleblowers, most of my books have not been great sellers, a couple of thousand copies after two years. Several have done worse. As far as professional advancement is concerned, I have followed the worst strategy imaginable. One advances in the academic profession by becoming an acknowledged expert in a field central to the discipline. I have not pursued this path, to say the least.

PHE: How does psychoanalysis inform these books?

CFA: Psychoanalysis informs every book I write. More particularly, a psychoanalytic view in the tradition of the British Object Relations Tradition, from Klein to Bion to D.W. Winnicott lies behind everything I write. The only question is whether this way of thinking is in the background, or serves as an express theory. In my books on evil, for example, I argue that doing evil is a doomed (because it must fail) form of projective identification, in which the evil-doer attempts to take unbearable, ineffable experiences and locate them inside the body of another, where they can be sealed off and destroyed. Here I found Grotstein’s elaboration of projective identification especially useful. In other words, I am not a theoretical purist.

In my book on whistleblowers, I decided that it would be unfair and demeaning to try to psychoanalyze them, even if I could. I did, however, develop a psychoanalytic category, drawn from my second book, Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalytic Theory. The category is “narcissism moralized” and concerns the way in which living-up to a high ego ideal can become almost addictive, leading whistleblowers to make sacrifices they otherwise wouldn’t ordinarily consider.

PHE: Of which of your works are you most proud?

CFA: My most recent book, Psychology of the Natural Law of Reparation (Cambridge, 2006). I don’t say this about it just because it is my most recent, but

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because it puts together my work on Melanie Klein with my work as a political theorist. In a nutshell, I argue that because she takes evil and hatred (the death drive) as seriously as she takes love of the good, Klein’s account of reparation is a good place to start in developing a realistic account of the natural law. Seen in this way, Klein’s account of reparation stands in the Great Tradition of the natural law beginning with Augustine. In one way or another, I have been working on this argument for twenty years.

PHE: What are you working on now? What is its importance and when do you expect to have it published?

CFA: I’m working on an account of the meaning of affliction. The great mystery of life, said Simone Weil, is not suffering, but affliction. In order to try to make sense of this mystery, I am comparing the “Book of Job” with the work of Primo Levi. Affliction, I argue, is the form suffering takes when we can make sense of it. Whether affliction is even possible in a post-Holocaust world is one of the key questions I address. As to publication, I always work on “spec” that is, I write the book manuscript, and then try to find a publisher. I expect to have a manuscript to shop around sometime in 2007.

PHE: What is your primary affiliation?

CFA: My primary affiliation is political science. But you should know that I am a political theorist, and that means that I teach the classic thinkers: Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, the tragic poets, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas. This already makes me a marginal, but recognized and accepted sub-specialist, in political science.

PHE: What special training was most helpful in your doing political psychology?

CFA: First, my own long experience as an analysand with psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy. Second, my work with the A.K. Rice Institute, which at the time I was a member still, adhered to Bion’s “group as a whole” perspective, and in general was quite theoretically minded. Some senior members still are, by the way. From several I have learned a great deal.

PHE: Have you published, or do you plan to publish, an autobiography or any autobiographical writings?

CFA: No, not only is this, in my estimation, the activity that marks the end of a career, but there are many more lives far more interesting than my own. Primo Levi’s is one. However, occasionally I still write short fiction (once, a dozen years ago, a story of mine won fifth prize in Story magazine’s short story contest), and autobiography always manages to creep in, sometimes more than I would like.

PHE: What training should a person entering political psychology today pursue?

CFA: When a student tells me that he or she is interested in political psychology, I always try to find out whether it is the “political” or the “psychology” part that he or she is most drawn to. For in many political psychology programs, there is little or no psychology as we have been discussing it: psychology that takes the dynamic unconscious seriously. A couple of years ago I was president of the political psychology section of the American Political Science Association, and I was shocked to find out how little I had in common with what other political psychologists did. My best advice: if you think you are interested in political psychology, go read the last couple of years of the journal Political Psychology, the lead journal in the field. If you are still interested, go to one of the leading programs in the country. To find that out, see where the journal is being edited, and where members of the editorial board are located. You may, however, find out that what is ordinarily called political psychology is not what you are interested in. To some students I say they will find more psychology in departments of English literature, even if it is generally not the psychology to which I am most attracted.

PHE: How do you see political psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory developing in the next decade and beyond?

