Freud, Sigmund (1915-002/1925.en): Thoughts for the times on war and death

XVII

THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES ON WAR
AND DEATH:

(1915)
I

THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE WAR

WEPT as we are into the vortex of this war-time,
our information one-sided, ourselves too near to
focus the mighty transformations which have
already taken place or are beginning to take place, and
without a glimmering of the inchoate future, we are
incapable of apprehending the significance of the
thronging impressions, and know not what value to
attach to the judgements we form. We are constrained
to believe that never has any event been destructive
of so much that is valuable in the common wealth of
humanity, nor so misleading to many of the clearest
intelligences, nor so debasing to the highest that we
know. Science herself has lost her passionless impar-
tiality ; in their deep embitterment her servants seek
for weapons from her with which to contribute towards
the defeat of the enemy. The anthropologist is driven
to declare the opponent inferior and degenerate ; the
psychiatrist to publish his diagnosis of the enemy’s
disease of mind or spirit. But probably our sense of
these immediate evils is disproportionately strong, and
we are not entitled to compare them with the evils
of other times of which we have not undergone the
experience.
The individual who is not himself a combatant—
and so a wheel in the gigantic machinery of war—feels
ı First published carly in 1gr5 in Imago, Bd. V.; reprinted in
Sammlung, Vierte Folge. [Translated by E. Colburn Mayne.)
288

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 289

conscious of disorientation, and of an inhibition in his
powers and activities. I believe that he will welcome
any indication, however slight, which may enable him
to find out what is wrong with himself at least. I
propose to distinguish two among the most potent
factors in the mental distress felt by non-combatants,
against which it is such a heavy task to struggle, and
to treat of them here: the disillusionment which this
war has evoked; and the altered attitude towards
death which this—Jike every other war—imposes on us.

When I speak of disillusionment, everyone at once
knows what Imean. One need not be a sentimentalist ;
one may perceive the biological and psychological neces-
sity of suffering in the economics of human life, and
yet condemn war both in its means and in its aims,
and devoutly look forward to the cessation of all wars.
True, we have told ourselves that wars can never cease
so long as nations live under such widely differing
conditions, so long as the value of individual life is in
each nation so variously computed, and so long as the
animosities which divide them represent such powerful
instinctual forces in the mind. And we were prepared
to find that wars between the primitive and the
civilized peoples, between those races whom a colour-
line divides, nay, wars with and among the undeveloped
nationalities of Europe or those whose culture has
perished—that for a considerable period such wars
would occupy mankind. But we permitted ourselves
to have other hopes. We had expected the great
ruling powers among the white nations upon whom
the leadership of the human species has fallen, who
were known to have cultivated world-wide interests, to
whose creative powers were due our technical advances
in the direction of dominating nature, as well as the
artistic and scientific acquisitions of the mind—peoples
such as these we had expected to succeed in discovering
another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts
of interest. Within each of these nations there pre-

vailed high standards of accepted custom for the
VOL. IV T

290 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVu

individual, to which his manner of life was bound to
conform if he desired a share in communal privileges.
These ordinances, frequently too stringent, exacted a
great deal from him, much self-restraint, much renuncia-
tion of instinctual gratification. He was especially for-
bidden to make use of the immense advantages to be
gained by the practice of Iying and deception in the
competition with his fellow-men. The civilized state
regarded these accepted standards as the basis of its
existence ; stern were its proceedings when an impious
hand was laid upon them; frequent the pronounce-
ment that to subject them even to examination by
a critical intelligence was entirely impracticable. It
could be assumed, therefore, that the state itself would
respect them, nor would contemplate undertaking any
infringement of what it acknowledged as the basis of
its own existence. To be sure, it was evident that
within these civilized states were mingled remnants of
certain other races who were universally unpopular
and had therefore been only reluctantly, and even so
not to the fullest extent, admitted to participation in
the common task of civilization, for which they had
shown themselves suitable enough. But the great
nations themselves, it might have been supposed, had
acquired so much comprehension of their common
interests, and enough tolerance for the differences that
existed between them, that ‘ foreigner ’ and “enemy’
could no longer, as still in antiquity, be regarded as
synonymous.

Relying on this union among the civilized races,
countless people have exchanged their native home for
a foreign dwelling-place, and made their existence
dependent on the conditions of intercourse between
friendly nations. But he who was not by stress of
circumstances confined to one spot, could also confer
upon himself, through all the advantages and attrac-
tions of these civilized countries, a new, a wider father-
land, wherein he moved unhindered and unsuspected.
In this way he enjoyed the blue sea, and the grey ; the

I9I5 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 29I

beauty of the snow-clad mountains and of the green
pasture-lands ; the magic of the northern forests and
the splendour of the southern vegetation ; the emotion
inspired by landscapes that recall great historical
events, and the silence of nature in her inviolate places.
This new fatherland was for him a museum also, filled
with all the treasures which the artists among civilized
communities had in the successive centuries created
and left behind. As he wandered from one gallery to
another in this museum, he could appreciate impartially
the varied types of perfection that miscegenation, the
course of historical events, and the special character-
istics of their mother-earth had produced among his
more remote compatriots. Here he would find a cool
inflexible energy developed to the highest point;
there, the gracious art of beautifying existence ; else-
where, the sense of order and fixed law—in short, any
and all of the qualities which have made mankind the
lords of the earth.

Nor must we forget that each of these citizens of
culture had created for himself a personal ‘ Parnassus ’
and “School of Athens’. From among the great
thinkers and artists of all nations he had chosen those
to whom he, conceived himself most deeply indebted
for what he had achieved in enjoyment and compre-
hension of life, and in his veneration had associated
them with the immortals of old as well as with the
more familiar masters of his own tongue. None of
these great figures had seemed to him alien because he
had spoken another language—not the incomparable
investigator of the passions of mankind, nor the
intoxicated worshipper of beauty, nor the vehement
and threatening prophet, nor the subtle mocking
satirist; and never did he on this account rebuke
himself as a renegade towards his own nation and his
beloved mother-tongue.

