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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.