40

II

OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS
DEATH

IT remains for us to consider the
second factor of which I have already
spoken which accounts for our feel-
ing of strangeness in a world which used
to seem so beautiful and familiar to us. I
refer to the disturbance in our former at-
titude towards death.

Our attitude had not been a sincere one.
To listen to us we were, of course, pre-
pared to maintain that death is the neces-
sary termination of life, that everyone of
us owes nature his death and must be pre-
pared to pay his debt, in short, that death

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WAR AND DEATH

was natural, undeniable, and inevitable.
In practice we were accustomed to act as
if matters were quite different. We have
shown an unmistakable tendency to put
death aside, to eliminate it from life. We
attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have
the proverb: to think of something as of
death. Of course we meant our own
death. We cannot, indeed, imagine our
own death; whenever we try to do so we
find that we survive ourselves as spec-
tators. The school of psychoanalysis
could thus assert that at bottom no one be-
lieves in his own death, which amounts to
saying: in the unconscious every one of
us is convinced of his immortality.
As far as the death of another person
is concerned every man of culture will
studiously avoid mentioning this possi-
bility in the presence of the person in ques

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tion. Only children ignore this restraint;
they boldly threaten each other with the
possibility of death, and are quite capable
of giving expression to the thought of
death in relation to the persons they love,
as, for instance: Dear Mama, when unfor-
tunately, you are dead, I shall do so and
so. The civilized adult also likes to avoid
entertaining the thought of another’s
death lest he seem harsh or unkind, unless
his profession as a physician or a lawyer
brings up the question. Least of all
would he permit himself to think of some-
body’s death if this event is connected
with a gain of freedom, wealth, or position.
Death is, of course, not deferred through
our sensitiveness on the subject, and when
it occurs we are always deeply affected,
as if our expectations had been shattered.
We regularly lay stress upon the unex-
 

43

WAR AND DEATH

pected causes of death, we speak of the ac
cident, the-
infection, or advanced age, and
thus betray our endeavor to debase death
from a necessity to an accident. A large
number of deaths seems unspeakably
dreadful to us. We assume a special at
titude towards the dead, something almost
like admiration for one who has accom
plished a very difficult feat. We suspend
criticism of him, overlooking whatever
wrongs he may have done, and issue the
command, de mortuis nil nisi bene: we act
as if we were justified in singing his praises
at the funeral oration, and inscribe only
what is to his advantage on the tombstone.
This consideration for the dead, which he
really no longer needs, is more important
to us than the truth and to most of us,
certainly, it is more important than con
sideration for the living.

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This conventional attitude of civilized
people towards death is made still more
striking by our complete collapse at the
death of a person closely related to us,
such as a parent, a wife or husband, a
brother or sister, a child or a dear friend.
We bury our hopes, our wishes, and our
desires with the dead, we are inconsolable
and refuse to replace our loss. We act in
this case as if we belonged to the tribe of
the Asra who also die when those whom
they love perish.¹

But this attitude of ours towards death
exerts a powerful influence upon our lives.
Life becomes impoverished and loses its
interest when life itself, the highest stake
in the game of living, must not be risked.
It becomes as hollow and empty as an

¹Compare Heine’s poem, “Der Asra,” Louis Unter
meyer’s translation, p. 269, Henry Holt & Co., 1917.

45

WAR AND DEATH

American flirtation in which it is under-
stood from the beginning that nothing is
to happen, in contrast to a continental
love affair in which both partners must
always bear in mind the serious conse-
quences. Our emotional ties, the unbear-
able intensity of our grief, make us disin-
clined to court dangers for ourselves and
those belonging to us. We do not dare
to contemplate a number of undertakings
that are dangerous but really indispens-
able, such as aeroplane flights, expeditions
to distant countries, and experiments with
explosive substances. We are paralyzed
by the thought of who is to replace the son
to his mother, the husband to his wife, or
the father to his children, should an acci-
dent occur. A number of other renunci-
ations and exclusions result from this ten-
dency to rule out death from the calcula-
tion.

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REFLECTIONS ON

tions of life. And yet the motto of the
Hanseatic League said: Navigare necesse
est, vivere non necesse: It is necessary
to sail the seas, but not to live.