The enjoyment of this fellowship in civilization was
{rom time to time disturbed by warning voices, which
declared that as a result of long-prevailing differences

292 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XV

wars were unavoidable, even among the members of a
fellowship such as this. We refused to believe it ; but
if such a war indeed must be, what was our imaginary
picture of it? We saw it as an opportunity for
demonstrating the progress of mankind in communal
feeling since the era when the Greek Amphictyones
had proclaimed that no city of the league might be
demolished, nor its olive-groves hewn down, nor its
water cut off. As a chivalrous crusade, which would
limit itself to establishing the superiority of one side
in the contest, with the least possible infliction of dire
sufferings that could contribute nothing to the decision,
and with complete immunity for the wounded who
must of necessity withdraw from the contest, as well
as for the physicians and nurses who devoted them-
selves to the task of healing. And of course with the
utmost precautions for the non-combatant classes of the
population—for women who are debarred from war-
work, and for the children who, grown older, should be
enemies no longer but friends and co-operators. And
again, with preservation of all the international under-
takings and institutions in which the mutual civiliza-
tion of peace-time had been embodied.

Even a war like this would have been productive
of horrors and sufferings enough ; but it would not
have interrupted the development of ethical relations
between the greater units of mankind, between the
peoples and the states.

Then the war in which we had refused to believe
broke out, and brought—disillusionment. Not only is
it more sanguinary and more destructive than any war
of other days, because of the enormously increased
perfection of weapons of attack and defence ; but it is
at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any
that has preceded it. It sets at naught all those
restrictions known as International Law, which in
peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe ;
it ignores the prerogatives of the wounded and the
medical service, the distinction between civil and

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 293

military sections of the population, the claims of private
property. It tramples in blind fury on all that comes
in its way, as though there were to be no future and no
goodwill among men after it has passed. It rends all
bonds of fellowship between the contending peoples,
and threatens to leave such a legacy of embitterment
as will make any renewal of such bonds impossible for
a long time to come.

Moreover, it has brought to light the almost un-
believable phenomenon of a mutual comprehension
between the civilized nations so slight that the one can
turn with hate and loathing upon the other. Nay,
more—that one of the great civilized nations is so
universally unpopular that the attempt can actually
be made to exclude it from the civilized community as
“ barbaric ’, although it long has proved its fitness by
the most magnificent co-operation in the work of
civilization. We live in the hope that the impartial
decision of history will furnish the proof that precisely
this nation, this in whose tongue we now write, this for
whose victory our dear ones are fighting, was the one
which least transgressed the laws of civilization—but
at such a time who shall dare present himself as the
judge of his own cause ?

Nations are in a measure represented by the states
which they have formed ; these states, by the govern-
ments which administer them. The individual in any
given nation has in this war a terrible opportunity to
convince himself of what would occasionally strike him
in peace-time—that the state has forbidden to the
individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it
desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize
it, like salt and tobacco. The warring state permits
itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence,
as would disgrace the individual man. It practises not
only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate Iying
and deception against the enemy ; and this, too, in a
measure which appears to surpass the usage of former
wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience

294 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time
treats them as children by maintaining an excess of
secrecy, and a censorship of news and expressions of
opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectu-
ally oppressed defenceless against every unfavourable
turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves
itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed
with other states, and makes unabashed confession of
its rapacity and lust for power, which the private
individual is then called upon to sanction in the name
of patriotism.

Nor may it be objected that the state cannot
refrain from wrong-doing, since that would place it at
a disadvantage. It is no less disadvantageous, as a
general rule, for the individual man to conform to the
customs of morality and refrain from brutal and
arbitrary conduct; and the state but seldom proves
able to indemnify him for the sacrifices it exacts. It
cannot be a matter for astonishment, therefore, that
this relaxation of all the moral ties between the greater
units of mankind should have had a seducing influence
on the morality of individuals ; for our conscience is
not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers are wont
to declare it, but in its origin is ‘dread of the com-
munity ’ and nothing else. When the community has
no rebuke to make, there is an end of all suppression of
the baser passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty,
fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with
their civilization that one would have held them to be
impossible.

Well may that civilized cosmopolitan, therefore, of
whom I spoke, stand helpless in a world grown strange
to him—his all-embracing patrimony disintegrated, the
common estates in it laid waste, the fellow-citizens
embroiled and debased !

In criticism of his disillusionment, nevertheless,
certain things must be said. Strictly speaking, it is
not justified, for it consists in the destruction of—an
illusion ! We welcome illusions because they spare us

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 295

emotional distress, and enable us instead to indulge in
gratification. We must not then complain if now and
again they come into conflict with some portion of
reality, and are shattered against it.

Two things in this war have evoked our sense of
disillusionment : the destitution shown in moral rela-
tions externally by the states which in their interior
relations pose as the guardians of accepted moral usage,
and the brutality in behaviour shown by individuals,
whom, as partakers in the highest form of human
civilization, one would not have credited with such a
thing.

Let us begin with the second point and endeavour
to formulate, as succinctly as may be, the point of
view which it is proposed to criticize. How do we
imagine the process by which an individual attains to
a higher plane of morality ? The first answer is sure
to be: He is good and noble from his very birth, his
very earliest beginnings. We need not consider this
any further. A second answer will suggest that we
are concerned with a developmental process, and will
probably assume that this development consists in
eradicating from him the evil human tendencies and,
under the influence of education and a civilized environ-
ment, replacing them by good ones. From that stand-
point it is certainly astonishing that evil should show
itself to have such power in those who have been thus
nurtured.

