ABSTRACT
In 1932 Sigmund Freud inquired of Albert Einstein, “How long shall we have to wait before the rest of mankind become pacifists too? There is no telling … But one thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.” Although Freud’s inquiry had been instigated by a League of Nations request, his interest in war was not new. As an adolescent, he affixed colored pins to a map hung on his bedroom wall to follow the battles of the Franco-Prussian war. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he described a dream as the outcome of a series of battles. The first great paradigm shift in the history of psychoanalysis, the structural theory, emerged from its reflections on shell shock during World War I. The second, the turn toward the mother, found its fullest expression in the welfare states created during World War II. Psychoanalysis has always been involved with war.
