Argument on the Theme

Starting from the question posed almost a century ago to Freud, “Why war?”, and to which he formulated the first ideas about the causes of war, the current international context brings back into question the need to complete the dialogue between Einstein and the father of psychoanalysis, to review and update the understanding of the phenomenon from our perspective, in accordance with the knowledge of the 21st century.

In an age of perplexity, confusion and disorientation (in Bollas's phrase), war appears as a necessary defense that translates internal psychotic anxieties into real external dangers in order to control them (Volkan). We wage war against others in order not to war with ourselves. By regressing to an archaic mode of psychic functioning, collective mechanisms of cleavage and projection of unwanted parts, the refusal to understand the other, manifestations of the death drive are put into action.

Although Freud's article, “Why War?”, was written before the horrors of the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, or the repressions of Communism were known, we have reason to believe that the recent forms of mutual aggression among our fellows are just new ways of manifestation of unconscious destructive impulses, respectively the failure of peaceful resolution (repression, cleavage, sublimation) of some internal conflicts.

If the individual problems require a psychoanalytic cure - a framework, an analyst and a patient, the debate of this collective “disease” that is war calls for a forum such as scientific manifestations (conferences, publications) to constitute the “framework” of the analysis, and in which the audience/readers to be alternately analyst and analysand. That is why we invite you to join this effort with your contributions to the analysis of this phenomenon, hoping that we will be able to better understand the causes and mechanisms of anguish, trauma, but also of the sadistic or masochistic pleasure that fuels the phenomenon of war.