But this answer implies the thesis from which we
propose to dissent. In reality, there is no such thing
as“ eradicating ’ evil tendencies. Psychological—more
strictly speaking, psycho-analytic—investigation shows
instead that the inmost essence of human nature consists
of, elemental instincts, which are common to all men
and aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs.
These instincts in themselves are neither good nor evil.
We but classify them and their manifestations in that
fashion, according as they meet the needs and demands
of the human community. It is admitted that all

296 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XV

those instincts which society condemns as evil—let us
take as representatives the selfish and the cruel—are
of this primitive type.

These primitive instincts undergo a lengthy process
of development before they are allowed to become
active in the adult being. They are inhibited, directed
towards other aims and departments, become com-
mingled, alter their objects, and are to some extent
turned back upon their possessor. Reaction-formations
against certain instincts take the deceptive form of a
change in content, as though egoism had changed into
altruism, or crueltyintopity. Thesereaction-formations
are facilitated by the circumstance that many instincts
are manifested almost from the first in pairs of opposites,
a very remarkable phenomenon—and one strange to
the lay public—which is termed the “ ambivalence of
feeling’. The most easily observable and compre-
hensible instance of this is the fact that intense love
and intense hatred are so often to be found together in
the same person. Psycho-analysis adds that the con-
flicting feelings not infrequently have the same person

for their object.
It is not until all these ‘ vicissitudes to which

instincts are subject” have been surmounted that
what we call the character of a human being is formed,
and this, as we know, can only very inadequately be
classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. A human being is
seldom altogether good or bad; he is usually “ good’
in one relation and ‘bad’ in another, or ‘good’ in
certain external circumstances and in others decidedly
“bad’. It is interesting to learn that the existence of
strong ‘bad’ impulses in infancy is often the actual
condition for an unmistakable inclination towards
‘good’ in the adult person. Those who as children
have been the most pronounced egoists may well
become the most helpful and self-sacrificing members
of the community ; most of our sentimentalists, friends
of humanity, champions of animals, have been evolved
from little sadists and animal-tormentors.

I9I5 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 297

The transformation of ‘bad’ instincts is brought
about by two co-operating factors, an internal and an
external. The internal factor consists in an influence
on the bad—say, the egoistic—instincts exercised by
erotism, that is, by the human need for love, taken in
its widest sense. By the admixture of erotic com-
ponents the egoistic instincts are transmuted into social
ones. We learn to value being loved as an advantage
for which we are willing to sacrifice other advantages.
The external factor is the force exercised by up-bringing,
which advocates the claims of our cultural environment,
and this is furthered later by the direct pressure of that
civilization by which we are surrounded. Civilization
is the fruit of renunciation of instinctual satisfaction,
and from each new-comer in turn it exacts the same
renunciation. Throughout the life of the individual
there is a constant replacement of the external com-
pulsion by the internal. The influences of civilization
cause an ever-increasing transmutation of egoistic
trends into altruistic and social ones, and this by an
admixture of erotic elements. In the last resort it may
be said that every internal compulsion which has been
of service in the development of human beings was
originally, that is, in the evolution of the human race,
nothing but an external one. Those who are born
to-day bring with them as an inherited constitution
some degree of a tendency (disposition) towards trans-
mutation of egoistic into social instincts, and this
disposition is easily stimulated to achieve that effect.
A further measure of this transformation must be
accomplished during the life of the individual himself.
And so the human being is subject not only to the
pressure of his immediate environment, but also to the
influence of the cultural development attained by his
forefathers.

If we give the name of cultural adaptability to a
man’s personal capacity for transformation of the
egoistic impulses under the influence of the erotic, we
may further affiırm that this adaptability is made up

298 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

of two parts, one innate and the other acquired through
experience, and that the relation of the two to each
other and to that portion of the instinctual life which
remains untransformed is a very variable one.

Generally speaking, we are apt to attach too much
importance to the innate part, and in addition to this
we run the risk of overestimating the general adapt-
ability to civilization in comparison with those instincts
which have remained in their primitive state—by which
I mean that in this way we are led to regard human
nature as ‘ better’ than it actually is. For there is,
besides, another factor which obscures our judgement
and falsifies the issue in too favourable a sense.

The impulses of another person are naturally hidden
from our observation. We deduce them from his
actions and behaviour, which we trace to motives born
of his instinctual life. Such a conclusion is bound to
be, in many cases, erroneous. This or that action
which is “good ’ from the civilized point of view may
in one instance be born of a ‘ noble ’ motive, in another
not so. Ethical theorists class as ‘good ’ actions only
those which are the outcome of good impulses ; to the
others they refuse their recognition. But society,
which is practical in its aims, is little troubled on the
whole by this distinction ; it is content if a man
regulates his behaviour and actions by the precepts of
civilization, and is little concerned with his motives.

We have seen that the external compulsion exercised
on a human being by his up-bringing and environment
produces a further transformation towards good in his
instinctual life—a turning from egoism towards altru-
ism. But this is not the regular or necessary effect
of the external compulsion. Education and environ-
ment offer benefits not only in the way of love, but also
employ another kind of premium system, namely,
reward and punishment. In this way their effect may
turn out to be that he who is subjected to their influence
will choose to ‘ behave well’ in the civilized sense of
the phrase, although no ennoblement of instinct, no

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 299

transformation of egoistic into altruistic inclinations,
has taken place within. The result will, roughly speak-
ing, be the same ; only a particular concatenation of
circumstances will reveal that one man always acts
rightly because his instinctual inclination compels him
so to do, and the other is ‘ good ’ only in so far and for
so long as such civilized behaviour is advantageous for
his own egoistic purposes. But superficial acquaint-
ance with an individual will not enable us to distinguish
between the two cases, and we are certainly misled by
our optimism into grossly exaggerating the number of
human beings who have been transformed in a civilized
sense.

