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What is the most powerful impulse of human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown?—It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping towards them in seven league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flightless bird.
What is written here is a potential research agenda, and a beginning prescription for action in relation to the nuclear deadlock. The orientation is acknowledgedly American, but I hope that what I have to say may have some pertinence for members of other nationalities.
In several sessions of the Psychoanalytic Congress now in progress1 there have been discussions of the European Holocaust. In this session we are drawing on that experience as part of our effort to prevent a larger holocaust that may be emergent. For in the coming holocaust there will be no opportunity to study it afterwards.