More about War

Dear Sir

Diana Birkett's paper on ‘Psychoanalysis and War’ (British Journal of Psychotherapy 8(3)) raises some very important issues within psychotherapy, and within an overall psychological understanding of human beings. To a non-analytical therapist, the analytical treatment of war and other social conflicts often seems bizarre. It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher's celebrated dictum: ‘There is no such thing as society!’

To see war simply as the projection of many individual sadisms leaves out the social conflicts underpinning it. And if social conflict itself is seen only as projected intrapsychic conflict, then history itself disappears. Are we to say that the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American War of Independence and Civil War, the Russian Revolution, are without historical and social significance? This suggests that such social forces as feudalism and capitalism (which I assume came into collision in the above revolutions) are themselves non-existent or, if they do exist, have no psychological consequences for the human being.

It strikes me that there is a blurring between cause and effect here. Based on the unimpeachable observation that war allows the expression of infantile conflicts and primitive feelings in people - sadism, guilt, masochism and so on - psychoanalysis has often made the hazardous inference that those infantile conflicts cause war, or that war is required as a kind of safety valve for them. The psychoanalyst might argue that any other causes of war that are adduced - such as social conflicts over material resources - are themselves either reducible to ‘repressed psychic contents’, or do not address the primitive feeling level in the adult, and therefore do not concern psychoanalysis. But that does not mean that those social forces are irrelevant to our overall understanding of war. The aims of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and any psychological discipline are quite distinct from those of a ‘theory of war’. To put it simply,