ABSTRACT
Freud was never one to restrict his writings to the realm of individual psychology. Just as he used his initial analyses of hysterical and neurotic illnesses to formulate a universal theory of sexual and mental development, so he applied his ideas which began as theories of the individual, such as the Oedipus complex and repression, to society at large. Through Freud’s numerous articles on anthropology, religion, art and society, psychoanalysis developed into a set of principles that claimed the power to explain aspects of all these fields. Psychoanalysis, in a sense, colonised other areas of theoretical speculation about humans and their relations, although it did so with varying degrees of success. There are no anthropologists today who would see in Freud’s anthropological writings anything but evidence of past dubious beliefs about anthropology, but the explanatory stories he posits continue to have power as literary creations or myths for our culture. His writings on war and group psychology pose intriguing speculative answers to questions about the herd instinct in human beings, the origin of outbreaks of organised violence, and the distinctively human ability to identify oneself with an immaterial ideal such as a nation or a cause to the extent of being willing to fight and die for it (see particularly ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’ and ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’). All these problems of human social organisation and bonds seemed to Freud to call out for psychoanalytic explanations.
