“Why War?” Study Day
Avila Carmelite Centre, Donnybrook, Dublin 4
Saturday 12 April 2025
by Albert Llussà
In 1931, the League of Nations arranged for exchanges of letters between representative intellectuals “to serve the common interests of the League of Nations and the intellectual life”. Among the first to be approached was Einstein, and Einstein suggested Freud’s name.
In 1932, Einstein invited Freud to address the question of whether the propensity for war shown by humanity throughout history could somehow be explained from a psychological point of view, and asked him to shed “the light of your far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life” to see if there might be “any way of delivering humanity from the menace of war.”
The League of Nations was the first ever international organisation for political cooperation, established in 1920 in the aftermath of World War I, with the objective of securing collective security and disarmament. At the time the letter was written, the League of Nations was already in crisis. The sound of sabre rattling was ominous across Europe. Major powers such as Japan, Germany and Italy had withdrawn from the League. The main criticism made of the League to explain its failure to prevent a new war breaking out was its lack of legal and juridical power to enforce international law. Observing current political trends across the Atlantic, such as increased isolationist policies towards international institutions set up after World War II and the current economic war on tariffs unilaterally started by the Trump government, it is difficult to escape the feeling that we are living in a period that resembles the 1930s of last century. The war on tariffs is a radical withdrawal from the international trade agreements pursued by the international community under the auspices of the UN, first in the form of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GAAT), and, since 1995, its successor the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is worth noting that GAAT was created following WWII to prevent a replay of the tariff wars of the 1920s.
What prompted the MLA to organise today’s Study Day, however, were the wars and armed conflicts that have broken out in Europe and the Middle East in the last couple of years, namely Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I suppose our consciences, and perhaps our own sense of security, were shocked and shaken by these awful events, and the question was asked as to what psychoanalysis could say, today, if anything, in relation to them.
Most of us probably underestimate the number of wars and armed conflicts around the world. According to the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, there are currently more than 110 armed conflicts around the world: 45 in the Middle East and North Africa,1 35 in Africa2, 19 in Asia3, 6 in Europe4, and 6 in Latin America5.
After World War II, the United Nations (UN) was established with virtually the same goals as those of the League of Nations, namely to secure peace, security, and development. A number of institutions were set up, including a General Assembly, a Security Council and an International Court of Justice. The intention was to avoid the mistakes made by the League of Nations. The proliferation of wars and armed conflicts around the world since its inception in 1945, and the persistence of war as a means to deal with conflicts of interests between groups, however, suggest that our current UN system has also been inadequate and ineffective to a large extent to prevent war. The compulsion to repeat articulated by Freud as of the essence of all living organisms seems to manifest itself as well in groups such as the League of Nations and of the UN.
What follows is a summary of what Freud wrote to Einstein In his 1932 letter. Freud notes that violence has existed since the dawn of time. Humanity -and animals- have always settled their conflicts of interests by violence. In a small human horde, the physically stronger imposed his will. When tools were introduced, intelligence and skill supplemented and replaced physical strength. But ultimately the stronger imposed his will, either by killing or by subjugating the other. An enemy’s life might be spared if he could prove himself useful; but then the victor had to reckon with the risk of revenge.
The course of evolution brought about some changes: by coming together, several weak individuals could overcome the power of the stronger. There was a movement from violence to law. Law and violence, however are not antithetic; rather, one developed out of the other. Law is based on the use of force by the community, not by an individual.
For law to prevail, however, it is necessary that the community be stable and lasting. Otherwise, individuals will always attempt to dominate others by force, and the cycle of violence would be repeated ad infinitum. A community must be organised, subject to rules that are respected and enforceable. The emotional ties developed among the members of a community around common interests is what lends the community its strength.
Communities, however, are made up of elements of unequal strength -men and women, parents and children – and power -victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and slaves-. The ruling members sometimes make laws by and for themselves, while the rights of others are not respected.
Some rulers -Freud says- will try to set themselves above the prohibitions which apply to everyone, and dominate by violence rather than by law. At the same time, oppressed members of the groups will try to obtain more power and get more recognition. These two factors are sources of unrest, but at the same time can lead to a further growth of law.
New wars and conflicts will occur, law will be temporarily suspended, solutions by violence will be attempted anew, until a fresh rule of law is established.
Therefore - Freud says -, violent solutions of conflicts of interest are not avoided even inside a community. The history of humankind reveals an endless series of conflicts which have almost always been settled by force of arms. Freud agrees with Einstein that wars will only be prevented if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over, with the necessary power to enforce its rulings.
