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In 1930, the year the Nazi party emerged as a major force in the Reichstag elections, Freud asserted unequivocally that:
civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind…. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and all against each, opposes this programme … the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for the life of the human species [p. 122].
Fifteen years later the newly founded United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) paraphrased him in the Preamble to its Charter: “Since wars are born in the spirit of human beings, it is there that the fortresses of peace must be established.”
Freud also anticipated, in psychoanalytical terms, two of the chief obstacles to such an effort:
In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal’. For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such