Reflections on War and Death

Summary

Reflections on War and Death is the English title of two linked essays Freud wrote in the spring of 1915, some six months into the First World War, and published that year in the psychoanalytic journal Imago. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner translated them for an American audience in 1918, while the United States was itself at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Freud writes not as a soldier or strategist but as a non-combatant in Vienna, and he addresses the 'stay-at-home' who feels bewildered and spiritually miserable. He names two causes of that misery: disappointment, and a disturbed attitude toward death. The first essay, 'The Disappointments of War', describes the cultivated European who had treated the whole continent as one fatherland and one museum, and who believed that the great nations would at least fight with restraint toward the wounded, physicians and civilians. The war broke every such expectation. States that punish lying and violence in their citizens practise both abroad, and educated men behave with a brutality no one thought possible. Freud then argues that the disappointment rests on an illusion. Evil is never eradicated by education; primitive impulses are only redirected by love and by social pressure, and many people conform to civilized morals out of fear of reproach rather than any change of heart. Such people live 'psychologically beyond their means'. Because earlier stages of the mind survive beside later ones, war can strip civilization away, as sleep does each night in dreams. The second essay, 'Our Attitude Towards Death', claims that civilized people speak of death as natural yet behave as if it were an accident to be hushed up; in the unconscious no one believes in his own death. Freud reconstructs prehistoric man, who readily killed strangers but, grieving over a loved one who was also partly a rival, invented spirits, the soul, the afterlife and the first commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill'. Our unconscious, he holds, still wishes death on rivals and still cannot imagine its own end. War exposes these layers. He closes by asking whether it would be more truthful to give death its proper place, revising an old proverb into 'If you wish life, prepare for death.' The essays are short, vivid and openly speculative. Students should separate Freud's observations of wartime conduct, which are often acute, from his theories of the primal horde, inherited guilt and the origin of religion, which rest on Totem and Taboo and are presented as reconstructions. His reduction of conscience to 'social fear' and his account of the Christian doctrine of atonement as a memory of primal murder are claims to examine against the text and against Christian teaching, not to absorb uncritically. The closing question about honesty before death, however, joins a long tradition of Christian and classical meditation on mortality.

Plot or Argument

• I. The stay-at-home's confusion

  Freud opens by admitting that people caught in the war lack perspective and that even science has been conscripted: the anthropologist declares the enemy degenerate, the psychiatrist diagnoses him as deranged. He proposes to help the non-combatant by examining two sources of distress, disappointment and the changed attitude toward death.

• I. The broken dream of a common civilization

  He portrays the educated European who travelled freely, chose his own 'Parnassus' of poets and philosophers from every nation, and expected any war among civilized peoples to spare the wounded, physicians, civilians and international institutions. The actual war disregarded all of these, and states proved willing to lie, censor and break treaties while demanding obedience. Freud remarks that the state forbids wrongdoing to individuals in order to monopolize it.

• I. Why the disappointment rests on an illusion

  Psychoanalysis, Freud claims, shows that evil impulses are never eradicated but transformed, chiefly by love (erotic components in the widest sense) and by education's rewards and punishments. Ambivalence lets love and hate attach to the same person. Because society rewards outward conformity, many are 'civilized hypocrites' rather than truly transformed, so the war did not lower people as far as feared; they never rose as high as believed.

• I. Regression and the blindness of intellect

  Mental development differs from other growth because earlier stages persist alongside later ones and can return; mental illness and nightly dreams show such regression, and war can produce it in whole peoples. The credulity of leading intellectuals is explained as reason serving emotional interest. Freud ends the first essay hoping for more truthfulness between peoples and their governments.

• II. The conventional denial of death

  The second essay argues that civilized people concede death in words but treat it as an accident, avoid mentioning it, praise the dead uncritically and collapse at the loss of those they love. Life grows impoverished when it may not be risked; literature and theatre become the place where we die vicariously and survive. War ends this conventional treatment by making death unavoidable and numerous.

• II. Primitive man and the origin of conscience

  Drawing on his own Totem and Taboo, Freud reconstructs a prehistoric man who killed strangers without scruple but, grieving over a beloved person who was also partly hated, conceived spirits, the division of body and soul, and an afterlife. From the same conflict came the first ethical command, 'Thou shalt not kill', which Freud reads as evidence of an ancient desire to kill. He interprets the Christian doctrine of atonement as pointing back to a primal murder.

• II. The unconscious, war, and preparing for death

  The unconscious, like primitive man, does not believe in its own death, wishes death on those who obstruct it, and is ambivalent toward those it loves; obsessive self-reproach after a death illustrates the point. War strips away the later layers and revives this primitive stance. Freud asks whether honesty would require giving death its place again, concluding that bearing life is the first duty of the living and paraphrasing the proverb as 'If you wish life, prepare for death.'

Characters

• The stay-at-home, addressee

  The non-combatant civilian whom Freud sets out to help; he is confused, spiritually distressed, and stripped of his former confidence in European civilization.