Freud then turns to Einstein’s question of whether there is “something at work in men– an instinct for hatred and destruction-“, to make them enthusiastic about war and which goes halfway to meet the efforts of the warmongers. Freud confirms that psychoanalysis believes “in the existence of a drive of that kind” and then proceeds to set out a portion of psychoanalysis’ theory of the drives.
Psychoanalysis believes that there are only two kinds of human drives: “those which seek to preserve and unite” (the erotic or sexual drives) and “those which seek to destroy” (“the aggressive or destructive drive”). They represent the opposition between Love and Hate which -Freud says to Einstein- “may perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge” (i.e. physics).
Freud warns against making ethical judgments of good and evil: neither drive is more essential than the other. Life arises from “the concurrent or mutually opposition action of both”. Furthermore, it seems as though they cannot operate in isolation: one is always accompanied -or, alloyed- with a certain quota from the other, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim. For example, the drive of selfpreservation is of an erotic kind, but it must also have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to succeed. Similarly, the drive of love, when directed towards an object, needs some help from the instinct for mastery if it is to obtain possession of that object.
In addition - says Freud - human actions are very rarely the result of a single drive (which itself is made up of Eros and destructiveness). When human beings are incited to war, they may have different motives for assenting – some noble and some base, such as a lust for aggression and destruction. Destructive impulses are mixed with others of an erotic and idealistic kind.
According to Freud, the destructive drive “is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter”6. That is why it is referred to as a death drive, while the erotic drives represent the effort to live.
The death drive can be directed outwards or inwards. When directed outwards on to objects it turns into a destructive drive. Some portion of the death drive, however, remains operative within the organism. Some normal and pathological phenomena can be explained by this inward diversion of aggressiveness. Whereas it is unhealthy to turn these destructive forces inwardly too much, the organism will benefit if they are turned towards the external world. This would seem to provide a biological justification for the death drive and therefore for war. These impulses stand nearer to nature than does our resistance to them.
For Freud, there is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations. He does not believe that there has ever been any human community who know has not knowncoercion or aggression.
It should be possible, however, - he says - for “to divert man’s aggressive impulses to such an extent that they need no find expression in war”, and this can be done in different ways: Firstly, by bringing into play Eros, the antagonist of the destructive drive, encouraging the growth of emotional ties between men. And he mentions two such kinds of ties: Love and Identification. “There is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion uses the same words:“Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself””. As for identification, whatever leads men to share important interests produces these identifications, a community of feeling.
After emphasizing the importance for education to promote independent minds -eager in the pursuit of truth- and of freedom of thought, Freud states that “The ideal condition would be a community whose members subordinate their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite them so completely and so tenaciously, even if there were no emotional ties between them.”
Freud ends his letter with one last provocative question to Einstein :
“Why do you and I and so many other people rebel so violently against war?
Why do we not accept it as another of the many painful calamities of life? After
all, it seems to be quite a natural thing, to have a good biological basis and in
practice to be scarcely avoidable.”
Firstly, - he says - because “everyone has a right to his own life, because war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it brings individual men into humiliating situations, because it compels them against their will to murder other men, and because it destroys previous material objects which have been produced by the labours of humanity.”
Secondly, because there is no longer any heroism or honour in modern-day warfare.
Finally, we oppose war because we cannot help doing so; “we are pacifists for organic reasons” as a result of the evolution of civilization since the dawn of time. According to Freud, we owe to that process of civilization the best of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from. Its causes and beginnings are obscure, and its outcome uncertain :
“It may perhaps be leading to the extinction of the human race, for in more
than one way it impairs the sexual function; […] the evolution of civilization is
an organic process… The psychical modifications that go along with the
process of civilization are striking and unambiguous. They consist in a
progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual
impulses.”
The letter concludes: civilization seems to be based on a strengthening of the intellect - to govern instinctual life- and an internalization of aggressive impulses. War is the crassest opposition to civilization, says Freud. We repudiate it not only on intellectual and emotional grounds, but on the basis that we have a constitutional intolerance of war.
Much of what Freud wrote to Einstein he had set out in a formidable manner in Civilization and its discontents just two years before (1930). Whereas in his letter Freud focused on the way the death drive manifests itself towards the outside, in Civilization and its discontents Freud describes also the way the drive is turned inwards in the subject. Freud says that perhaps the most important way in which civilization inhibits the aggressiveness which opposes it is by turning it inwards, by internalizing, sending it back to where it came from, that is, towards the ego.