Civilized society, which exacts good conduct and
does not trouble itself about the impulses underlying it,
has thus won over to obedience a great many people
who are not thereby following the dictates of their own
natures. Encouraged by this success, society has
suffered itself to be led into straining the moral standard
to the highest possible point, and thus it has forced its
members into a yet greater estrangement from their
instinctual dispositions. They are consequently sub-
jected to an unceasing suppression of instinct, the
resulting strain of which betrays itself in the most
remarkable phenomena of reaction and compensation
formations. In the domain of sexuality, where such
suppression is most difficult to enforce, the result is
seen in the reaction-phenomena of neurotic disorders.
Elsewhere the pressure of civilization brings in its train
no pathological results, but is shown in malformations
of character, and in the perpetual readiness of the
inhibited instincts to break through to gratification at
any suitable opportunity. Anyone thus compelled to
act continually in the sense of precepts which are not
the expression of instinctual inclinations, is living,
psychologically speaking, beyond his means, and might
objectively be designated a hypocrite, whether this
difference be clearly known to him or not. It is un-
deniable that our contemporary civilization is extra-

300 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XV

ordinarily favourable to the production of this form of
hypocrisy. One might venture to say that it is based
upon such hypocrisy, and that it would have to submit
to far-reaching modifications if people were to under-
take to live in accordance with the psychological truth.
Thus there are very many more hypocrites than truly
civilized persons—indeed, it is a debatable point
whether a certain degree of civilized hypocrisy be not
indispensable for the maintenance of civilization,
because the cultural adaptability so far attained by
those living to-day would perhaps not prove adequate
to the task. On the other hand, the maintenance of
civilization even on so questionable a basis offers the
prospect of each new generation achieving a farther-
reaching transmutation of instinet, and becoming the
pioneer of a higher form of civilization.

From the foregoing observations we may already
derive this consolation—that our mortification and our
grievous disillusionment regarding the uncivilized be-
haviour of our world-compatriots in this war are shown
to be unjustified. They were based on an illusion to
which we had abandoned ourselves. In reality our
fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared,
because they had never risen so high as we believed.
That the greater units of humanity, the peoples and
states, have mutually abrogated their moral restraints
naturally prompted these individuals to permit them-
selves relief for a while from the heavy pressure of
civilization and to grant a passing satisfaction to the
instincts it holds in check. This probably caused no
breach in the relative morality within their respective
national frontiers.

We may, however, obtain insight deeper than this
into the change brought about by the war in our
former compatriots, and at the same time receive a
warning against doing them an injustice. For the
evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity which is
present in no other process of development. When a
village grows into a town, a child into a man, the

1915 IHOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 301

village and the child become submerged in the town
and the man. Memory alone can trace the earlier
features in the new image ; in reality the old materials
or forms have been superseded and replaced by new
ones. It is otherwise with the development of the
mind. Here one can describe the state of affairs,
which is a quite peculiar one, only by saying that in
this case every earlier stage of development persists
alongside the later stage which has developed from it;
the successive stages condition a co-existence, although
it is in reference to the same materials that the whole
series of transformations has been fashioned. The
earlier mental state may not have manifested itself for
years, but none the less it is so far present that it may
at any time again become the mode of expression
of the forces in the mind, and that exclusively, as
though all later developments had been annulled,
undone. This extraordinary plasticity of the evolution
that takes place in the mind is not unlimited in its
scope ; it might be described as a special capacity for
retroversion—for regression—since it may well happen
that a later and higher stage of evolution, once aban-
doned, cannot be reached again. But the primitive
stages can always be re-established; the primitive
mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

What are called mental diseases inevitably impress
the layman with the idea of destruction of the life of
mind and soul. In reality, the destruction relates only
to later accretions and developments. The essence of
mental disease lies in a return to earlier conditions of
affective life and functioning. An excellent example
of the plasticity of mental life is afforded by the state
of sleep, which every night we desire. Since we have
learnt to interpret even absurd and chaotic dreams, we
know that whenever we sleep we cast off our hard-won
morality like a garment, only to put it on again next
morning. This divestiture is naturally unattended by
any danger because we are paralysed, condemned to
inactivity, by the state of sleep. Only through a

302 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XV

dream can we learn of the regression of our emotional
life to one of the earliest stages of development.
For instance, it is noteworthy that all our dreams
are governed by purely egoistic motives. One of
my English friends put forward this proposition at
a scientific meeting in America, whereupon a lady who
was present remarked that that might be the case in
Austria, but she could maintain for herself and her
friends that they were altruistic even in their dreams.
My friend, although himself of English race, was
obliged to contradict the lady emphatically on the
ground of his personal experience in dream-analysis,
and to declare that in their dreams high-minded
American ladies were quite as egoistical as the
Austrians.

Thus the transformations of instinet on which our
cultural adaptability is based, may also be perma-
nently or temporarily undone by the experiences
of life. Undoubtedly the influences of war are among
the forces that can bring about such regression ;
therefore we need not deny adaptability for culture to
all who are at the present time displaying uncivilized
behaviour, and we may anticipate that the refinement
of their instincts will be restored in times of peace.

