The Transformation of Thought That the Nuclear Age Requires: Can We Achieve It?

Psychoanalytic discourse on the problems of aggression and war usually takes its point of departure from the famous exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud, “Why War?” (Freud, 1933), although that exchange is now more than half a century old and occurred before the advent of the nuclear age when the question of war was not yet that of the very survival of the human species on a livable planet. In that interchange, Einstein interspersed a number of assertions about human psychology with questions addressed to Freud. He asked, “How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction…. And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” (p. 201; italics added). Certainly a serious question for one of the world's intellectual giants to address to the creator of psychoanalysis who had done so much to illuminate the dark side of man's instinctual life.

Freud's answer to these queries began modestly and almost apologetically. He noted that Einstein in his letter had “said almost all