It is therefore inevitable that we should
seek compensation for the loss of life in
the world of fiction, in literature, and in
the theater. There we still find people
who know how to die, who are even quite
capable of killing others. There alone the
condition for reconciling ourselves to
death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all
the vicissitudes of life a permanent life
still remains to us. It is really too sad
that it may happen in life as in chess,
where a false move can force us to lose
the game, but with this difference, that we
cannot begin a return match. In the
realm of fiction we find the many lives in
one for which we crave. We die in iden-
 

47

WAR AND DEATH

tification with a certain hero and yet we
outlive him and, quite unharmed, are pre-
pared to die again with the next hero.

It is obvious that the war must brush
aside this conventional treatment of death.

Death is no longer to be denied; we are
compelled to believe in it. People really
die and no longer one by one, but in large
numbers, often ten thousand in one day.
It is no longer an accident. Of course, it
still seems accidental whether a particular
bullet strikes this man or that but the sur-
vivor may easily be struck down by a
second bullet, and the accumulation of
deaths ends the impression of accident.
Life has indeed become interesting again;
it has once more received its full signifi-
cance.

Let us make a division here and sepa-
rate those who risk their lives in battle

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from those who remain at home, where they
can only expect to lose one of their loved
ones through injury, illness, or infection.
It would certainly be very interesting to
study the changes in the psychology of the
combatants but I know too little about
this. We must stick to the second group,
to which we ourselves belong. I have al-
ready stated that I think the confusion
and paralysis of our activities from which
we are suffering is essentially determined
by the fact that we cannot retain our pre-
vious attitude towards death. Perhaps it
will help us to direct our psychological in-
vestigation to two other attitudes towards
death, one of which we may ascribe to
primitive man, while the other is still pre-
served, though invisible to our conscious-
ness, in the deeper layers of our psychic
life.

49

WAR AND DEATH

The attitude of prehistoric man towards
death is, of course, known to us only
through deductions and reconstructions,
but I am of the opinion that these have
given us fairly trustworthy information.

Primitive man maintained a very curi-
ous attitude towards death. It is not at
all consistent but rather contradictory.
On the one hand he took death very se-
riously, recognized it as the termination of
life, and made use of it in this sense; but,
on the other hand, he also denied death
and reduced it to nothingness. This con-
tradiction was made possible by the fact
that he maintained a radically different
position in regard to the death of others,
a stranger or an enemy, than in regard to
his own. The death of another person
fitted in with his idea, it signified the an-
nihilation of the hated one, and primitive

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man had no scruples against bringing it
about. He must have been a very pas-
sionate being, more cruel and vicious than
other animals. He liked to kill and did it
as a matter of course. Nor need we at-
tribute to him the instinct which restrains
other animals from killing and devouring
their own species.

As a matter of fact the primitive history
of mankind is filled with murder. The
history of the world which is still taught
to our children is essentially a series of
race murders. The dimly felt sense of
guilt under which man has lived since
archaic times, and which in many religions
has been condensed into the assumption
of a primal guilt, a hereditary sin, is prob-
ably the expression of a blood guilt, the
burden of which primitive man assumed.
In my book entitled “Totem and Taboo,”

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WAR AND DEATH

1913, I have followed the hints of W.
Robertson Smith, Atkinson, and Charles
Darwin in the attempt to fathom the na-
ture of this ancient guilt, and am of the
opinion that the Christian doctrine of to-
day still makes it possible for us to work
back to its origin.²

If the Son of God had to sacrifice his
life to absolve mankind from original sin,
then, according to the law of retaliation,
the return of like for like, this sin must
have been an act of killing, a murder.
Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of
a life in expiation. And if original sin
was a sin against the God Father, the old-
est sin of mankind must have been a patri-
cide–the killing of the primal father of
the primitive human horde, whose memory

²Totem and Taboo, translated by Dr. A. A. Brill,
Moffat, Yard & Co., 1918.

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REFLECTIONS ON

picture later was transfigured into a
deity.³

Primitive man was as incapable of imag-
ining and realizing his own death as any
one of us are today. But a case arose in
which the two opposite attitudes towards
death clashed and came into conflict with
each other, with results that are both signi-
ficant and far reaching. Such a case was
given when primitive man saw one of his
own relatives die, his wife, child, or friend,
whom he certainly loved as we do ours;
for love cannot be much younger than the
lust for murder. In his pain he must have
discovered that he, too, could die, an ad-
mission against which his whole being
must have revolted, for everyone of these
loved ones was a part of his own beloved
self. On the other hand again, every such

²Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV.

