KRAEMER, WILLIAM. (London). ‘Peace—what is peace? Ideal and reality’. Article in the Guild of Pastoral Psychology pamphlet, January 1978, ‘Paradox and opposites in politics and analytical psychology’

In this paper, given as a lecture in London at the Spring 1977 Conference of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, Kraemer tackles a thorny question under the title he has chosen. The first part draws on a German childhood, with experience as a three-year-old of the First World War, and describes the initial excitement generated by German victories, and the convictions held by both sides that the other was wholly bad, and that each was fighting for a lasting peace. Kraemer contrasts the idealisation of the First World War with the more sober approach to the second, which he feels was a step forward in man's development.

The second part of his article concerns peace and war in the individual. Here he discusses a patient's emergence from a depression as he struggles to integrate his anger, envy, violence and other unacceptable feelings which have been projected into the outside world which seems to the patient to be a sad and bad place. Here the unconscious idealisation is of the individual.

I found this a confusing paper because the links between the psyche of the individual and the will of a nation seemed unclear in Kraemer's argument. The paradox and opposites of the title do, of course, recur in Kraemer's discussion, and his concluding observation that the reality of peace is to live with conflict illustrates the enormity of the problem for society and for the individual.