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47 Queen Anne Street, W. I., 6th July, 1948.
Dear Miss Freud:
One cannot help thinking about this horrible Mental Health Conference, and your task. As one who was perhaps chiefly responsible for this programme of the Child Section, I feel concerned
that one of the aims shall be fulfilled, namely that the work done specifically in Great Britain in the last 25 years, be put forward by whoever is representing Great Britain. For in my opinion, in the natural development of psycho-analysis, it has fallen to the lot of psycho-analysts in this country to bring the aggressive impulses and ideas into their proper place in psycho-analytic theory and practice. Particularly important has been the study of the relation of aggression, guilt and depression, and reparation to each other.
I am rather surprised to find that I owe you a letter on this subject. When I sent you my paper on Aggression (R.S.M.)1 you wrote and asked me for a summary. It is really awfully difficult to give a summary of so condensed a paper. Either the general tendency and the work it is based on is known and understood, or else (I should say) no summary is of the slightest use. Nevertheless I would say the following:—
In this Congress the important thing to get across is that the world's troubles are not due to man's aggression, but are due to repressed aggression in individual man.
Following this, the remedy is not education of children in ways of managing and controlling their aggression, but is to provide for the maximum number of infants and children such steady and reliable conditions (of emotional environment) that they, each one of them, may come to know and to tolerate as part of themselves the whole of their aggression (primitive greedy love, destructiveness, capacity for hate etc).
To enable human beings, (infants, children or adults) to tolerate and accept their own aggression, respect for guilt and depression is needed, and full recognition of reparative tendencies when they exist.
It is also importa