CFA: I think the latter two enterprises will face tough times, but then again the last couple of decades have not been easy either. “Neuroscience” seems to be the new wave in political psychology, and traditional psychoanalysis has been marginalized, but we seem to be coming up against the limits of various new classes of drugs, so it may be that psychoanalytically-oriented talk therapy will continue to find a place. People need to talk, they need help in constructing a narrative of their lives, and there will always be a place for that. About psychohistory, I’m not in the best position to judge. My sense is that it will continue to be practiced under a variety of

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names, most of which will not bear the label “psychohistory.” In one sense I’m optimistic. No matter how much the emphasis on “relevance,” “measurable outputs,” and the like drive our universities and insurance companies, human understanding is fundamentally narrative in structure, and that is what psychoanalysis and psychohistory are about.

PHE: On the basis of your association with several U.K. psychoanalytic organizations, what is your impression of the strength of psychoanalysis and applied psychoanalysis there?

CFA: I’m not so sure about psychoanalysis, but I know that applied psychoanalysis does not seem to experience itself on the defensive. I have some colleagues who set up the Psycho-Social Research Centre at the University of the West of England in Bristol. They publish a couple of journals, one in psychoanalysis and social theory, another in psychoanalytically-oriented organization theory. They get decent grant money to support their journals, more grant money to support a research project, as well as travel funding to report on their findings at meetings in Europe and America. Most of the money comes from government agencies. The Tavistock Institute in London is still influential, though not to the degree it once was.

PHE: What do we need to do to strengthen our work?

CFA: Tell good stories, and don’t confuse good work with good funding, no matter how tempting.

PHE: What is the importance of childhood to political psychology?

CFA: I think it’s terribly important, and even more difficult to get at. Many of my books are based on qualitative interviews, and I have generally abandoned asking questions about childhood, as the leaps I have to make are too great. Instead, I look at the narrative structure of the interview itself, including the silences, gaps, and caesuras.

PHE: Some Forum researchers have been struggling with the issue of identification with a particular parent and achievement. If you would like to comment on this, it would be helpful to them.

CFA: I don’t have much to say about that, except that I can think of an awful lot of exceptions. Lyndon Johnson, for example. But about what one does not know, one should remain silent.

PHE: In your experience and life, are high-achievers more identified with their fathers?

CFA: I’m some sort of Kleinian, and so that means that the mother-child relationship is central. This is true for Winnicott as well. I think this makes me not the most useful person to ask about these things.

PHE: Following up on an issue raised by Freud, what is the impact of parental loss on your level of achievement and those of subjects you have studied?

CFA: My parents died relatively recently (about five and ten years ago), and from time to time I feel like an almost sixty-year-old orphan. I don’t know how it affects my work. I know that the world is an emptier place without them. Taking care of them in their old age was taking care of me too.

PHE: How do you explain the growth and psychology of fundamentalism?

CFA: I’m not sure if you are referring to the United States or the world. In the U.S. I’m not sure how much it is growing, and how much it is just nosier, more interested in politics, and that some politicians have figured out how to use it. In the world, the rise of fundamentalism seems to be a reaction to globalization, what Max Weber called rationalization. Of all the scarce resources in the world, meaning (including the meaning of life) is perhaps the scarcest of all. Globalization threatens the meaning of life of millions, no billions. Finally, the failure of many autocratic states to democratize, to create new places and the chances for citizens to live new lives with new hopes and dreams, not all material, should not be ignored. The meaning of life can arise out of participation in the creation of new practices, not just old traditions. It doesn’t arise out of sitting on the sidelines watching one’s way of life being destroyed.

PHE: What are your thoughts on the psychology and psychodynamics of violence in our world?

CFA: I’m very troubled by the glorification of violence everywhere, it seems: from Hollywood to the Middle East. Yet it is not so simple, for there is also the tendency to use less than discriminate violence as state policy and not talk about it. I think one has to admit that there is pleasure in destruction and violence, and deep satisfaction too, and that pleasure and satisfaction, coupled with a lack of remorse, is one good way to define evil. There is also a deep satisfaction in making reparation, but when people are

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frightened, the paranoid position dominates, and the deeper but more subtle pleasures of reparation are unavailable.

PHE: How do you understand the psychology of terrorism?

CFA: I don’t mean to be too simple, but since I haven’t thought about it much, I would say it is an expression of hopeless paranoid rage coupled with a certain rationality terrorism is the weapon of the weak against the strong.

PHE: How can psychologically-oriented scholars have more impact in academia and on society in general?

