Impelled by the need for increased understanding of the central question in the 1932 Freud-Einstein exchange of letters, a conference of eminent American and Israeli psychoanalysts was held in Jerusalem in 1972. This book is a collection of papers that emerged from this conference addressed to the question, 'Why War?'. Reflecting the uneasy lull between the Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur attack, the conference was relevant and timely. Ruth Jaffee's report on the reactions of Israeli soldiers to the Six-Day War underlines the sense of urgency of the question, 'Why War?'.

The papers convey a rich knowledge of and commitment to psychodynamic concepts and discipline. As the question the authors address themselves to is clearly beyond the scope of a single discipline, one hopes this will be the first of a series of volumes presenting a distillate