ABSTRACT
Freud’s most elaborate discussion of violence came in response to Albert Einstein’s urgent plea for an answer to war. The community is, according to Freud, a compromised form, whose desire to persist and unify its people depends on laws that themselves ultimately rest upon the threat of a “compelling use of violence” to make its members comply with them. Freud explains that human “hordes” were initiated through brute force, by virtue of the “muscular superiority” of a single individual whose greater strength granted him power over those weaker than he. The US did pass laws punishing violence against women, but there are currently movements pushing back against them and agitating against punishing rapists, for example. The legal reining in of violence against women hardly quashed destructive fantasies of committing it.
