REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND

DEATH
***
SIGMUND FREUD
Translated by

A. A. BRILL

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 *
Reflections on War and Death
First published in 1918
ISBN 978-1-62013-639-3
Duke Classics
© 2014 Duke Classics and its licensors. All rights reserved.

While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained
in this edition, Duke Classics does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions
in this book. Duke Classics does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance
upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book.

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 Contents
*
I - The Disappointments of War
II - Our Attitude Towards Death
Endnotes

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 I - The Disappointments of War
*
Caught in the whirlwind of these war times, without any real information or
any perspective upon the great changes that have already occurred or are
about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the future, it is small wonder
that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which
crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming. It would
seem as though no event had ever destroyed so much of the precious
heritage of mankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so
thoroughly debased what is highest.

Even science has lost her dispassionate impartiality. Her deeply embittered
votaries are intent upon seizing her weapons to do their share in the battle
against the enemy. The anthropologist has to declare his opponent inferior
and degenerate, the psychiatrist must diagnose him as mentally deranged.
Yet it is probable that we are affected out of all proportion by the evils of
these times and have no right to compare them with the evils of other times
through which we have not lived.

The individual who is not himself a combatant and therefore has not
become a cog in the gigantic war machinery, feels confused in his bearings
and hampered in his activities. I think any little suggestion that will make it
easier for him to see his way more clearly will be welcome. Among the
factors which cause the stay-at-home so much spiritual misery and are so
hard to endure there are two in particular which I should like to emphasize
and discuss. I mean the disappointment that this war has called forth and the
altered attitude towards death to which it, in common with other wars,
forces us.

When I speak of disappointment everybody knows at once what I mean.

One need not be a sentimentalist, one may realize the biological and
physiological necessity of suffering in the economy of human life, and yet
one may condemn the methods and the aims of war and long for its
termination. To be sure, we used to say that wars cannot cease as long as
nations live under such varied conditions, as long as they place such
different values upon the individual life, and as long as the animosities
which divide them represent such powerful psychic forces. We were
therefore quite ready to believe that for some time to come there would be
wars between primitive and civilized nations and between those divided by
color, as well as with and among the partly enlightened and more or less
civilized peoples of Europe. But we dared to hope differently. We expected
that the great ruling nations of the white race, the leaders of mankind, who
had cultivated world wide interests, and to whom we owe the technical
progress in the control of nature as well as the creation of artistic and
scientific cultural standards—we expected that these nations would find
some other way of settling their differences and conflicting interests.

Each of these nations had set a high moral standard to which the individual
had to conform if he wished to be a member of the civilized community.

These frequently over strict precepts demanded a great deal of him, a great
self-restraint and a marked renunciation of his impulses. Above all he was
forbidden to resort to lying and cheating, which are so extraordinarily
useful in competition with others. The civilized state considered these moral
standards the foundation of its existence, it drastically interfered if anyone
dared to question them and often declared it improper even to submit them
to the test of intellectual criticism. It was therefore assumed that the state
itself would respect them and would do nothing that might contradict the
foundations of its own existence. To be sure, one was aware that scattered
among these civilized nations there were certain remnants of races that were
quite universally disliked, and were therefore reluctantly and only to a
certain extent permitted to participate in the common work of civilization
where they had proved themselves sufficiently fit for the task. But the great
nations themselves, one should have thought, had acquired sufficient
understanding for the qualities they had in common and enough tolerance
for their differences so that, unlike in the days of classical antiquity, the
words "foreign" and "hostile" should no longer be synonyms.
Trusting to this unity of civilized races countless people left hearth and
home to live in strange lands and trusted their fortunes to the friendly
relations existing between the various countries. And even he who was not
tied down to the same spot by the exigencies of life could combine all the
advantages and charms of civilized countries into a newer and greater
fatherland which he could enjoy without hindrance or suspicion. He thus
took delight in the blue and the grey ocean, the beauty of snow clad
mountains and of the green lowlands, the magic of the north woods and the
grandeur of southern vegetation, the atmosphere of landscapes upon which
great historical memories rest, and the peace of untouched nature. The new
fatherland was to him also a museum, filled with the treasure that all the
artists of the world for many centuries had created and left behind. While he
wandered from one hall to another in this museum he could give his
impartial appreciation to the varied types of perfection that had been
developed among his distant compatriots by the mixture of blood, by
history, and by the peculiarities of physical environment. Here cool,
inflexible energy was developed to the highest degree, there the graceful art
of beautifying life, elsewhere the sense of law and order, or other qualities
that have made man master of the earth.