• The civilized world-citizen, figure in the argument

  Freud's portrait of the cultivated European who treated the continent as one fatherland and museum and whose disappointment the first essay analyses.

• Primitive man, reconstructed figure

  The prehistoric human whom Freud reconstructs from Totem and Taboo: ready to kill strangers, unable to imagine his own death, and driven by grief over loved ones to invent spirits and the first prohibition on killing.

• Achilles (Homer), quoted literary witness

  Freud quotes the shade of Achilles from Odyssey XI, who would rather be a living labourer than king among the dead, to show how meagre early ideas of the afterlife were.

Lessons

• The state that monopolizes wrong

  Freud observes that wartime states demanded obedience and sacrifice while practising lies, censorship and treaty-breaking that would disgrace any private citizen. His charge raises a classical question: is a political community bound by the same moral law as the persons who compose it? Christian just-war thinkers from Augustine to Grotius answered that it is, which gives students a standard against which to test both Freud's complaint and the governments he describes.

  • Freud says the state forbids wrongdoing to individuals in order to monopolize it. Is that an accurate description of the governments of 1915, or an exaggeration born of disillusionment?
  • Which specific wartime practices does Freud list (censorship, deception of the enemy, breaking treaties), and are any of them ever justified?
  • How would a just-war tradition such as Grotius's judge a state that 'absolves itself from guarantees and treaties'?

• Can evil be eradicated by education?

  Freud rejects both the view that people are good from birth and the view that education removes evil inclinations. Impulses remain; they are redirected by love and by rewards and punishments, and many people conform outwardly without any inward change. Christian teaching agrees that sin is not abolished by schooling and that outward conformity is not virtue, but it locates the remedy in grace and repentance rather than in the gradual transformation of instinct across generations.

  • What does Freud mean by a 'civilized hypocrite', and how does he distinguish such a person from the truly cultured?
  • Where does Freud's account of human nature overlap with the doctrine of original sin, and where does it part company with it?
  • Freud calls conscience nothing but 'social fear'. What evidence in the essay supports this, and what experience of conscience might count against it?

• Death hushed up, death made natural

  The second essay describes a culture that calls death natural but treats each death as an accident and avoids speaking of it. Freud argues that this evasion impoverishes life, so that people seek in novels and plays the risk they deny themselves. Students can weigh his diagnosis against older practices of preparing for death, from Socrates in the Phaedo to Christian manuals of holy dying, and ask whether Freud's remedy and theirs are the same.

  • Why, according to Freud, do people stress 'the accident, the infection, or advanced age' when someone dies?
  • Freud says fiction gives us 'many lives in one'. Is that a healthy use of literature or an escape from reality?
  • Compare Freud's 'If you wish life, prepare for death' with the Christian practice of remembering death. What does each think preparation involves?

• Reading a speculative reconstruction

  Much of the second essay rests on Freud's picture of prehistoric man, drawn from Totem and Taboo and nineteenth-century anthropology; he admits it is known only 'through deductions and reconstructions'. Students should practise separating what Freud observes (grief mixed with guilt, self-reproach after a death, the survival of childish wishes) from what he conjectures (a primal patricide behind the doctrine of atonement, inherited guilt). Evaluating an argument fairly means identifying which premises carry its weight.

  • List three claims in Part II that Freud presents as observation and three he presents as reconstruction. Which are more persuasive, and why?
  • Freud argues that a strong prohibition proves a strong desire. Does that inference hold for every commandment? Test it on another example.
  • How does Freud read the Christian doctrine of atonement, and what would a Christian theologian say in response from the text of Scripture?

Context

The two essays appeared in German in 1915 in Imago under the title 'Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod' (later rendered by James Strachey as 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'). The war had begun in August 1914; by early 1915 the Western Front had settled into trench warfare and casualty lists were enormous. Freud, nearly sixty, had sons in uniform, and his Vienna practice had dwindled. Brill and Kuttner's American translation of 1918 carries a translators' preface offering the book to the cause of international understanding.

Composition

Freud wrote the essays in early 1915, in the same period as his metapsychological papers, including 'Mourning and Melancholia' (written 1915, published 1917). The second essay leans heavily on Totem and Taboo (1913), which Brill's translation had made available in English in 1918; footnotes in the library's text refer readers there. The essay's reflections on the unconscious denial of death and on ambivalence toward the dead develop themes he had treated in that book.

Reception

The essays were reprinted in Freud's collected papers and became a reference point for later psychoanalytic and cultural writing on death and denial, notably Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973). Freud returned to the subject of war in his 1932 public exchange of letters with Albert Einstein, 'Why War?', and to the conflict between instinct and civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The pairing was included in volume 54 of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World (1990).

Comparisons

• All Quiet on the Western Front

  Freud explicitly declines to describe the psychology of combatants, saying he knows too little about it; Remarque, writing in 1929 from the front-line soldier's side, supplies exactly what Freud left out, including the experience of killing at close quarters that Freud imagines the victor forgetting once home.