“There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the
rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’, is
ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that
the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals.”
This tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego gives rise to the sense of guilt, which expresses itself as a need for punishment :
“Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous
desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an
agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”
A child does not have a natural capacity for knowing what is good or bad. Such judgments are imposed on the child by an external authority -usually symbolized in the father- which the child internalizes, and submits to it because of his helplessness and dependency on other people, that is, because of a fear of loss of love. What is bad, ultimately, is whatever causes us to be threatened with loss of love. At this stage, the sense of guilt is only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety.
Thus, there are two sources to our sense of guilt: fear of an authority and, later, fear of the super-ego. The first demands the renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, in addition to this, presses for punishment.
The new psychical economy (Melman) (2000)
It is interesting to contrast Freud’s view that more civilization should hopefully mean less external aggressivity and less war with Charles Melman’s ideas around what he called, more than 20 years ago, our new psychical economy. In paper written in the year 20007, Melman says that we are “in the process of leaving a culture whose religion forced its adherents to repress their desires and become neurotic, for another where the right to their free expression and full satisfaction is proclaimed”. This has led to a rapid devaluation of values transmitted by morality and political tradition. Petrified figures of authority and knowledge seem to have disintegrated. People only come together in small groups which share common interests or passions: bikers, ecologists, hunters, patriots, homosexuals, etc.. Young people turn away from established authorities and knowledge to create a new economy based on enjoyment. Where Freud suggested that "the discontent in civilization" was linked to the excessive sexual repression it demanded, Melman asks whether, today, happiness8 is within our grasp and society has finally been cured of symptoms ?
In a series of interviews with Belgian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and member of l’Association Lacanienne Internationale (ALI), Jean-Pierre Lebrun between July 2001and July 2002, Melman elaborated on the topic. The only master in our culture -he says- is enjoyment. […] Such enjoyment, however, is no longer phallic, but enjoyment of the objet petit a, this object “constructed” from partial objects. In Melman’s opinion, the deep wish of humanity is to die, to disappear, and in a way we are moving towards the realization of this wish. We are increasingly getting closer to making biological life is impossible on earth :
“The characteristic of the new psychic economy -Melman tells us- is that it
absolutely does not encourage us to contain the death drive; it aspires to it !
When one's appetite is only for fulfilled satisfaction, maintaining life is never a
limiting factor. If this new economy were to prevail completely, we would be
all the more driven by the death drive.”9
Conclusion
Where Freud shows that civilization is the result of the suppression of man’s instinctual impulses and that their subjection to the “dictatorship of reason” is one of the means available to try to free humankind from the menace of war and violence, Melman asks what the consequences of this new psychical economy are for civilization, given that it is based on an ever-pressing command to enjoy without limits, without submission to almost any authority.
In the absence of a final answer, the psychoanalysis can still offer us – I believe – a glimmer of hope. Psychoanalysis is not a philosophy, nor does it purport to have final answers to social or political questions, such as the question of war. Its field of study and application is the individual subject. It seeks to emphasize what is most human in the person. It invites the subject to try to live better, by seeking to understand unconscious mental processes that are at work in each one of us. Psychoanalysis can hopefully promote the use of the word and speech in place of the use of the sword and war. Freud says in Totem & Taboo that “in primitive men,…thought passes directly into action. … the deed … is a substitute for the thought”10, so that paraphrasing the poet, he can say “in the beginning was the Deed”11,but psychoanalysis allies itself with civilization by working on the Word because “words are substitutes for deeds”12 and, ultimately, what make us human.
1 Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and Western Sahara.
2 Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan.
3 Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan and The Philippines.
4 Ukraine, ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, Crimea (Ukraine), Transdniestria (Moldova), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), and Nagorno Karabakh (Azerbaijan).
5 Mexico and Colombia.
6 Cf. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
7 Melman, Charles; Introduction to the new psychical economy. L’Homme sans gravité. Jouir à tout prix.
Entretiens avec Jean-Pierre Lebrun. Collection Folio essais. (2005).
8 Freud begins Civilization and its discontents speaking about happiness being what
9 L’Homme sans gravité. Jouir à tout prix. Entretiens avec Jean-Pierre Lebrun. Collection Folio essais. (2005).
10Totem & Taboo, S.E. X, 161.
11 ‘Im Aufang war die Tat’ (Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 3).
12 The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, S.E. III, 36.
Albert Llussà