CFA: I don’t know. Trying to talk in simple language might be a good start.

PHE: What is the impact of psychohistory on your areas of expertise?

CFA: Generally, political theorists hate it. I remember a reader’s review of my book on Group Psychology and Political Theory, which drew on my A. K. Rice experience as consultant to small groups to reinterpret Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The comment was something like “a fascinating work. Publish it. But of course I don’t believe a word, of it.” Yale went on to publish it, and it never sold very well. Political theorists become political theorists in part because they want to avoid psychological interpretations. Every profession is a defense.

PHE: As “Distinguished Scholar-Teacher” at the University of Maryland and the winner of other awards on teaching, what to your mind makes a really good teacher?

CFA: I think I’d get bored if I didn’t teach. Next semester I will teach 150 students in “Introduction to Political Theory.” I enjoy bringing 2,500 years of Western thought to the masses in one semester. Why? Because it’s impossible, and so I can pick and choose what I like. We will begin with Stanley Milgram, and end with Plato’s Republic. So, I guess my answer is that a good teacher likes to teach. Which doesn’t mean that I’m thrilled every day that I have to go to class. Also, my teaching load is reasonable, one undergrad and one graduate course, and I have three teaching assistants to do the grading with my undergrad course. So, I think I’ll keep at it for a while longer.

PHE: Did the experience of psychoanalysis impact on your learning and teaching, as in my case?

CFA: Yes, but my experience with A.K. Rice and the psychology of groups had even more of an impact, for I understand something about group dynamics, especially in my smaller classes, and occasionally make process comments. I’ll even do this in a large class. If, for example, a lot of students seem to be talking, or restless, I’ll suggest that perhaps something about the material is making them anxious, and speculate about what. Students don’t like process comments, generally ignore them, but often the comments seem to work that is, their behavior changes.

PHE: What is it like to spend your entire academic career in one institution?

CFA: That’s a tough one, because I have no basis of comparison. All I can say is that I’m treated with respect, paid less than I’m worth, and am still surprised when someone says “We need a senior person on this committee,” and they look at me.

PHE: I know you have a close intellectual friendship with Jim Glass, your colleague who is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland in College Park. How has this impacted on your work and what has it taught you about some of the intellectuals you have studied in history?

CFA: A simple answer is that he showed me the way to make political theory personally as well as intellectually exciting. Without him I don’t think I would have ever found my own way to do this. In addition, he is a good friend. What more could one ask?

PHE: When Victor Wolkenstein learned that you would be our Featured Scholar, he wrote, “Fred’s a great choice for you [he is] a bold and inventive scholar, with a distinctive voice and a willingness to take intellectual risks (and the ability to make them pay off).” Please describe in what ways you feel your voice is distinctive and give an example or two of the challenges you faced and met.

CFA: I take what Freud called the Todestrieb seriously. Not so much the quest for Nirvana, but Klein’s version of it: the pleasure in hate and destruction, the primacy of the paranoid-schizoid position as she called it, the conviction that my internal pain and discomfort is caused by an external force I would destroy. Important too is envy of the good because it is good, and not me or mine. Because I can’t have it,

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I must spoil it. This desire to destroy the good because it is good is as fine a definition of evil as any. It is, by the way, the worldview of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.

When I look at human history, these ways of thinking seem central. Central too is the desire to make reparation, to love and care for others. It is the task of culture, in all its forms, from art to political leadership, to give frame and form to these emotions, so that we might live with them, directing our reparation towards those most deserving. Put simply, life is a constant struggle between Eros and Thanatos for the life of the species, to almost quote Freud. I’ve tried (or rather been unable to avoid) the pursuit of this thought, or aspects of it, in most of my works.

PHE: Tell us about your presidency, excuse me, your role as Executive Director of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Society (APCS)?

CFA: The strange thing about the APCS is that it has no president. I was, and am, the Executive Director, which according to the by-laws, is the position that has all the power. Then there is a Chairman, who has no standing in the by-laws, other than to preside at board meetings, but depending on the person holding the position, can be quite influential. When I took over as Executive Director, I expected the Chairman to continue to run the organization. But she resigned, another executive officer resigned, and I spent a year and a half holding things together. We recently redrafted the by-laws to put the real power, such as it is, in the hands of a new chairman (actually co-chairmen), and things seem back on track.

