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‘The Janus aspect of aggression’ (a term used by the author), with which mankind has to live, epitomizes the message of this book. The reader of this Journal, familiar with the opposite aspects of archetypes, the conflict which these engender and the way conflict has to be borne and continuously worked on, will have no difficulty in accepting this message. He is not likely to be shocked by having psychological and animal origins of human aggression pointed out, nor will he be offended when the author tells him how the human animal with his capacity for hostility, cruelty and sadism is far worse than most other vertebrates who do not kill their own kind.
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that Storr is not in sympathy with his fellow humans because of their terrifying destructive potential: our greater cerebral development combined on the one hand with an extraordinarily long period of dependence, and, on the other, a relative lack of bodily equipment (tooth and claw), have logically led to an increasingly sophisticated invention of weapons. This, combined with our capacity for abstraction and detachment, with memories for humiliations and the ability to project and to identify, may yet lead to the ultimate tragedy of mankind.
All this is interestingly and very readably presented by the author. If one added that he also maintains a balanced view of the evidence from psychodynamic ethological and social sources, the reader might come to the conclusion that the book is not provocative or controversial enough. The following examples will prove that this is not the case.
First, ethological parallels are not always as convincing as Harlow's work on infant monkeys and their surrogate mothers. On p. 24 we first meet a male snake who is ‘suffering psychologically’ because he has been vanquished by a rival. He will crawl away and remain sexually inactive for weeks while his triumphant (my italics) adversary will immediately mate. In a later chapter (‘Aggression in relation