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WAR AND DEATH

death was satisfactory to him, for there
was also something foreign in each one of
these persons. The law of emotional am-
bivalence, which today still governs our
emotional relations to those whom we love,
certainly obtained far more widely in
primitive times. The beloved dead had
nevertheless roused some hostile feelings
in primitive man just because they had
been both friends and enemies.

Philosophers have maintained that the
intellectual puzzle which the picture of
death presented to primitive man forced
him to reflect and became the starting
point of every speculation. I believe the
philosophers here think too philosophi-
cally, they give too little consideration to
the primary effective motive. I should
therefore like to correct and limit the
above assertion; primitive man probably

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REFLECTIONS ON

triumphed at the side of the corpse of the
slain enemy, without finding any occasion
to puzzle his head about the riddle of life
and death. It was not the intellectual
puzzle or any particular death which
roused the spirit of inquiry in man, but the
conflict of emotions at the death of be-
loved and withal foreign and hated per-
sons.

From this emotional conflict psychology
arose. Man could no longer keep death
away from him, for he had tasted of it in
his grief for the deceased, but he did not
want to acknowledge it, since he could not
imagine himself dead. He therefore
formed a compromise and concealed his
own death but denied it the significance of
destroying life, a distinction for which the
death of his enemies had given him no
motive. He invented spirits during his

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WAR AND DEATH

contemplation of the corpse of the person
he loved, and his consciousness of guilt
over the gratification which mingled with
his grief brought it about that these first
created spirits were transformed into evil
demons who were to be feared. The
changes wrought by death suggested to
him to divide the individual into body and
soul, at first several souls, and in this way
his train of thought paralleled the dis-
integration process inaugurated by death.
The continued remembrance of the dead
became the basis of the assumption of
other forms of existence and gave him the
idea of a future life after apparent death.

These later forms of existence were at
first only vaguely associated appendages
to those whom death had cut off, and en-
joyed only slight esteem until much later
times; they still betrayed a very meagre

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REFLECTIONS ON

knowledge. The reply which the soul of
Achilles made to Odysseus comes to our
mind:

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
Here thou dost 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.

Odysseus XI, verse 484–491
Translated by H. B. Coterill.

Heine has rendered this in a forcible
and bitter parody:

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WAR AND DEATH

The smallest living philistine,
At Stuckert on the Neckar
Is much happier than I am,
Son of Pelleus, the dead hero,
Shadowy ruler of the Underworld.

It was much later before religions man-
aged to declare this after-life as the more
valuable and perfect and to debase our
mortal life to a mere preparation for the
life to come. It was then only logical to
prolong our existence into the past and to
invent former existences, transmigrations
of souls, and reincarnations, all with the
object of depriving death of its meaning
as the termination of life. It was as early
as this that the denial of death, which we
described as the product of conventional
culture, orginated.

Contemplation of the corpse of the per-
son loved gave birth not only to the theory
of the soul, the belief in immortality, and

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implanted the deep roots of the human
sense of guilt, but it also created the first
ethical laws. The first and most impor-
tant prohibition of the awakening con-
science declared: Thou shalt not kill.
This arose as a reaction against the gratifi-
cation of hate for the beloved dead which
is concealed behind grief, and was grad-
ually extended to the unloved stranger
and finally also to the enemy.

Civilized man no longer feels this way
in regard to killing enemies. When the
fierce struggle of this war will have
reached a decision every victorious warrior
will joyfully and without delay return
home to his wife and children, undisturbed
by thoughts of the enemy he has killed
either at close quarters or with weapons
operating at a distance.

