Psychoanalysis and War

The earliest and some of the most creative developments in psychoanalysis took place in Europe at a time when the continent was devastated by two of the most destructive wars in history. Further, many of the most gifted practitioners and theorists in this field were, by virtue of their race or nationality, more than averagely affected by the splitting of families and the deaths of members resulting from fighting, persecution, invasion and separation.

One would think that any science which sought to explain human behaviour would be drawn to these issues. Yet they are addressed, in the psychoanalytic literature, almost exclusively in terms of the inner life of the individual. Psychoanalysis has curiously little to say about world events; in another context, that of political persecution in Argentina, Janine Puget comments: ‘the theoretical instrument does not allow for the formulation of theories about external reality’, though she does qualify this in relation to group analysis. Indeed, it was in the field of groups that Freud took a lead in applying the insights of psychoanalysis to an understanding of society. This represented a one-way process, however, and there was little attempt to study the effects of society on the psyche.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Psychoanalysis in its early days never claimed to be a political or social theory, and has always concentrated on the inner world of the individual as determined by infantile conflicts. From its inception it has striven to fend off the claims of real-life events (as in Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory). In a passage from ‘A Child is being Beaten’ (1919), Freud seems to be paying lip-service to the impact of events in later life:

at the present time theoretical knowledge is still far more important than therapeutic success, and anyone who neglects childhood analysis is bound to fall into the most disastrous errors. The emphasis which is laid here on the importance of the earliest experience d