Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil, edited by Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth F. Howell,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020,  295 pp.

Sigmund Freud, in his writings, was neither utopian nor dystopian but boldly pragmatic in his embracing of humankind's ever-present task of weaving together their instinctual animal heritage with their participation in a variety of communities and societies. Thinking of children, he (Freud, 1917, p. 311) noted:

For society must undertake as one of its most important educative tasks to tame and restrict the sexual instinct when it breaks out … and to subject it to an individual will which is identical with the bidding of society. It is also concerned to postpone the full development of the instinct till the child shall have reached a certain degree of intellectual maturity, for, with the complete irruption of the sexual instinct, educability is for practical purposes at an end. Otherwise, the instinct would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of civilization.

This same taming of the instincts is required of the aggressive-destructive drives that arise from our animal instincts. Indeed, one can imagine a society in which the sexual urges are quite openly expressed—and 21st C. Western Democracies have amply demonstrated this possibility—but envisioning a workable culture in which apocalyptic horsemen roam free, compromising our most basic wishes for security and safety, is unthinkable.

Still, Love and Aggression are not entirely comparable. It is fair, for instance, to assume that those early hominids who failed to develop wishes for safety by developing connection with Mothers and others wandered off and were eaten by lions and bears or met with accidental deaths, and, thereby, removed themselves from our collective gene pools, early in life and before passing on these genetic propensities. We are, that is, an attaching species, one for whom Libido is a defining characteristic.

Destrudo is different. Destructiveness by individuals (harm to other individuals and to the polities of mutual concern and interest in which they live) may well only app