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It is central to the psychoanalytic method that the psychoanalyst strives for an objective position from which to view and judge passion-laden events. From the beginning, analysts have attempted to transcend the study of a single individual in analysis and to enter a wider sociological and historical field of observation. Such a transplantation of method requires that appropriate data be used and it calls for special skills and self-discipline in those who would venture into these more uncertain and less encompassable areas. In this psycho-socio-historical field few have deserved to attempt such a study on as wide a scale as Robert Waelder. His aim is to survey the global crisis to which the world is presently heading and to uncover its psychological underpinnings. The scope and depth of this work, and the universality of its applicability, calls to mind and makes it a worthy sequel to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
This book, his last major creative work, is a monumental finale to the distinguished psychoanalytic career of Dr. Waelder. Published just two months before his death, it is no treatise on a small or localized subject, no treatment of any limited, discrete, or tangential piece of psychopathology, but applies the force, depth, and clarity of Dr. Waelder's disciplined way of thinking, accumulated over a lifetime, to 'the issues of our age'. His 'patient' is no less than mankind, and its illness a creeping moral decay, a universal amorphous anomie, and an internal rumbling and instability which, ominous and menacing, threatens momentarily to discharge its aggressive ferment over its external environment. The discontents of civilization seem to perch man on the tip of a volcano. The world is being increasingly polarized. Frustration and grievances are deep in the hearts of men,