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On the topic of WAR and PSYCHOANALYSIS here are some thoughts.
‘Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life or death for civilization…. Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?’ (Freud, : 201). Einstein asked Freud these basic and still extremely relevant questions in a letter exchange in 1932. Freud's answer was equally insightful and actual. After examining the power of the life and death instincts he wrote: ‘Of the psychological characteristics of civilization two appear to be most important: the strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and perils' (: 214-5). He advocated a strengthening of intellectual life and renunciation of instinct as a way to oppose wars; he did not say by what ways and means this would come about. He called himself a pacifist with a constitutional intolerance of war and thought that it might not be Utopian