There is, however, another symptom in our world-
compatriots which has perhaps astonished and shocked
us no less than the descent from their ethical nobility
which has so greatly distressed us. I mean the narrow-
mindedness shown by the best intellects, their obduracy,
their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments,
their uncritical credulity for the most disputable asser-
tions. This indeed presents a lamentable picture, and
I wish to say emphatically that in this I am by no
means a blind partisan who finds all the intellectual
shortcomings on one side. But this phenomenon is
much easier to account for and much less disquieting
than that which we have just considered. Students
of human nature and philosophers have long taught us
that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 303

an independent force and in overlooking its dependence
upon the emotional life. Our intelligence, they teach
us, can function reliably only when it is removed from
the influences of strong emotional impulses ; otherwise
it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and
delivers the inference which the will requires. Thus,
in their view, logical arguments are impotent against
affective interests, and that is why reasons, which in
Falstaff’s phrase are ‘as plenty as blackberries’, pro-
duce so few victories in the conflict with interests.
Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further
confirmed this statement. It daily shows that the
shrewdest persons will all of a sudden behave like
imbeciles as soon as the needful insight is confronted
by an emotional resistance, but will completely regain
their wonted acuity once that resistance has been over-
come. The logical infatuations into which this war has
deluded our fellow-citizens, many of them the best of
their kind, are therefore a secondary phenomenon, a
consequence of emotional excitement, and are destined,
we may hope, to disappear with it.

Having in this way come to understand once more
our fellow-citizens who are now so greatly alienated
from us, we shall the more easily endure the disillusion-
ment which the nations, those greater units of the
human race, have caused us, for we shall perceive that
the demands we make upon them ought to be far more
modest. Perhaps they are reproducing the course of
individual evolution, and still to-day represent very
primitive phases in the organization and formation of
higher unities. It is in agreement with this that the
educative factor of an external compulsion towards
morality, which we found to be so effective for the
individual, is barely discernible in them. True, we
had hoped that the extensive community of interests
established by commerce and production would consti-
tute the germ of such a compulsion, but it would seem
that nations still obey their immediate passions far
more readily than their interests. Their interests

304 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

serve them, at most, as rationalizations for their
passions ; they parade their interests as their justifica-
tion for satisfying their passions. Actually why the
national units should disdain, detest, abhor one another,
and that even when they are at peace, is indeed a
mystery. I cannot tell why it is. It is just as though
when it becomes a question of a number of people, not
to say millions, all individual moral acquirements were
obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest,
the crudest mental attitudes were left. Possibly only
future stages in development will be able in any way
to alter this regrettable state of affairs. But a little
more truthfulness and upright dealing on all sides,
both in the personal relations of men to one another
and between them and those who govern them, should
also do something towards smoothing the way for this
transformation.

u
OuUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

The second factor to which I attribute our present
sense of estrangement in this once lovely and congenial
world is the disturbance that has taken place in our
attitude towards death, an attitude to which hitherto
we have clung so fast.

This attitude was far from straightforward. We
were of course prepared to maintain that death was the
necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes a debt
to Nature and must expect to pay the reckoning—in
short, that death was natural, undeniable and un-
avoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed
to behave as if it were otherwise. We displayed an
unmistakable tendency to ‘ shelve’ death, to eliminate
it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed we even
have the saying, ‘ To think of something as we think
of death’. That is our own death, of course. Our

3 [The German saying is used as an equivalent for ‘ incredible’ or
“unlikely ’—Trans.]

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 305

own death is. indeed unimaginable, and whenever we
make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that
we really survive as spectators. Hence the psycho-
analytic school could venture on the assertion that at
bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the
same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one
of us is convinced of his own immortality.

As to the death of another, the civilized man will
carefully avoid speaking of such a possibility in the
hearing of the person concerned. Children alone dis-
regard this restriction ; unabashed they threaten one
another with the eventuality of death, and even go so
far as to talk of it before one whom they love, as for
instance: “ Dear Mamma, it will be a pity when you
are dead but then I shall do this or that.’ The civilized
adult can hardly even entertain the thought of another’s
death without seeming to himself hard or evil-hearted ;
unless, of course, as a physician, lawyer or something
of the sort, he has to deal with death professionally.
Least of all will he permit himself to think of the death
of another if with that event some gain to himself in
freedom, means or position is connected. This sensi-
tiveness of ours is of course impotent to arrest the
hand of death; when it has fallen, we are always
deeply affected, as if we were prostrated by the over-
throw of our expectations. Our habit is to lay stress
on the fortuitous causation of the death—accident,
disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray
our endeavour to modify the significance of death from
a necessity to an accident. A multitude of simul-
taneous deaths appears to us exceedingly terrible.
Towards the dead person himself we take up a special
attitude, something like admiration for one who has
accomplished a very difficult task. We suspend criti-
cism of him, overlook his possible misdoings, issue the
command: De mortuis nil nisi bene, and regard it as
justifiable to set forth in the funeral-oration and upon
the tombstone only that which is most favourable to
his memory. Consideration for the dead, who no

VOL. IV U

306 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVo

longer need it, is dearer to us than the truth, and
certainly, for most of us, is dearer also than considera-
tion for the living.

The culmination of this conventional attitude
towards death among civilized persons is seen in our
complete collapse when death has fallen on some
person whom we love—a parent or a partner in
marriage, a brother or sister, a child, a dear friend.
Our hopes, our pride, our happiness, lie in the grave
with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the
loved one’s place. We behave then as if we belonged
to the tribe of the Asra, who must die too when those
die whom they love.

But this attitude of ours towards death has a
powerful effect upon our lives. Life is impoverished,
it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game
of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as
flat, as superficial, as one of those American flirtations
in which it is from the first understood that nothing
is to happen, contrasted with a Continental love-affair
in which both partners must constantly bear in mind
the serious consequences. Our ties of affection, the
unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined
to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong
to us. We dare not contemplate-a great many under-
takings which are dangerous but quite indispensable,
such as attempts at mechanical flight, expeditions to
far countries, experiments with explosive substances.
We are paralysed by the thought of who is to replace
the son with his mother, the husband with his wife, the
father with his children, if there should come disaster.
The tendency to exclude death from our calculations
brings in its train a number of other renunciations and
exclusions. And yet the motto of the Hanseatic League
declared: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse’ |
(It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to
live.)

