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Freud and War is a compendium of essays assembled and edited by French psychoanalyst Marlene Belilos, originally published in French in 2011, and subjected in this volume to a number of translators.
The book is rooted in the exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in which the great physicist seeks, at the behest of the League of Nations, to obtain from Freud his views on the possibility of “delivering mankind from the menace of war.”1 Freud responds at some length with the guarded hope that, in time, perhaps civilization might triumph over the universal plague of human aggression.
There follows what appears to be the first description published in English of a 1935 investigation of Freud and Viennese psychoanalysis by Italian fascist embassy officials. It concludes that Freud and his colleagues were all left-wing-oriented Jews, under careful observation and control, and that there was no “necessity for the creation in Italy of an Association like Freud's,” since it might serve as a “front for, and be used by, political tendencies that were not necessarily favorable to fascism.”2 As a result, Italian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio was denied his request for permission to join the Viennese Society.
Included in this volume and of some interest to the meticulous scholar is Mark Solms's translation of the original text of Freud's lecture