C F Alford
Biographic Data
| ID | 18469 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C F Alford |
| GIVEN NAMES | C F |
| FAMILY NAME | Alford |
| SIGNATURE | ALFORD C F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9948-2454 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Simon Clarke memorial essay
Intergenerational transmission of trauma
Drawing on my own research, as well as the research of others, the question considered is how trauma may be transmitted down the generations. Some argue that the second-generation of Holocaust survivors is traumatized. I disagree, concluding that many faced emotional problems separating from while remaining connected to their parents. Attachment theory seems the best way of explaining both the problem and how it is best dealt with. The answer to …
Trauma and psychoanalysis
Trauma and Its Victims
The missing moment
Subjectivity and the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma
Trauma and Forgiveness
Contrary to the view of trauma popularized by literary theorists, Trauma and Forgiveness argues that the traumatized are capable of representing their experience and that we should therefore listen more and theorize less. Using stories and case studies, including testimonies from Holocaust survivors, as well as the victims of 'ordinary' trauma, C. Fred Alford shows that, while the traumatized are generally capable of representing their experience…
Bauman and Levinas
The most ambitious attempt to use Emmanuel Levinas to justify a new moral philosophy in a postmodern world is that of Zygmunt Bauman in Postmodern Ethics. Levinas cannot be used. Bauman would use Levinas in order to “desocialize” the subject. That is, to render the subject less a creature of the organization, community, and group, each of which is the enemy of ethics. While Levinas would also desocialize the subject, the terms and concepts he emp…
Niebuhr, Evil, and the Holocaust
Reinhold Niebuhr could not think thoroughly about the Holocaust. This may surprise some, for Niebuhr is generally known as the hard-headed realist who understood sin and evil to be real and active in the world. Niebuhr could not think thoroughly about the Holocaust because he could not think thoroughly about the emergence of a new type of evil. If Germans took pleasure in the destruction of Jews for its own sake, then the meaning of history is it…
Voting against one's interests
Politics and Biology
Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics. Edited by Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 352p. $80.00 cloth, $27.50 paper. Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott's Man Is by Nature a Political Animal brings together some of the most important social scientists working at the intersection of political science, psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience. Given recent advan…
Winnicott and trauma
Hanna Segal – A memorial appreciation
Round-Robin Commentary
Research Article| July 01 2011 Round-Robin Commentary Joe Oppenheimer; Joe Oppenheimer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google C. Fred Alford; C. Fred Alford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Karol Edward Sołtan Karol Edward Sołtan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2011) 20 (2): 319–337. https://doi.org/10.5325/goodsociety.20.2.0319 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Sh…
Young People, Relativism, and Natural Law
After the Holocaust
The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he …
What If The Holocaust Had No Name
Comparing the earliest recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors, done in 1946, with later interviews demonstrates that much of the vocabulary describing and conceptualising the Holocaust was unavailable to those interviewed in the immediate aftermath of their liberation. Less ritualised than later testimonies, the earliest testimonies suggest that the Holocaust resembles what might best be called an organised pogrom. This perspective is compa…
Why Holocaust Testimony is Important, and how Psychoanalytic Interpretation can Help…but only to a Point
Whistle-Blower Narratives
C. Fred Alford Whistle-Blower Narratives: The Experience of Choiceless Choice ONE MIGHT ARGUE THAT THE VERY CONCEPT OF A CHOICELESS CHOICE disqualifies the action undertaken as ethical.' Ethical choices are by their very nature the result of willful choice, even if they are not always the result of rational reflection—as when, for example, someone runs into a burning building to save a child's life. By the end of this essay, I hope you will be co…
Evil Be Thou My Good
Research Article| January 01 2006 Evil Be Thou My Good C. Fred Alford C. Fred Alford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2006) 15 (2): 13–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/25702812 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation C. Fred Alford; Evil Be Thou My Good. The Good Society 1 January 2006; 15 (2): 13–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25702812 Download citation file: Zotero Refere…
Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis
Freedom of the Encumbered Self
Augustine, Arendt, and Melanie Klein
Levinas and Political Theory
How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas’s thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas’s political theory, the term “inverted liberalism” would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term “inverted” over “l…
Freedom and Borderline Experience
In–depth interviews with 52 diverse informants about their experience of freedom reveal a devaluation of freedom relative to money and power. The way in which many of these informants conceptualize freedom has a borderline quality to it—a term that refers to borderline personality disorder, but which is conceptualized here as a cultural construct similar to that of the culture of narcissism, as Christopher Lasch called it. The conclusion speculat…
What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong? Discipline and Punish after twenty years
Think No Evil
