Freud’s Views On Promoting World Peace
Freud soon responded to Einstein.….[Y]ou have stated the gist of the matter in your letter–and taken the wind out of my sails! Still, I will gladly follow in your wake and content myself with endorsing your conclusions, which, however, I propose to amplify to the best of my knowledge….
Freud then uses his theory of the blending of the love instinct and the destructive instinct to develop further the reasons for the resistance to the war prevention tribunal that Einstein envisioned.
But
then he notes that he realizes that Einstein is not so much interested
in a lot of theorizing, but rather, in concrete steps that may be taken
to promote lasting world peace. The answer, he says, perhaps lies in
trying to figure out why he, Einstein, and some others developed into
human beings who are so much less likely than others to heed the drums
of war. Perhaps if we understand this, we can create the conditions for
others to reach a similar level of development. Thus, Freud wrote,Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and practically unavoidable. I trust you will not be shocked by my raising such a question. For the better conduct of an inquiry it may be well to don a mask of feigned aloofness. The answer to my query may run as follows:
Because
every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that
were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that
shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will;
it ravages material amenities, the fruits of human toil, and much
besides. Moreover, wars, as now conducted, afford no scope for acts of
heroism according to the old ideals and, given the high perfection of
modern arms, war today would mean the sheer extermination of one of the
combatants, if not of both. This is so true, so obvious, that we can but
wonder why the conduct of war is not banned by general consent…. Here is the way in which I see it. The cultural development of mankind (some, I know, prefer to call it civilization) has been in progress since immemorial antiquity. To this process we owe all that is best in our composition, but also much that makes for human suffering….
The
psychic changes which accompany this process of cultural change are
striking, and not to be gainsaid. They consist in the progressive
rejection of instinctive ends and a scaling down of instinctive
reactions. Sensations which delighted our forefathers have become
neutral or unbearable to us; and, if our ethical and aesthetic ideals
have undergone a change, the causes of this are ultimately organic. On
the psychological side two of the most important phenomena of culture
are, firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master
our instinctive life, and, secondly, an introversion of the aggressive
impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils. 
Now
war runs most emphatically counter to the psychic disposition imposed
on us by the growth of culture; we are therefore bound to resent war, to
find it utterly intolerable. With pacifists like us it is not merely an
intellectual and affective revulsion, but a constitutional intolerance,
an idiosyncrasy in its most drastic form. And it would seem that the
aesthetic ignominies of warfare play almost as large a part in this
repugnance as war’s atrocities.How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet perhaps our hope that these two factors–man’s cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take–may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or byways this will come about, we cannot guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war.
With kindest regards and, should this expose prove a disappointment to you, my sincere regrets,
Yours,
SIGMUND FREUD
