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Introduction

Introduction Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 3: 113–117 (2006) DOI: 10.1002/aps Forter to health allies it with the norms of a society, making it an (unwitting?) ally to that society’s wars. From the point of view of a certain kind of psychoanalysis, conversely, war is hardly a problem at all. It is, rather, an inevitable if hyperbolic expression of innate human aggressiveness, that is, of the death drive – so much so that, for the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, the problem of heteroaggression is solved only through the pathological self-lacerations of the superego. We avoid killing each other only by ruthlessly punishing ourselves, and the condition of pacific social relations is then the heightening of individuals’ guilt for unconscious and unconsummated “acts” of aggression. One could put these positions most starkly by saying this: arguments that foreground the historical causes of war leave little room for psychoanalytic insights about the transhistorical character of human violence or its genesis in the constitution of the psyche; but psychoanalytic claims for the centrality of aggression to the human psyche risk dehistoricizing violence, ontologizing it as the inescapable and (most depressing) insurmountable truth http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies Wiley

Introduction

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ISSN
1742-3341
eISSN
1556-9187
DOI
10.1002/aps.93
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 3: 113–117 (2006) DOI: 10.1002/aps Forter to health allies it with the norms of a society, making it an (unwitting?) ally to that society’s wars. From the point of view of a certain kind of psychoanalysis, conversely, war is hardly a problem at all. It is, rather, an inevitable if hyperbolic expression of innate human aggressiveness, that is, of the death drive – so much so that, for the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents, the problem of heteroaggression is solved only through the pathological self-lacerations of the superego. We avoid killing each other only by ruthlessly punishing ourselves, and the condition of pacific social relations is then the heightening of individuals’ guilt for unconscious and unconsummated “acts” of aggression. One could put these positions most starkly by saying this: arguments that foreground the historical causes of war leave little room for psychoanalytic insights about the transhistorical character of human violence or its genesis in the constitution of the psyche; but psychoanalytic claims for the centrality of aggression to the human psyche risk dehistoricizing violence, ontologizing it as the inescapable and (most depressing) insurmountable truth

Journal

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies – Wiley

Published: Jun 1, 2006

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