Freud on War and Death: Thoughts from a Nuclear Perspective

Jacob Burckhardt (1905/1963), the great Swiss historian, of whom Nietzsche wrote “he dared to see things realistically” (a habit of mind for which Freud had only admiration), told his students at the University of Basle in the 1870s (the decade of Freud's coming of age) that “war…must be assumed to be …a necessary occasion for higher development.” Burckhardt quoted Heraclitus' dictum: “War is the father of all things”—the cause of all value in life. From this perspective, war was not only divine but essential—a fundamental fact of the social world and nature. War was the elemental conflict from which harmony emerged. Burckhardt did not limit himself to this premise, which was not uncharacteristic of his contemporaries. He went on:

Men are men in peace as in war; the poverty inherent in the world persists in men under both conditions equally…. Extended peace leads to enervation and permits the rise

President, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. This is an expanded version of a paper given at the annual meeting of the New York Freudian Society in April, 1983.

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of a mass of contemptuous, fearful, wretched lives who would have never developed without peace … War raises the true capacities of man to their honored place. War, at a minimum, perhaps reduces those wretched lives to silence.

He argued that “War … has an enormous ethical superiority” over the “mere violent egotism of the individual”:

War commands violent forces in service of a general ideal, and, in fact, the highest general ideal with a discipline which also permits the highest of heroic virtues to unfold” [pp. 161-163].2

This view of war as heroic—as reflecting the conflict at the core of existence and human achievement, as a dialectic in which pain and suffering, even death, yield peace, beauty, and nobility—provides an historical link to Freud. “But war is not to be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among the nations are so varied, and the repulsions between peoples so intense, there will b