It is an inevitable result of all this that we should
seek in the world of fiction, of general literature and

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 307

of the theatre compensation for the impoverishment of
life.- There we still find people who know how to die,
indeed, who are even capable of killing someone else.
There alone too we can enjoy the condition which
makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with
death—namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life
we preserve our existence intact. For it is indeed too
sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, when
one false move may lose us the game, but with the
difference that we can have no second game, no return-
match. In the realm of fiction we discover that
plurality of lives for which we crave. We die in the
person of a given hero, yet we survive him, and are
ready to die again with the next hero just as safely.

It is evident that the war is bound to sweep away
this conventional treatment of death. Death will no
longer be denied ; we are forced to believe in him.
People really are dying, and now not one by one, but
many at a time, often ten thousand in a single day.
Nor is it any longer an accident. To be sure, it still
seems a matter of chance whether a particular bullet
hits this man or that ; but the survivor may easily be
hit by another bullet ; and the accumulation puts an
end to the impression of accident. Life has, in.truth,
become interesting again; it has regained its full
significance. -

Here a distinction should be made between two
groups—those who personally risk their lives in battle,
and those who have remained at home and have only
to wait for the loss of their dear ones by wounds,
disease, or infection. It would indeed be very interest-
ing to study the changes in the psychology of the
combatants, but I know _too little about it. We must
stop short at the second group, to which we ourselves
belong. I have said already that in my opinion the
bewilderment and the paralysis of energies, now so
generally felt by us, are essentially determined in part
by the circumstance that we cannot maintain our
former attitude towards death, and have not yet dis-

308 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

covered a new one. Perhaps it will assist us to do this
if we direct our psychological inquiry towards two
other relations with death—the one which we may
ascribe to primitive, prehistoric peoples, and that other
which in every one of us still exists, but which conceals
itself, invisible to consciousness, in the deepest-Iying
strata of our mental life.

The attitude of prehistoric man towards death is
known to us, of course, only by inferences and recon-
struction, but I believe that these processes have
furnished us with tolerably trustworthy information.

Primitive man assumed a very remarkable attitude
towards death. It was far from consistent, was indeed
extremely contradictory. On the one hand, he took
death seriously, recognized it as the termination of life
and used it to that end; on the other hand, he also
denied death, reduced it to nothingness. This contra-
diction arose from the circumstance that he took up
radically different attitudes towards the death of
another man, of a stranger, of an enemy, and towards
his own. The death of the other man he had no
objection to; it meant the annihilation of a creature
hated, and primitive man had no scruples against
bringing it about. He was, in truth, a very violent
being, more cruel and more malign than other animals.
He liked to kill, and killed as a matter of course. That
instinct which is said to restrain the other animals
from killing and devouring their own species we need
not attribute to him.

Hence the primitive history of mankind is filled
with murder. Even to-day, the history of the world
which our children learn in school is essentially a series
of race-murders. The obscure sense of guilt which has
been common to man since prehistoric times, and
which in many religions has been condensed into the
doctrine of original sin, is probably the outcome of a
blood-guiltiness incurred by primitive man. In my
book Totem und Tabu (1913) I have, following clues
given by W. Robertson Smith, Atkinson and Charles

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 309

Darwin, attempted to surmise the nature of this primal
guilt, and I think that even the contemporary Christian
doctrine enables us to deduce it. If the Son of God
was obliged to sacrifice his life to redeem mankind from
original sin, then by the law of the talion, the requital
of like for like, that sin must have been a killing, a
murder. Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of a
life in expiation. And if the original sin was an offence
against God the Father, the primal crime of mankind
must have been a parricide, the killing of the primal
father of the primitive human horde, whose image in
memory was later transfigured into a deity.!

His own death was for primitive man certainly just
as unimaginable and unreal as it is for any one of us
to-day. But there was for him a case in which the
two opposite attitudes towards death came into conflict
and joined issue; and this case was momentous and
productive of far-reaching results. It occurred when
primitive man saw someone who belonged to him die—
his wife, his child, his friend, whom assuredly he loved
as we love ours, for love cannot be much younger than
the lust to kill. Then, in his pain, he had to learn that
one can indeed die oneself, an admission against which
his whole being revolted ; for each of these loved ones
was, in very truth, a part of his own beloved ego.
But even so, on the other hand, such deaths had a
rightfulness for him, since in each of the loved persons
something of the hostile stranger had resided. The
law of ambivalence of feeling, which to this day
governs our emotional relations with those whom we
love most, had assuredly a very much wider validity in
primitive periods. Thus these beloved dead had also
been enemies and strangers who had aroused in him a
measure of hostile feeling.

Philosophers have declared that the intellectual
enigma presented to primitive man by the picture of
death was what forced him to reflection, and thus that

* C£. * Die infantile Wiederkehr des Totemismus’, Totem und Tabu.
? C£.‘ Tabu und Ambivalenz ’, Totem und Tabu.

3Io APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS Xvu

it became the starting-point of all speculation. I
believe that here the philosophers think too philo-
sophically, and give too little consideration to the
primarily effective motives. I would therefore limit
and correct this assertion: By the body of his slain
enemy primitive man would have triumphed, without
racking his brains about the enigma of life and death.
Not the intellectual enigma, and not every death, but
the conflict of feeling at the death of loved, yet withal
alien and hated persons was what disengaged the
spirit of inquiry in man. Of this conflict of feeling
psychology was the direct offspring. Man could no
longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted of it
in his grief for the dead ; but still he did not consent
entirely to acknowledge it, for he could not conceive
of himself as dead. So he devised a compromise ; he
conceded the fact of death, even his own death, but
denied it the significance of annihilation, which he had
had no motive for contesting where the death of his
enemy had been concerned. During his contemplation
of his loved one’s corpse he invented ghosts, and it
was his sense of guilt at the satisfaction mingled with
his sorrow that turned these new-born spirits into evil,
dreaded demons. The changes wrought by death
suggested to him the disjunction of the individuality
into a body and a soul—first of all into several souls ;
in this way his train of thought ran parallel with the
process of disintegration which sets in with death.
The enduring remembrance of the dead became the
basis for assuming other modes of existence, gave him
the conception of life continued after apparent death.

