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This book grew out of a series of lectures the author was invited to give at the C. G. Jung Foundation, New York, in 1985. The title of the lectures as ‘The Archetypes of War’. It sets out to look at war and man's fascination and involvement in it since earliest times. The author states that there have been many books written about the developmental origins of war but few about its evolutionary origins. This is an effort to redress the balance.
Stevens looks at man's evolution and how he has changed from a primitive instinctual creature to the civilised man of today, and what part war has played in that development. At the same time he explores this development from a Jungian perspective. He believes that man's need to go to war is part of his archetypal inheritance and that within each man (not woman) there exists an archetypal disposition to make war. He stresses how humans operate on two levels, conscious and unconscious. As war has archetypal roots, it exists in the unconscious and is part of our primitive inheritance. Here, according to Stevens, is the centre of the problem—man's lack of awareness of his ancient inheritance. Because he is cut off from his ancient roots there can be no understanding of the unconscious force which pushes him towards war. This potential for war in a nuclear age is of even greater concern. Technological man has developed weapons which would destroy the evolutionary process and the human race itself if the archetypes of war are activated.
In the later chapters Stevens looks at the possibilities of how this process of going to war in an nuclear age could be controlled; but ultimately he sees that it is only the birth of a new consciousness which can save mankind and his world.
This book was written when glasnost and perestroika had arisen in the Soviet Union, but before the changes in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. As if foreseeing the changes, the author warns that if the fear that keeps the Warsaw Pact and N.A.T.O. forces in o