We must not forget that every civilized citizen of the world had created his
own special "Parnassus" and his own "School of Athens." Among the great
philosophers, poets, and artists of all nations he had selected those to whom
he considered himself indebted for the best enjoyment and understanding of
life, and he associated them in his homage both with the immortal ancients
and with the familiar masters of his own tongue. Not one of these great
figures seemed alien to him just because he spoke in a different language;
be it the incomparable explorer of human passions or the intoxicated
worshiper of beauty, the mighty and threatening seer or the sensitive
scoffer, and yet he never reproached himself with having become an
apostate to his own nation and his beloved mother tongue.

The enjoyment of this common civilization was occasionally disturbed by

voices which warned that in consequence of traditional differences wars
were unavoidable even between those who shared this civilization. One did
not want to believe this, but what did one imagine such a war to be like if it
should ever come about? No doubt it was to be an opportunity to show the
progress in man's community feeling since the days when the Greek
amphictyonies had forbidden the destruction of a city belonging to the
league, the felling of her oil trees and the cutting off of her water supply. It
would be a chivalrous bout of arms for the sole purpose of establishing the
superiority of one side or the other with the greatest possible avoidance of
severe suffering which could contribute nothing to the decision, with
complete protection for the wounded, who must withdraw from the battle,
and for the physicians and nurses who devote themselves to their care. With
every consideration, of course, for noncombatants, for the women who are
removed from the activities of war, and for the children who, when grown
up, are to become friends and co-workers on both sides. And with the
maintenance, finally, of all the international projects and institutions in
which the civilized community of peace times had expressed its corporate
life.

Such a war would still be horrible enough and full of burdens, but it would
not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the large
human units, between nations and states. But the war in which we did not
want to believe broke out and brought—disappointment. It is not only
bloodier and more destructive than any foregoing war, as a result of the
tremendous development of weapons of attack and defense, but it is at least
as cruel, bitter, and merciless as any earlier war. It places itself above all the
restrictions pledged in times of peace, the so-called rights of nations, it does
not acknowledge the prerogatives of the wounded and of physicians, the
distinction between peaceful and fighting members of the population, or the
claims of private property. It hurls down in blind rage whatever bars its
way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over. It
tears asunder all community bonds among the struggling peoples and
threatens to leave a bitterness which will make impossible any re-
establishment of these ties for a long time to come.

It has also brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized

nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn
from the other with hate and loathing. Indeed one of these great civilized
nations has become so universally disliked that it is even attempted to cast it
out from the civilized community as though it were barbaric, although this
very nation has long proved its eligibility through contribution after
contribution of brilliant achievements. We live in the hope that impartial
history will furnish the proof that this very nation, in whose language I am
writing and for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, has sinned least
against the laws of human civilization. But who is privileged to step
forward at such a time as judge in his own defense?

Races are roughly represented by the states they form and these states by
the governments which guide them. The individual citizen can prove with
dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times
of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it
wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it,
like salt and tobacco. A state at war makes free use of every injustice, every
act of violence, that would dishonor the individual. It employs not only
permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the
enemy, and this to a degree which apparently outdoes what was customary
in previous wars. The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of
its citizens, but at the same time it treats them as children through an excess
of secrecy and a censorship of news and expression of opinion which render
the minds of those who are thus intellectually repressed defenseless against
every unfavorable situation and every wild rumor. It absolves itself from
guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, makes
unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power, which the
individual is then supposed to sanction out of patriotism.

Let the reader not object that the state cannot abstain from the use of
injustice because it would thereby put itself at a disadvantage. For the
individual, too, obedience to moral standards and abstinence from brutal
acts of violence are as a rule very disadvantageous, and the state but rarely
proves itself capable of indemnifying the individual for the sacrifice it
demands of him. Nor is it to be wondered at that the loosening of moral ties
between the large human units has had a pronounced effect upon the
morality of the individual, for our conscience is not the inexorable judge
that teachers of ethics say it is; it has its origin in nothing but "social fear."
Wherever the community suspends its reproach the suppression of evil
desire also ceases, and men commit acts of cruelty, treachery, deception,
and brutality, the very possibility of which would have been considered
incompatible with their level of culture.
Thus the civilized world-citizen of whom I spoke before may find himself
helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great
fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed,
and his fellow citizens divided and debased.