It is worthy of note that the primitive

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WAR AND DEATH

races which still inhabit the earth and who
are certainly closer to primitive man than
we, act differently in this respect, or have
so acted as long as they did not yet feel
the influence of our civilization. The sav-
age, such as the Australian, the Bushman,
or the inhabitant of Terra del Fuego,
is by no means a remorseless murderer;
when he returns home as victor from the
war path he is not allowed to enter his
village or touch his wife until he has ex-
piated his war murders through lengthy
and often painful penances. The explan-
ation for this is, of course, related to his
superstition; the savage fears the avenging
spirit of the slain. But the spirits of
the fallen enemy are nothing but the ex-
pression of his evil conscience over his
blood guilt; behind this superstition there
lies concealed a bit of ethical delicacy of

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feeling which has been lost to us civilized
beings.⁴

Pious souls, who would like to think us
removed from contact with what is evil
and mean, will surely not fail to draw
satisfactory conclusions in regard to the
strength of the ethical impulses which have
been implanted in us from these early and
forcible murder prohibitions. Unfortun-
ately this argument proves even more for
the opposite contention.

Such a powerful inhibition can only be
directed against an equally strong im-
pulse. What no human being desires to
do does not have to be forbidden, it is self-
exclusive. The very emphasis of the com-
mandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes
it certain that we are descended from an
endlessly long chain of generations of

⁴Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV.

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WAR AND DEATH

murderers, whose love of murder was in
their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
The ethical strivings of mankind, with the
strength and significance of which we need
not quarrel, are an acquisition of the his-
tory of man; they have since become,
though unfortunately in very variable
quantities, the hereditary possessions of
people of today.

Let us now leave primitive man and
turn to the unconscious in our psyche.
Here we depend entirely upon psycho-
analytic investigation, the only method
which reaches such depths. The ques-
tion is what is the attitude of our uncon-
scious towards death. In answer we say
that it is almost like that of primitive man.
In this respect, as well as in many others,
the man of prehistoric times lives on, un-
changed, in our conscious.

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Our unconscious therefore does not be-
lieve in its own death; it acts as though it
were immortal. What we call our uncon-
scious, those deepest layers in our psyche
which consist of impulses, recognizes no
negative or any form of denial and re-
solves all contradictions, so that it does not
acknowledge its own death, to which we
can give only a negative content. The idea
of death finds absolutely no acceptance in
our impulses. This is perhaps the real
secret of heroism. The rational basis of
heroism is dependent upon the decision
that one’s own life cannot be worth as
much as certain abstract common ideals.
But I believe that instinctive or impulsive
heroism is much more frequently indepen-
dent of such motivation and simply defies
danger on the assurance which animated

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WAR AND DEATH

Hans, the stone-
cutter, a character in
Anzengruber, who always said to himself:
Nothing can happen to me. Or that mo-
tivation only serves to clear away the hesi-
tations which might restrain the corre-
sponding heroic reaction in the uncon-
scious. The fear of death, which controls
us more frequently than we are aware, is
comparatively secondary and is usually the
outcome of the consciousness of guilt.
On the other hand we recognize the
death of strangers and of enemies and
sentence them to it just as willingly and
unhesitatingly as primitive man. Here
there is indeed a distinction which becomes
decisive in practice. Our unconscious
does not carry out the killing, it only
thinks and wishes it. But it would be
wrong to underestimate the psychic reality.

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so completely in comparison to the practi-
cal reality. It is really important and
full of serious consequences.

In our unconscious we daily and hourly
do away with all those who stand in our
way, all those who have insulted or harmed
us. The expression: “The devil take
him,” which so frequently crosses our lips
in the form of an ill-humored jest, but by
which we really intend to say, “Death take
him,” is a serious and forceful death wish
in our unconscious. Indeed our uncon-
scious murders even for trifles; like the old
Athenian law of Draco, it knows no other
punishment for crime than death, and this
not without a certain consistency, for
every injury done to our all-mighty and
self-glorifying self is at bottom a crimen
laesae majestatis.

Thus, if we are to be judged by our un-
 

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WAR AND DEATH

conscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing
but a band of murderers, just like primi-
tive man. It is lucky that all wishes do
not possess the power which people of
primitive times attributed to them.⁵ For
in the cross fire of mutual maledictions
mankind would have perished long ago,
not excepting the best and wisest of men
as well as the most beautiful and charm-
ing women.

As a rule the layman refuses to believe
these theories of psychoanalysis. They
are rejected as calumnies which can be
ignored in the face of the assurances of
consciousness, while the few signs through
which the unconscious betrays itself to
consciousness are cleverly overlooked. It
is therefore in place here to point out that
many thinkers who could not possibly have

⁵ See Totem and Taboo, Chapter III.

