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The heart within them screamed for all-out war.
Whenever I tire of the jargon and trivia that fills our current psychoanalytic literature, and when I am starting to feel burned out about our discipline (notice I did not say “our science” because I think our discipline is, as Ricoeur [1970] put it, a unique combination of science and hermeneutics), I return to Freud. Reading Freud is like taking a breath of fresh air; one cannot help but marvel at the clarity and penetration of his thought, with the exception of his occasional offensive remarks about women. Freud (1930) deals with the problem of archaic sadism in civilization, especially in his philosophical masterpiece, The Malaise Inherent in Civilization, often misleadingly mistranslated as Civilization and Its Discontents. Here he tells us “Homo homini lupus”—there is a powerful instinctual aggressiveness in humans: Our neighbors attempt to exploit our capacity for work without compensation, to use us sexually without our consent, to seize our possessions, to humiliate us, to cause us pain, to torture us, and to kill us. He asks, “Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” (1930, p. 111).
This “primary mutual hostility of human beings” (1930, p. 112), as Freud puts it—and this was written even before World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima—perpetually threatens civilized society with disintegration. Furthermore, Freud continues, “But even when it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment” (p. 121), and this “inclination to aggression is an original, self-abusing instinctual disposition in man, and … it constitutes the greatest impediment to