WHY WAR? WITH NO WIND IN THE SAILS AND SLOW MILLS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/upj/2025-3-1-9Keywords:
civilization, life and death drives, self-destruction, violence, war.Abstract
Abstract. As an introduction to the works of the conference, the paper is re-capitulated the exchange of letters with Albert Einstein that Freud pressed to entitle by a question, Why war?, which is not only the starting point of his inquiry, but also its enigmatic conclusion. To investigate the violence which is at the heart of the right (the might of a community held by together by emotional ties) Freud resorts to the psychoanalytic theory of life and death drives, to point that the destructive and self-destructive aggressiveness of the being human is heterogeneous with respect to all animality. It is not an original “naturalness”, but a true “second nature” deposited in human being by the effects of the child’s relationship with the other adult, a consequence of the intimate and inseparable connection between human beings and drives. Therefore “there is no hope”, as Freud says, of being able to suppress these tendencies towards destruction and self-destruction which are “an intractable psychic function”, to the extent that they coincide with the sexual which, with language and intertwined with it, characterizes our being human. One can only “try to divert them to such an extent that they need not find expression in war”, through everything that gives rise to emotional bonds of love and identification between human beings. But this conclusion, witnessing the destruction that so many human beings are suffering from wars, make we share with Freud the “unpleasant picture […] of mills that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their flour”.
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