Our writers, coming from different disciplines, have conveyed similar responses to how they would write Civilization and Its Discontents today. Each essentially agreed with Freud's basic description of the internal and external forces that make up human kind. There is aggression, death, love, and a powerful trajectory to organization and coherence. It is these forces that we see so clearly in the clinical situation.

Yet, without exception, they all take issue with Freud's conclusion that aggression and death takes precedence over every other force in human experience. Each writer argues that it is not aggression; it is love that takes precedence in the form of integration, development, coherence and a need to be social. In addition there is the glaring evidence of the precedence of love in Freud's enormous productivity throughout his life that remains as a source of understanding and growth of civilization.

Melvin Bornstein, M.D.

Issue Editor