All this is background to the real question I want to answer. Every time I told my wife about what was going on in APCS, she would say something like “It sounds like the group is crazy.” I’d reply, “Don’t you get it? All groups are crazy.” The question I wonder about is whether groups made up of analytic-types are crazier than others. I don’t know the answer. I suspect, however, that groups without a clear objective goal, except to meet and further their own existence as a group, tend to be crazier than others. Bion taught us this. The real trick is to have something to do in the real world, a task. “Task drift,” as it is known in organization theory, is the real enemy here. As one nurse in a mental hospital studied by one of Bion’s students said (this is a true story), “If we just didn’t have all these patients to take care of, we’d all get along so much better.”

PHE: What are your future plans for the APCS?

CFA; My future plans are to step back and let our new co-chairs, Martin Glisserman and Marilyn Charles, run things. They work well together, the bylaws are being amended to give them the power to do so, and together they bring a great combination of theory and practice. Martin is former editor of American Imago. Marilyn is a therapist at Austen Riggs with deep theoretical insight (we recently both contributed essays to a collection on Klein). APCS seems to be attracting a nice balance of theoretical types and practical, clinical types, and that is always my favorite combination. Sometimes it even comes in one person.

PHE: How can we recruit new people to our fields of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychohistory?

CFA: This is a tough one, for in being all things to all people we risk being nothing. My preference is that academics write in such a way that they are comprehensible to clinicians. I have frequently found my deepest satisfaction in speaking to clinicians, rather than other academics. Actually, I don’t know that I have really answered your question, but it is the best I can do, and it suggests the combination that I think is most intellectually fruitful. That other branch of applied psychoanalysis, which flourishes in departments of English and literary criticism is often fascinating, sometimes infuriating in its inaccessibility, and seems quite capable of taking care of itself.

PHE: What books were important to your development?

CFA: Beyond the work of Klein, Winnicott, Freud and Bion, I would add Thomas Ogden’s work on the autistic-contiguous position, and Grotstein on projective identification. I’ve also found the work of Heinz Kohut useful, even as he doesn’t run with my usual crowd. Kohut talks about the self as though it were real and precious, and I appreciate that. Finally, Plato’s struggle with Eros and Reason (compare The Symposium and The Republic) has helped me place psychoanalytic theory within a metaphysical perspective. I can say the same for Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.

PHE: Who was important to your development as a student of psychosocial phenomena? Did Erik Erik-

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son have an impact on you?

CFA: No, I came to Erikson late. I think Robert Jay Lifton had much more of an impact, particularly The Broken Connection.

PHE: Are there any mentors who come to mind?

CFA: Sure, Jim Glass and Victor Wolfenstein. Also, I’ve learned as much from a couple of graduate students as I’ve taught them.

PHE: What is your psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic experience and what is its influence on you as a psychohistorian? How has it changed your vision of the world?

CFA: Two experiences with psychotherapy have been deeply influential. The first I’ve already mentioned, the experience of going to graduate school after some rather intense psychotherapy, and realizing that if my experiences in psychotherapy were true, then much of what I was being taught about human behavior in political science was false. The second is an experience with psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy as a professor. I was surprised at how readily and easily I shifted from talking about what I was writing about to what was going on in my life. Of course, to be able to do this requires a well-educated and well-read therapist, and in that I was fortunate.

PHE: How do you define political psychology? Psychohistory?

CFA: I would define them the same. An explanation of human action that takes account of the dynamic unconscious, much of which is inaccessible to the actors at the time. Actors include not merely leaders, but followers. One must be careful, however, not to posit a “group mind,” and not to use “culture,” as an explanatory variable, when it is “culture” that is generally in need of an explanation.

PHE; Please list the five people who you think have made the greatest contribution to psychohistory, or if you prefer, political psychology, in order of their contribution.

CFA: I’m not sure I can do this, especially as I understand psychohistory so broadly, as virtually coextensive with the application of psychoanalysis to social theory. But here goes, Sigmund Freud, Robert Jay Lifton, Victor Wolfenstein, Jim Glass, and you the last is not meant as flattery but for your services to psychohistory, for keeping the field alive as a coherent entity. Since Professor James Glass may be less well known to your readers I will summarize his contributions. For over twenty years he conducted a research project at Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, which at the time practiced long-term inpatient, psychoanalytically-oriented treatment. The result was a series of four books that uncovered the roots of ordinary social and political life in the extreme politics of delusion. Perhaps the most well known book is the first, Delusion: Internal Dimensions of Political Life (1985). Since then he has published on the Holocaust, including Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany (Basic Books, 1997).

PHE: Thank you for a valuable interview.

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