In this investigation of the contemporary notion of evil, C. Fred Alford asks what we can learn about this concept, and about ourselves, by examining a society where it is unknown-where language contains no word that equates to the English term "evil." Does such a society look upon human nature more benignly? Do its members view the world through rose-colored glasses? Korea offers a fascinating starting point, and Alford begins his search for ans…
Levinas and Political Theory
How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas’s thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas’s political theory, the term “inverted liberalism” would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term “inverted” over “l…
The Political Psychology of Evil
Fifty‐eight subjects were interviewed about their concepts of evil. They include students, retirees, white collar workers, and 18 prison inmates. Many defined evil not as a moral category but as an experience of impending doom. This definition reflects and affects how many subjects experience evil as an ethical problem, leading them to “privatize” evil—experiencing it in terms of their own terror. Many have considerable difficulty connecting this…
The Organization of Evil
That men and women organize to commit evil can hardly be denied. But what is the ultimate source of these evil acts? Are most evildoers just following the orders of a twisted few? Or do even the bureaucrats of evil, such as Otto Adolf Eichmann, use their positions in the bureaucracy as an opportunity to satisfy their own rage and hatred? Drawing upon the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, this essay argues that there is indeed an in every on…
Is J rgen Habermas's reconstructive science really science
Whistle-Blower Narratives
C. Fred Alford Whistle-Blower Narratives: The Experience of Choiceless Choice ONE MIGHT ARGUE THAT THE VERY CONCEPT OF A CHOICELESS CHOICE disqualifies the action undertaken as ethical.' Ethical choices are by their very nature the result of willful choice, even if they are not always the result of rational reflection—as when, for example, someone runs into a burning building to save a child's life. By the end of this essay, I hope you will be co…
Communication and the Evolution of Society
Hitler's Willing Executioners
Reconciliation with Nature? The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and Melanie Klein
Trauma and psychoanalysis
Voting against one's interests
Winnicott and trauma
Hanna Segal – A memorial appreciation
Levinas and Winnicott
American Imago - Volume 57, Number 3, Fall 2000
Whistle-Blowers
Based on intensive interviews with several dozen whistle-blowers, this article asks what they have to teach about the organizations in which they worked. The most important thing they have to teach is that organizations are deeply threatened by what Kant called ethical autonomy (Mündigkeit). Organizational life is dedicated to the destruction of ethical autonomy for much the same reason that Freud saw social life as dedicated to the suppression o…
Greek Tragedy and Civilization
Of all the strategies for civilization reviewed by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests, one is distinctly missing: that civilization might be rendered more decent and peaceful by cultivating the civilizing emotions based upon love and pity. The reason, it seems, is not the fear that these civilizing emotions are too weak to quell rage, greed, and violence, but too strong, too likely to cause problems of their own, which is why K…
Mastery and Retreat
Freud claims that illusions are wish fulfillment fantasies. As such, they stem from our anxieties: With our wishes and illusions we seek to alleviate an anxiety. This paper examines the popular appeal of Ronald Reagan by considering the national anxieties that he addresses. Prime among these anxieties is a feeling of helplessness: that our economy and society are out of control. More precisely, the anxiety is that, out of a combination of complac…
Habermas, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and the End of the Individual
For some time now a number of critics have argued that Juergen Habermas has misinterpreted Freud. The gist of this criticism is that Habermas' interpretation of psychoanalysis as 'depth hermeneutics' must violate the intent of Freud's work, which is so deeply grounded in drive theory. In other words, Habermas confuses philosophical reflection with psychoanalysis. This paper takes a somewhat different focus. It examines the consequences of Haberma…
Eros and Civilization after thirty years
What If The Holocaust Had No Name
Comparing the earliest recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors, done in 1946, with later interviews demonstrates that much of the vocabulary describing and conceptualising the Holocaust was unavailable to those interviewed in the immediate aftermath of their liberation. Less ritualised than later testimonies, the earliest testimonies suggest that the Holocaust resembles what might best be called an organised pogrom. This perspective is compa…
Evil Be Thou My Good
Research Article| January 01 2006 Evil Be Thou My Good C. Fred Alford C. Fred Alford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2006) 15 (2): 13–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/25702812 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation C. Fred Alford; Evil Be Thou My Good. The Good Society 1 January 2006; 15 (2): 13–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25702812 Download citation file: Zotero Refere…
Freedom of the Encumbered Self
Freedom and Borderline Experience
In–depth interviews with 52 diverse informants about their experience of freedom reveal a devaluation of freedom relative to money and power. The way in which many of these informants conceptualize freedom has a borderline quality to it—a term that refers to borderline personality disorder, but which is conceptualized here as a cultural construct similar to that of the culture of narcissism, as Christopher Lasch called it. The conclusion speculat…
A Psychoanalytic Study of Evil