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been influenced by psychoanalysis have
very clearly accused our silent thought of
a readiness to ignore the murder prohibi-
tion in order to clear away what stands in
our path. Instead of quoting many ex-
amples I have chosen one which is very
famous. In his novel, Père Goriot, Bal-
zac refers to a place in the works of J. J.
Rousseau where this author asks the
reader what he would do if, without leav-
ing Paris and, of course, without being
discovered, he could kill an old mandarin
in Peking, with great profit to himself,
by a mere act of the will. He makes it
possible for us to guess that he does not
consider the life of this dignitary very
secure. “To kill your mandarin” has be-
come proverbial for this secret readiness
to kill, even on the part of people of today.

There are also a number of cynical

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WAR AND DEATH

Jokes and anecdotes which bear witness to
the same effect, such as the remark attrib-
uted to the husband: “If one of us dies I
shall move to Paris.” Such cynical jokes
would not be possible if they did not have
an unavowed truth to reveal which we
cannot admit when it is baldly and se-
riously stated. It is well known that one
may even speak the truth in jest.

A case arises for our consciousness, just
as it did for primitive man, in which the
two opposite attitudes towards death, one
of which acknowledges it as the destroyer
of life, while the other denies the reality of
death, clash and come into conflict. The
case is identical for both, it consists of the
death of one of our loved ones, of a parent
or a partner in wedlock, of a brother or a
sister, of a child or a friend. These per-
sons we love are on the one hand a part

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of our inner possessions and a constituent
of our own selves, but on the other hand
they are also in part strangers and even
enemies. Except in a few instances, even
the tenderest and closest love relations also
contain a bit of hostility which can arouse
an unconscious death wish. But at the
present day this ambivalent conflict no
longer results in the development of ethics
and soul theories, but in neuroses which
also gives us a profound insight into the
normal psychic life. Doctors who prac-
tice psychoanalysis have frequently had
to deal with the symptom of over tender
care for the welfare of relatives or with
wholly unfounded self reproaches after
the death of a beloved person. The study
of these cases has left them in no doubt
as to the significance of unconscious death
wishes.

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WAR AND DEATH

The layman feels an extraordinary
horror at the possibility of such an emo-
tion and takes his aversion to it as a legiti-
mate ground for disbelief in the assertions
of psychoanalysis. I think he is wrong
there. No debasing of our love life is
intended and none such has resulted. It
is indeed foreign to our comprehension as
well as to our feelings to unite love and
hate in this manner, but in so far as nature
employs these contrasts she brings it about
that love is always kept alive and fresh in
order to safeguard it against the hate that
is lurking behind it. It may be said that
we owe the most beautiful unfolding of
our love life to the reaction against this
hostile impulse which we feel in our hearts.

Let us sum up what we have said. Our
unconscious is just as inaccessible to the
conception of our own death, just as much

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inclined to kill the stranger, and just as
divided, or ambivalent towards the per
sons we love as was primitive man. But
how far we are removed from this primi
tive state in our conventionally civilized
attitude towards death!

It is easy to see how war enters into
this disunity. War strips off the later de
posits of civilization and allows the primi
tive man in us to reappear. It forces us
again to be heroes who cannot believe in
their own death, it stamps all strangers
as enemies whose death we ought to cause
or wish; it counsels us to rise above the
death of those whom we love. But war
cannot be abolished; as long as the condi
tions of existence among races are so
varied and the repulsions between them
are so vehement, there will have to be
wars. The question then arises whether

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WAR AND DEATH

we shall be the ones to yield and adapt
ourselves to it. Shall we not admit that in
our civilized attitude towards death we
have again lived psychologically beyond
our means? Shall we not turn around
and avow the truth? Were it not better
to give death the place to which it is en-
titled both in reality and in our thoughts
and to reveal a little more of our uncon-
scious attitude towards death which up to
now we have so carefully suppressed?
This may not appear a very high achieve-
ment and in some respects rather a step
backwards, a kind of regression, but at
least it has the advantage of taking the
truth into account a little more and of
making life more bearable again. To
bear life remains, after all, the first duty
of the living. The illusion becomes
worthless if it disturbs us in this.

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We remember the old saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you wish peace, prepare for war.
The times call for a paraphrase:
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you wish life, prepare for death.