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In this brochure Dr. Waelder deals with the problem of why men make war and what the likelihood is that they will in the not too remote future cease to do so.
After affirming that this problem is essentially a psychological one, he shows why it falls within the province of group rather than of individual psychology: individuals do not commonly resort to violence in situations analogous to those in which groups (nations, factions) do—conflict of interests, hatred, desire to pay off a past humiliation. An exceptionally clear exposition of Freud's contributions to group psychology and to the theory of the development of the individual conscience follows, with especial emphasis upon the relinquishing of conscience by the individual to the leader or to the group-ideal in mass situations.
Dr. Waelder concludes that men make war because most individuals are immature in the sense that they are glad to regress to a stage of development in which they may throw off the burden of responsibility for and vigilance over their own behavior. This is the nature of the mass situation, which he distinguishes very carefully from what he terms associations. By the latter he refers to groups in which the individual does not regress to the stage where he is externally rather than internally controlled, in other words, does not relinquish his conscience. He recognizes that even in mass situations the individual does not wholly relinquish his conscience but merely dissociates it from contact with the remainder of his personality—from instinctual forces, aggressiveness in particular. Thus the individual in a mass is subjected to a certain degree of moral conflict, depending upon the extent of this dissociation.
'Enduring peace might be assured if all national communities were communities free of the characteristics of psychological masses.' There might be enduring peace, in other words, if nations were associations rather than masses, groups whose actions would not differ from those of th