American Imago - Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 1999
Communication and the Evolution of Society
The Aesthetic Dimension. Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
Herbert Marcuse. The Aesthetic Dimension. Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. 88 plus xiii pages. $6.95
The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. George Friedman Introduction to Critical Theory
Critical Rationalism & the Problem of Utopian Thought
This essays argues that there is a "utopian moment" in critical rationalism, and that this "moment" is consistent with critical rationalism as a social philosophy. In pursuing this theme Professor Alford suggests that critical rationalism, and social theory in general, would benefit from additional utopian speculation. Utopian speculation is seen as a reservoir of richness for social theory, and critical rationalism is in need of enrichment. It h…
Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation. Barry Kātz
The “Iron Law of Oligarchy” in the Athenian Polis … and Today
This article shows how Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries mitigated Robert Michels' famous “iron law of oligarchy.” It is argued that Athens' success es related to its practice of universal male citizen participation in the administration of the city. At several points a comparison is drawn between how the International Typographical Union (ITU), studied in Lipset, Trow, and Coleman's Union Democracy , mitigated the “iron law,” a…
Nature and Narcissism
Reconciliation with nature is a puzzling concept in the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. It is difficult to grasp in a comprehensible manner, yet it can hardly be dismissed as an afterthought of these authors, as so much of their work seems to lead back to it. To transform the concept of reconciliation with nature into ecology and environmental consciousness hardly seems consonant with their intent. Yet, Jiirgen Haberm…
Epistemological Relativism & Political Theory
In this article Fred Alford discusses what may be a rather neglected theme in Paul Feyerabend's political theory, that is, his call for the separation of state and science and its beneficial implications for genuine human freedom and spontaneity. Professor Alford takes on the enterprise of "extracting" Feyerabend's political theory from the exaggerated rhetoric in which it is wrapped and, in the process, he also hopes to identify the correct rela…
Is J rgen Habermas's reconstructive science really science
Science and the Revenge of Nature
Hans Albert and the Unfinished Enlightenment
Science and the Revenge of Nature
Journal Article Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse & Habermas , by C. Fred Alford. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1985, ix + 226 pp. $24.50 Get access Peter Kivisto Peter Kivisto Augustana College , Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 48, Issue 2, Summer 1987, Pages 187–188, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711209 Published: 01 January 1987
Habermas, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and the End of the Individual
For some time now a number of critics have argued that Juergen Habermas has misinterpreted Freud. The gist of this criticism is that Habermas' interpretation of psychoanalysis as 'depth hermeneutics' must violate the intent of Freud's work, which is so deeply grounded in drive theory. In other words, Habermas confuses philosophical reflection with psychoanalysis. This paper takes a somewhat different focus. It examines the consequences of Haberma…
Eros and Civilization after thirty years
Herbert Marcuse's Utopia
"A Note on the Instutitional Context of Plato's "Protagoras
Mastery and Retreat
Freud claims that illusions are wish fulfillment fantasies. As such, they stem from our anxieties: With our wishes and illusions we seek to alleviate an anxiety. This paper examines the popular appeal of Ronald Reagan by considering the national anxieties that he addresses. Prime among these anxieties is a feeling of helplessness: that our economy and society are out of control. More precisely, the anxiety is that, out of a combination of complac…
Narcissism
The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas
"Melanie Klein and the "Oresteia Complex
reud's concept of the Oedipus is well known. Well known too is how this complex-particularly as expressed in the myth of the primal horde-not merely explains a little boy's love for his mother but the origins of civilized society as well. As such, the Oedipus is really a worldview, for it is an account of human nature as well as the nature of society. In contrast to the Oedipus I set the Oresteia complex as developed by Melanie Klein (although sh…
Response to Dallmayr
Fred Dallmayr and I share concern with the problem of evil and willingness to call it by its name. In the end, this is more important than what divides us, the issue of how best to conceptualize its origins. It is with this in mind that I respond to his thoughtful comments. Dallmayr's basic strategy seems to be to force me into the internalsources-of-evil camp, labeling my many references to interaction as concession, ambivalence, and so forth. H…
The Organization of Evil
That men and women organize to commit evil can hardly be denied. But what is the ultimate source of these evil acts? Are most evildoers just following the orders of a twisted few? Or do even the bureaucrats of evil, such as Otto Adolf Eichmann, use their positions in the bureaucracy as an opportunity to satisfy their own rage and hatred? Drawing upon the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, this essay argues that there is indeed an in every on…
Self in Social Theory
Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory
Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory
Philosophy (49 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Political science (38 works) · Psychology (36 works) · Epistemology (32 works) · Law (28 works) · Psychoanalysis (28 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Art (19 works) · Law (19 works)