Reflections on War and Death

by Sigmund Freud

Civilized society, which demands good conduct and does not bother about the impulse on which it is based, has thus won over a great many people to civilized obedience who do not thereby follow their own natures. Encouraged by this success, society has permitted itself to be misled into putting the ethical demands as high as possible, thereby forcing its members to move still further from their emotional dispositions. A continual emotional suppression is imposed upon them, the strain of which is indicated by the appearance of the most remarkable reactions and compensations.

In the field of sexuality, where such suppression is most difficult to carry out, it results in reactions known as neurotic ailments. In other fields the pressure of civilization shows no pathological results but manifests itself in distorted characters and in the constant readiness of the inhibited impulses to enforce their gratification at any fitting opportunity.

Anyone thus forced to react continually to precepts that are not the expressions of his impulses lives, psychologically speaking, above his means, and may be objectively described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly conscious of this difference or not. It is undeniable that our contemporary civilization favors this sort of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent. One might even venture to assert that it is built upon such a hypocrisy and would have to undergo extensive changes if man were to undertake to live according to the psychological truth. There are therefore more civilized hypocrites than truly cultured persons, and one can even discuss the question whether a certain amount of civilized hypocrisy is not indispensable to maintain civilization because the already organized cultural adaptability of the man of today would perhaps not suffice for the task of living according to the truth. On the other hand the maintenance of civilization even on such questionable grounds offers the prospect that with every new generation a more extensive transformation of impulses will pave the way for a better civilization.

These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed. The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses. In doing so their relative morality within their own national life probably suffered no rupture.

But we can still further deepen our understanding of the change which this war has brought about in our former compatriots and at the same time take warning not to be unjust to them. For psychic evolution shows a peculiarity which is not found in any other process of development. When a town becomes a city or a child grows into a man, town and child disappear in the city and in the man. Only memory can sketch in the old features in the new picture; in reality the old materials and forms have been replaced by new ones. It is different in the case of psychic evolution. One can describe this unique state of affairs only by saying that every previous stage of development is preserved next to the following one from which it has evolved; the succession stipulates a co-existence although the material in which the whole series of changes has taken place remains the same.

The earlier psychic state may not have manifested itself for years but nevertheless continues to exist to the extent that it may some day again become the form in which psychic forces express themselves, in fact the only form, as though all subsequent developments had been annulled and made regressive. This extraordinary plasticity of psychic development is not without limits as to its direction; one can describe it as a special capacity for retrograde action or regression, for it sometimes happens that a later and higher stage of development that has been abandoned cannot be attained again. But the primitive conditions can always be reconstructed; the primitive psyche is in the strictest sense indestructible.

The so-called mental diseases must make the impression on the layman of mental and psychic life fallen into decay. In reality the destruction concerns only later acquisitions and developments. The nature of mental diseases consists in the return to former states of the affective life and function. An excellent example of the plasticity of the psychic life is the state of sleep, which we all court every night.

Since we know how to interpret even the maddest and most confused dreams, we know that every time we go to sleep we throw aside our hard won morality like a garment in order to put it on again in the morning. This laying bare is, of course, harmless, because we are paralyzed and condemned to inactivity by the sleeping state.

Only the dream can inform us of the regression of our emotional life to an earlier stage of development. Thus, for instance, it is worthy of note that all our dreams are governed by purely egotistic motives. One of my English friends once presented this theory to a scientific meeting in America, whereupon a lady present made the remark that this might perhaps be true of Austrians, but she ventured to assert for herself and her friends that even in dreams they always felt altruistically. My friend, although himself a member of the English race, was obliged to contradict the lady energetically on the basis of his experience in dream analysis. The noble Americans are just as egotistic in their dreams as the Austrians.

The transformation of impulses upon which our cultural adaptability rests can therefore also be permanently or temporarily made regressive. Without doubt the influences of war belong to those forces which can create such regressions; we therefore need not deny cultural adaptibility to all those who at present are acting in such an uncivilized manner, and may expect that the refinement of their impulses will continue in more peaceful times.