Nevertheless several things might be said in criticism of his disappointment.

Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an
illusion. Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and
allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without
complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which
they are dashed to pieces.

Two things have roused our disappointment in this war: the feeble morality
of states in their external relations which have inwardly acted as guardians
of moral standards, and the brutal behavior of individuals of the highest
culture of whom one would not have believed any such thing possible.

Let us begin with the second point and try to sum up the view which we
wish to criticise in a single compact statement. Through what process does
the individual reach a higher stage of morality? The first answer will
probably be: He is really good and noble from birth, in the first place. It is
hardly necessary to give this any further consideration. The second answer
will follow the suggestion that a process of development is involved here
and will probably assume that this development consists in eradicating the
evil inclinations of man and substituting good inclinations under the
influence of education and cultural environment. In that case we may
indeed wonder that evil should appear again so actively in persons who
have been educated in this way.

But this answer also contains the theory which we wish to contradict. In
reality there is no such thing as "eradicating" evil. Psychological, or strictly
speaking, psychoanalytic investigation proves, on the contrary, that the
deepest character of man consists of impulses of an elemental kind which
are similar in all human beings, the aim of which is the gratification of
certain primitive needs. These impulses are in themselves neither good or
evil. We classify them and their manifestations according to their relation to
the needs and demands of the human community. It is conceded that all the
impulses which society rejects as evil, such as selfishness and cruelty, are of
this primitive nature.

These primitive impulses go through a long process of development before

they can become active in the adult. They become inhibited and diverted to
other aims and fields, they unite with each other, change their objects and in
part turn against one's own person. The formation of reactions against
certain impulses give the deceptive appearance of a change of content, as if
egotism had become altruism and cruelty had changed into sympathy. The
formation of these reactions is favored by the fact that many impulses
appear almost from the beginning in contrasting pairs; this is a remarkable
state of affairs called the ambivalence of feeling and is quite unknown to
the layman. This feeling is best observed and grasped through the fact that
intense love and intense hate occur so frequently in the same person.
Psychoanalysis goes further and states that the two contrasting feelings not
infrequently take the same person as their object.

What we call the character of a person does not really emerge until the fate
of all these impulses has been settled, and character, as we all know, is very
inadequately defined in terms of either "good" or "evil." Man is seldom
entirely good or evil, he is "good" on the whole in one respect and "evil" in
another, or "good" under certain conditions, and decidedly "evil" under
others. It is interesting to learn that the earlier infantile existence of intense
"bad" impulses is often the necessary condition of being "good" in later life.
The most pronounced childish egotists may become the most helpful and
self-sacrificing citizens; the majority of idealists, humanitarians, and
protectors of animals have developed from little sadists and animal
tormentors.

The transformation of "evil" impulses is the result of two factors operating

in the same sense, one inwardly and the other outwardly. The inner factor
consists in influencing the evil or selfish impulses through erotic elements,
the love needs of man interpreted in the widest sense. The addition of erotic
components transforms selfish impulses into social impulses. We learn to
value being loved as an advantage for the sake of which we can renounce
other advantages. The outer factor is the force of education which
represents the demands of the civilized environment and which is then
continued through the direct influence of the cultural milieu.

Civilization is based upon the renunciation of impulse gratification and in

turn demands the same renunciation of impulses from every newcomer.
During the individual's life a constant change takes place from outer to
inner compulsion. The influences of civilization work through the erotic
components to bring about the transformation of more and more of the
selfish tendencies into altruistic and social tendencies. We may indeed
assume that the inner compulsion which makes itself felt in the
development of man was originally, that is, in the history of mankind, a
purely external compulsion. Today people bring along a certain tendency
(disposition) to transform the egotistic into social impulses as a part of their
hereditary organization, which then responds to further slight incentives to
complete the transformation. A part of this transformation of impulse must
also be made during life. In this way the individual man is not only under
the influence of his own contemporary cultural milieu but is also subject to
the influences of his ancestral civilization.

If we call a person's individual capacity for transforming his egotistical

impulses under the influence of love his cultural adaptability, we can say
that this consists of two parts, one congenital and the other acquired, and we
may add that the relation of these two to each other and to the
untransformed part of the emotional life is a very variable one.

In general we are inclined to rate the congenital part too highly, and are also
in danger of over-valuing the whole cultural adaptability in its relation to
that part of the impulse life which has remained primitive, that is, we are
misled into judging people to be "better" than they really are. For there is
another factor which clouds our judgment and falsifies the result in favor of
what we are judging.

