Editorial

In his reflection on the possible motivations for human beings to continue fighting wars, Sigmund Freud pessimistically regarded destruction as inherent in human nature. In “Why war” he wrote, “The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one” (1933, p. 211), answering the questions formulated to him by Albert Einstein in this regard. Freud called this notion “the death drive” and it soon became one of his most controversial concepts. As such, it appeared to many “as one of the most bizarre monster of all of Freud’s gallery of monsters” (Flugel, 1953, p. 43), as the influential social psychologist contemporary with him, William McDougall (1871–1938), put it. But we will return to this later.

On February 22, 2022, the Russian army attacked and invaded Ukraine and once again psychoanalysts found themselves sharing with patients some extreme existential conditions. In the opening paper of the present issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, “Voices from the war: Some notes on the emotional experience of the war in Ukraine told by two Ukrainian psychoanalysts,” the Italian colleagues Paola Solano and Michele Vargiu interview Mikhaylo Suslov (a training and supervising analyst of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group and IPA member) and the young psychoanalyst Ksenia Zaitseva (a candidate of the Institute of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group). The interviewees recall their very painful and almost incredible personal and professional experience of the Russian invasion.

The interview took place on March 21, 2022 from 3 to 5 p.m. CET on the Zoom platform, with Solano and Vargiu in their offices in Genoa and Cagliari (Italy), respectively, while Suslov had just arrived in Dresden (Germany) and Zaitseva was currently in Lviv (Ukraine) but about to leave Ukraine herself. The article reports some fragments of the complex and painful emotional experience lived by these colleagues for which, as the interviewers observe, “there are