ABSTRACT
Military action needs further philosophical underpinning: soldiers need to be inculcated with the idea of the 'good death' –the ultimate in courage. Military obedience requires an acceptance of death as a possibility –even as a probability. Freud maintained that we all have destructive urges which could also result in self-destruction. This death instinct, he insisted, was present in all organisms, and arose when organic material developed from inorganic material. As far as human behaviour was concerned, it was Freud's contention that such practices as masochism, sadism, hostility and violence all derived from the death instinct. Psychoanalysts have never been greatly taken with the death instinct, and have tended, if anything to regard it as a rather vague expression for the desire to destroy. Investigations of US servicemen in the Second World War showed that ideological factors had little or no influence on their behaviour.