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  In 1915 Freud still explains aggression as a primitive impulse redirected by love and education; by 1920, partly in response to war neuroses, Beyond the Pleasure Principle proposes a separate death instinct. Reading them together shows the theory changing under the pressure of the war.

• Civilization and Its Discontents

  The 1915 claim that civilization rests on the renunciation of impulse, and that many live 'beyond their means' psychologically, becomes the central thesis of the 1930 book, which adds the super-ego and a fuller account of guilt.

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  Tolstoy's 1886 story dramatizes the very attitude Freud diagnoses: colleagues treat Ivan's dying as an awkward accident and a matter of promotions. Tolstoy's resolution, however, turns on repentance and light, where Freud asks only for truthfulness about death.

• The Odyssey

  Freud quotes the shade of Achilles in Book XI, who would rather be a landless labourer than king of the dead, as evidence that early ideas of the afterlife were faint and joyless. Students can read the full scene to see what Freud's excerpt leaves in and out.

• Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot)

  Freud cites Balzac's novel, in which Rastignac recalls the question (attributed to Rousseau) of whether one would kill an old mandarin in China by a mere act of will for profit; Freud uses 'to kill your mandarin' as proof that literature recognized unconscious death-wishes before psychoanalysis.

• Pensees

  Pascal also argued that people divert themselves rather than think about death; but where Pascal presses the diversion toward the wager and the God who answers mortality, Freud presses it toward psychological honesty within a purely natural account.

• Perpetual Peace

  Kant's 1795 proposal assumed that commerce and republican government would gradually restrain war among nations; Freud's first essay records the collapse of a similar hope, noting that nations 'obey their passions of the moment far more than their interests'.

Quotes

Medical Lens

A short but important document in the history of psychoanalytic thinking about death, grief and aggression. Freud describes mental illness as regression to earlier stages that persist beside later ones, uses dreams as the normal model of that regression, and presents clinical observations of over-solicitude and unfounded self-reproach after bereavement as evidence of ambivalence; the same months produced 'Mourning and Melancholia'. He also notes how wartime psychiatry was turned against the enemy, with psychiatrists diagnosing opponents as deranged. Freud expressly says he knows too little about the psychology of combatants, so the essay is not a source on shell shock or war neurosis. His claims about inherited guilt and the primal horde are speculative reconstructions and should be presented as his theory, not as established findings.

• Part I, opening paragraphs

  Freud complains that science has lost its impartiality in wartime: the anthropologist calls the enemy degenerate and the psychiatrist diagnoses him as mentally deranged.

  Psychiatry History Physicians Doctors
• Part I, paragraph on the 'chivalrous bout of arms' and the war that followed

  The expected war would have protected the wounded and the physicians and nurses who cared for them; the actual war disregarded the prerogatives of the wounded and of physicians.

  Physicians Doctors
• Part I, section on psychic regression

  Freud argues that earlier stages of mental development survive beside later ones; so-called mental diseases are returns to former states, and sleep with its egotistic dreams is the nightly example.

  Madness Psychosis Dreams Nightmares Psychology Unconscious
• Part I, paragraphs on continual suppression of impulse

  Continual suppression of impulse in the sexual field is said to produce neurotic ailments, and elsewhere distorted characters ready to seize any chance for gratification.

  Neurosis Anxiety Psychology Unconscious
• Part II, paragraphs on the conventional attitude and on bereavement

  Civilized people stress accident, infection or old age as causes of death, praise the dead uncritically, and collapse inconsolably at the loss of close relatives.

  Death Dying Grief
• Part II, paragraphs on ambivalence toward loved ones

  Freud reports that psychoanalysts often treat excessive anxiety for relatives' welfare and unfounded self-reproach after a death, which he reads as signs of unconscious death-wishes.

  Grief Neurosis Anxiety Psychology Unconscious

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Freud says conscience is 'nothing but social fear'. Using the essay's own examples of wartime conduct, write an argument either defending or refuting that claim, and consider what Romans 2:14-15 says about the law written on the heart.

• Fiction

  Write a letter dated spring 1915 from a Viennese 'stay-at-home' to a friend in Paris whom the war has made an enemy, showing in concrete detail the disappointment Freud describes.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Freud and the author of a seventeenth-century Christian book on holy dying about what it means to 'prepare for death'. Let each answer the other's strongest point.

Further Reading

• Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud

  The 1913 book on which the second essay's account of primitive man, ambivalence and the murder prohibition depends.

• Why War?, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud

  The 1932 exchange of letters in which Freud revisits war after developing his theory of a death instinct.

• Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

  Freud's fullest statement of the conflict between instinct and civilized morality.

• Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay

  Standard biography; covers Freud's experience of the First World War and his sons' service.

• The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

  A 1973 book that builds on Freud's claim that no one believes in his own death.

• The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell

  How the First World War changed the literary imagination of the English-speaking world.

• The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, Jeremy Taylor

  A classic Anglican manual (1651) on preparing for death, useful for comparing Christian and Freudian meanings of preparation.