At this moment, we are witnessing another war. Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th and from yesterday to today has intensified its attacks. A war like this - among many others that continue to happen without proper media coverage - always brings up a series of questions. If, on the one hand, we have advanced so much in terms of science, technology, shortening time and distances, overcoming diseases, prolonging life; on the other hand, we promote wars by shortening countless lives and exposing the most inhuman face of man.
It is far from my objective to make a geopolitical analysis of this crisis, my purpose here is only to try to bring some light to the understanding of the phenomenon of war, taking as a starting point some of what Freud wrote on the subject and which is still frighteningly current.
Freud witnessed both world wars. In the latter, as a Jew, he became a refugee, when in 1938 he went to London, where he stayed until the end of his life, a little more than a year later. There are two texts in which he deals specifically with the theme, one entitled "Contemporary Considerations on War and Death", which dates from the time of the First World War; and another, probably better known, called "Why the war?" from 1933. The latter is the result of an exchange of letters with Albert Einstein.
After World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations was created, an organization whose purpose was to prevent further wars and ensure peace. In 1932, the League, through its International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, invited Einstein to a project of exchanging letters between renowned intellectuals. Einstein chooses Freud for a debate on war. In his letter to the psychoanalyst, the scientist poses different questions, which - he does not cease to be surprised - remain, more than ever, relevant. Among them:
(...) Is there a way to free human beings from the fatality of war? (p. 421, Autentica publishing house).
Freud states that a prevention against wars would be the construction of "(...) a central power to which the right to arbitrate in all conflicts of interest will be transferred (p. 432).". However, as the author already told us in Mass psychology and analysis of the self , text from 1921, What can keep a group cohesive is the use of violence and the identifications between its members. When we talk about countries, nations, this is precisely what is at stake, communities, what is common within a people, what is (with) shared, roots, history, customs, ideals. There we have the affective bonds, which strengthen a people and make them, for example, capable of giving their lives for their country.
It is precisely these national ideals that are the great obstacle to the establishment of this "unifying authority". That is when, then, war is resorted to. And as Einstein states in his letter to Freud, in order to have national security, it is necessary for States to renounce their sovereignty, "a part of their freedom of action".
This seems to me to be one of the fundamental points in the discussion about war, because it speaks of a principle already brought by Freud in the Malaise in culture . In order to live in society, it is necessary for each individual to make instinctual renunciations, that is, to give up a portion of satisfactions, to put it briefly. In other words, there is a price for the collectivity to function, the collective overrides the individual. This same rule then extends when we talk about relations between different countries. For there to be peace, it is essential to renounce something. There must be costs for everyone involved.
Since we are talking about drive renunciations, it is important to highlight this other aspect brought by Freud in his response to Einstein, who, in turn, raises the question of a destructive aspect in man, referring to the death drive. Freud agrees with the scientist saying that one of the reasons why it would be "easy" (my quote) to incite people to war is the existence of what he calls the "drive to hate and annihilate", but emphasizes that the drives of life, or sexual (referred to Eros, which tends to agglutinate, conserve, unite) and death (linked to destroy, kill) are always mixed. "(...) from the joint and antagonistic action of both that the manifestations of life arise (p. 434.).", they do not manifest themselves in a pure state.
When, therefore, human beings are incited to war, there must be a good number of motives with which they must agree, noble and malicious, about which we speak openly, and others about which we are silent. (...). Pleasure in aggression and destruction is certainly among them; countless cruelties of history and daily life confirm its existence and its strength (p. 435).
Finally, Freud asks the intriguing question, if there is no prospect of abolishing the destructive tendencies of the human being, why do we continue to be astonished and indignant in the face of war? I consider it valid to transcribe the answer, as it could in fact be written today, in the year 2022:
(...) Because each and every human being has the right to his or her own life, because war annihilates human lives full of hope, puts each human being in situations that degrade him, forces him to murder others, which he does not want, destroys precious material values, the results of human labor, and many other things. And also because war, in its present form, no longer offers the opportunity to realize the old heroic, and because a future war, as a result of the improvement of the means of destruction, could mean the extermination of one or perhaps two adversaries (p. 439).
Along with this, he reminds us that the cultural process we live through leads to great psychic changes, allowing us to displace and restrict instinctual motions and thus make our intellectual capacity stronger and internalize aggressiveness, that is, to divert it from the outside and make something else out of it.
Everything that stimulates cultural development also works against war (p. 441).
I emphasize that this conversation between Freud and Einstein took place before the invention of the nuclear bomb, a weapon whose activation the Russian president put on alert about an hour ago. Thus, what the psychoanalyst raised as the possibility of extermination "of one or perhaps two adversaries" gains another radicality, as we start to talk about the possible destruction of human life on Earth.
Thus, unfortunately, the war in Ukraine is still ongoing. For now, here are the notes and reflections of Einstein and Freud for this terrible and inhuman phenomenon that is war, as well as indications of possible ways to avoid it. I want to believe that, as Svetlana Aleksiévitch says in War has no woman's face , "The human being is greater than war".