These subsequent modes of existence were at first
no more than appendages to that life which death had
brought to a close—shadowy, empty of content, and
until later times but slightly valued ; they showed as
yet a pathetic inadequacy. We may recall the answer
made to Odysseus by the soul of Achilles :

Erst in the life on the earth, no less than a god we revered thee,
‘We the Achaeans ; and now in the realm of the dead as a monarch

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH zIı

Here dost thou rule; then why should death thus grieve thee,
Achilles ?

Thus did I speak: forthwith then answering thus he addressed me,

Speak not smoothly of death, I beseech, O famous Odysseus,

Better by far to remain on the earth as the thrall of another ;

E’en of a portionless man that hath means right scanty of living,

Rather than reign sole king in the realm of the bodiless phantoms.t

Or in the powerful, bitterly burlesque rendering by
Heine, where he makes Achilles say that the most in-
significant little Philistine at Stuckert-on-the-Neckar,
in being alive, is far happier than he, the son of Peleus,
the dead hero, the prince of shadows in the nether world.

It was not until much later that the different
religions devised the view of this after-life as the more
desirable, the truly valid one, and degraded the life
which is ended by death to a mere preparation. It
was then but consistent to extend life backward into
the past, to conceive of former existences, transmigra-
tions of the soul and reincarnation, all with the purpose
of depriving death of its meaning as the termination of
life. So early did the denial of death, which above
we designated a convention of civilization, actually
originate.

Beside the corpse of the beloved were generated not
only the idea of the soul, the belief in immortality, and
a great part of man’s deep-rooted sense of guilt, but
also the earliest inkling of ethical law. The first and
most portentous prohibition of the awakening con-
science was: Thou shalt not kill. It was born of. the
reaction against that hate-gratification which lurked
behind the grief for the loved dead, and was gradually
extended to unloved strangers and finally even to
enemies.

This final extension is no longer experienced by
civilized man. When the frenzied conflict of this war
shall have been decided, every one of the victorious
warriors will joyfully return to his home, his wife and
his children, undelayed and undisturbed by any thought

3 Odyssey, xi. 484-491 ; translated by H. B. Cotterill.

312 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS xvu

of the enemy he has slain either at close quarters or by
distant weapons of destruction. It is worthy of note
that such primitive races as still inhabit the earth, who
are undoubtedly closer than we to primitive man, act
differently in this respect, or did so act until they came
under the influence of our civilization. The savage—
Australian, Bushman, Tierra del Fuegan—is by no
means a remorseless murderer; when he returns
victorious from the war-path he may not set foot in
his village nor touch his wife until he has atoned for
the murders committed in war by penances which are
often prolonged and toilsome. This may be presumed,
of course, to be the outcome of superstition ; the
savage still goes in fear of the avenging spirits of the
slain. But the spirits of the fallen enemy- are nothing
but the expression of his own conscience, uneasy on
account of his blood-guiltiness ; behind this superstition
lurks a vein of ethical sensitiveness which has been
lost by us civilized men.!

Pious souls, who cherish the thought of our remote-
ness from whatever is evil and base, will be quick to
draw from the early appearance and the urgency of the
prohibition of murder gratifying conclusions in regard
to the force of these ethical stirrings, which must
consequently have been implanted in us. Unfortun-
ately this argument proves even more for the opposite
contention. So powerful a prohibition can only be
directed against an equally powerful impulse. What
no human soul desires there is no need to prohibit ; ®
it is automatically excluded. The very emphasis of
the commandment Thou shalt not kill makes it certain
that we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers,
with whom the lust for killing was in the blood, as
possibly it is to this day with ourselves. The ethical
strivings of mankind, of which we need not in the
least depreciate the strength and the significance, are
an acquisition accompanying evolution ; they have

1 Cf. Totem und Tabu.
3 CH, the brilliant argument of Frazer quoted in Totem und Tabu.

I915 IHOUGHIS ON WAR AND DEAIH 313

then become the hereditary possession of those human
beings alive to-day, though unfortunately only in a
very variable measure.

Let us now leave primitive man, and turn to the
unconscious in our own mental life. Here we depend
entirely upon the psycho-analytic method of investiga-
tion, the only one which plumbs such depths. We ask
what is the attitude of our unconscious towards the
problem of death. The answer must be: Almost
exactly the same as primitive man’s. In this respect,
as in many others, the man of prehistoric ages survives
unchanged in our unconscious. Thus, our unconscious
does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if
immortal. What we call our ‘“unconscious’ (the
deepest strata of our minds, made up of instinctual
impulses) knows nothing whatever of negatives or of
denials—contradictories coincide in it—and so it knows
nothing whatever of our own death, for to that we can
give only a negative purport. It follows that no
instinct we possess is ready for a belief in death. This
is even perhaps the secret of heroism. The rational
explanation for heroism is that it consists in the decision
that the personal life cannot be so precious as certain
abstract general ideals.. But more frequent, in my
view, is that instinctive and impulsive heroism which
knows no such motivation, and flouts danger in the
spirit of Anzengruber’s Hans the Road - Mender:
“Nothing can happen to me.’ Or else that motivation
serves but to clear away the hesitation which might
delay an heroic reaction in accord with the unconscious.
The dread of death, which dominates us oftener than
we know, is on the other hand something secondary,
being usually the outcome of the sense of guilt.

On the other hand, for strangers and for enemies,
we do acknowledge death, and consign them to it quite
as readily and unthinkingly as did primitive man.
Here there does, indeed, appear a distinction which in
practice shows for a decisive one. Our unconscious
does not carry out the killing ; it merely thinks it and

314 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

wishes it. But it would be wrong entirely to depreciate
this psychical reality as compared with actual reality.
It is significant and pregnant enough. In our un-
conscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in
our way, all who have ofiended or injured.us. The
expression: “Devil take him!’ which so frequently
comes to our lips in joking anger, and which really
means ‘Death take him!’ is in our unconscious an
earnest deliberate death-wish. Indeed, our unconscious
will murder even for trifles ; like the ancient Athenian
law of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime
than death; and this has a certain consistency, for
every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is at
bottom a crime of löse-majeste.

And so, if we are to be judged by the wishes in our
unconscious, we are, like primitive man, simply a gang
of murderers. It is well that all these wishes do not
possess the potency which was attributed to them by
primitive men ;* in the cross-fire of mutual maledic-
tions mankind would long since have perished, the best
and wisest of men and the loveliest and fairest of women
with the rest.

Psycho-analysis finds little credence among laymen
for assertions such as these. They reject them as
calumnies which are confuted by conscious experience,
and adroitly overlook the faint indications through
which the unconscious is apt to betray itself even to
consciousness. It is therefore relevant to point out
that many thinkers who could not have been influenced
by psycho-analysis have quite definitely accused our
unspoken thoughts of a readiness, heedless of the
murder-prohibition, to get rid of anyone who stands
in our way. From many examples of this I will choose
one very famous one:

In Le Pere Goriot, Balzac alludes to a passage in the
works of J. J. Rousseau where that author asks the
reader what he would do if—without leaving Paris and
of course without being discovered—he could kill, with

1 Ct. “ Allmacht der Gedanken ’, Totem und Tabu.

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 315

great profit to himself, an old mandarin in Peking by a
mere act of the will. Rousseau implies that he would
not give much for the life of this dignitary. ‘ Tuer son
mandarin’ has passed into a proverb for this secret
readiness even on the part of ourselves to-day.

There is as well a whole array of cynical jests and
anecdotes which testify in the same sense, such as, for
instance, the remark attributed to a husband : ‘ If one
of us dies, I shall go and live in Paris.’ Such cynical
jokes would not be possible unless they contained an
unacknowledged verity which could not be countenanced
if seriously and baldly expressed. In joke, as we
know, even the truth may be told.

As for primitive man, so also for us in our un-
conscious, there arises a case in which the two con-
trasted attitudes towards death, that which acknow-
ledges it as the annihilation of life and the other which
denies it as ineffectual to that end, conflict and join
issue—and this case is the same as in primitive ages—
the death, or the endangered life, of one whom we love,
a parent or partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a
child or dear friend. These loved ones are on the one
hand an inner possession, an ingredient of our personal
ego, but on the other hand are partly strangers, even
enemies. With the exception of only a very few
situations, there adheres to the tenderest and closest
of our affections a vestige of hostility which can excite
an unconscious death-wish. But this conflict of ambi-
valence does not now, as it did then, find issue in
theories of the soul and of ethics, but in neuroses, which
afford us deep insight into normal mental life as well.
How often have those physicians who practise psycho-
analysis had to deal with the symptom of an exagger-
atedly tender care for the well-being of relatives, or
with entirely unfounded self-reproaches after the death
of a loved person. The study of these cases has left
them in no doubt about the extent and the significance
of unconscious death-wishes.

The layman feels an extraordinary horror at the

316 APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS XVII

possibility of such feelings, and takes this repulsion as
a legitimate ground for disbelief in the assertions of
psycho-analysis. I think, mistakenly. No deprecia-
tion of our love is intended, and none is actually con-
tained in it. It is indeed foreign to our intelligence as
also to our feelings thus to couple love and hate, but
Nature, by making use of these twin opposites, contrives
to keep love ever vigilant and fresh, so as to guard it
against the hate which lurks behind it. It might be
said that we owe the fairest flowers of our love-life
to the reaction against the hostile impulse which we
divine in our breasts.

To sum up: Our unconscious is just as inaccessible
to the idea of our own death, as murderously minded
towards the stranger, as divided or ambivalent towards
the loved, as was man in earliest antiquity But how
far we have moved from this primitive state in our
conventionally civilized attitude towards death !

It is easy to see the effect of the impact of war on
this duality. It strips us of the later accretions of
civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us.
It constrains us once more to be heroes who cannot
believe in their own death ; it stamps the alien as the
enemy, whose death is to be brought about or desired ;
it counsels us to rise above the death of those we love.
But war is not to be abolished ; so long as the condi-
tions of existence among the nations are so varied, and
the repulsions between peoples so intense, there will be,
must be, wars. The question then arises: Is it not
we who must give in, who must adapt ourselves to
them ? Isit not for us to confess that in our civilized
attitude towards death we are once more living psycho-
logically beyond our means, and must reform and give
truth its due? Would it not be better to give death
the place in actuality and in our thoughts which
properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more
Prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death
which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed ? This
hardly seems indeed a greater achievement, but rather

1915 THOUGHTS ON WAR AND DEATH 317

a backward step in more than one direction, a regres-
sion; but it has the merit of taking somewhat more
into account the true state of affairs, and of making
life again more endurable for us. To endure life
remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living
beings. Illusion can have no value if it makes this
more difficult for us.

We remember the old saying: Si vis Dacem, para
bellum. If you desire peace, prepare for war.

It would be timely thus to paraphrase it: S7 vis
vitam, para mortem. If you would endure life, be
prepared for death.