We are of course in no position to observe the impulses of another person.

We deduce them from his actions and his conduct, which we trace back to
motives springing from his emotional life. In a number of cases such a
conclusion is necessarily incorrect. The same actions which are "good" in
the civilized sense may sometimes originate in "noble" motives and
sometimes not. Students of the theory of ethics call only those acts "good"
which are the expression of good impulses and refuse to acknowledge
others as such. But society is on the whole guided by practical aims and
does not bother about this distinction; it is satisfied if a man adapts his
conduct and his actions to the precepts of civilization and asks little about
his motives.

We have heard that the outer compulsion which education and environment
exercise upon a man brings about a further transformation of his impulse
life for the good, the change from egotism to altruism. But this is not the
necessary or regular effect of the outer compulsion. Education and
environment have not only love premiums to offer but work with profit
premiums of another sort, namely rewards and punishments. They can
therefore bring it about that a person subject to their influence decides in
favor of good conduct in the civilized sense without any ennobling of
impulse or change from egotistic into altruistic inclinations. On the whole
the consequence remains the same; only special circumstances will reveal
whether the one person is always good because his impulses compel him to
be so while another person is good only in so far as this civilized behavior
is of advantage to his selfish purposes. But our superficial knowledge of the
individual gives us no means of distinguishing the two cases, and we shall
certainly be misled by our optimism into greatly over-estimating the
number of people who have been transformed by civilization.

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.

But there is perhaps another symptom of our fellow citizens of the world
which has caused us no less surprise and fear than this descent from former
ethical heights which has been so painful to us. I mean the lack of insight
that our greatest intellectual leaders have shown, their obduracy, their
inaccessibility to the most impressive arguments, their uncritical credulity
concerning the most contestable assertions. This certainly presents a sad
picture, and I wish expressly to emphasize that I am by no means a blinded
partisan who finds all the intellectual mistakes on one side. But this
phenomenon is more easily explained and far less serious than the one
which we have just considered. Students of human nature and philosophers
have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an
independent force and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life.
According to their view our intellect can work reliably only when it is
removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise it acts
simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will and delivers the
results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore
powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons
which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless
where our interests are concerned. Whenever possible psychoanalytic
experience has driven home this assertion. It is in a position to prove every
day that the cleverest people suddenly behave as unintelligently as
defectives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance,
but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance
has been overcome. This blindness to logic which this war has so frequently
conjured up in just our best fellow citizens, is therefore a secondary
phenomenon, the result of emotional excitement and destined, we hope, to
disappear simultaneously with it.

If we have thus come to a fresh understanding of our estranged fellow

citizens we can more easily bear the disappointment which nations have
caused us, for of them we must only make demands of a far more modest
nature. They are perhaps repeating the development of the individual and at
the present day still exhibit very primitive stages of development with a
correspondingly slow progress towards the formation of higher unities. It is
in keeping with this that the educational factor of an outer compulsion to
morality, which we found so active in the individual, is barely perceptible in
them. We had indeed hoped that the wonderful community of interests
established by intercourse and the exchange of products would result in the
beginning of such a compulsion, but it seems that nations obey their
passions of the moment far more than their interests. At most they make use
of their interests to justify the gratification of their passions.

It is indeed a mystery why the individual members of nations should

disdain, hate, and abhor each other at all, even in times of peace. I do not
know why it is. It seems as if all the moral achievements of the individual
were obliterated in the case of a large number of people, not to mention
millions, until only the most primitive, oldest, and most brutal psychic
inhibitions remained.

Perhaps only later developments will succeed in changing these lamentable

conditions. But a little more truthfulness and straightforward dealing on all
sides, both in the relation of people towards each other and between
themselves and those who govern them, might smooth the way for such a
change.

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 II - Our Attitude Towards Death
*
It remains for us to consider the second factor of which I have already
spoken which accounts for our feeling of strangeness in a world which used
to seem so beautiful and familiar to us. I refer to the disturbance in our
former attitude towards death.

Our attitude had not been a sincere one. To listen to us we were, of course,
prepared to maintain that death is the necessary termination of life, that
everyone of us owes nature his death and must be prepared to pay his debt,
in short, that death was natural, undeniable, and inevitable. In practice we
were accustomed to act as if matters were quite different. We have shown
an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate it from life. We
attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the proverb: to think of something
as of death. Of course we meant our own death. We cannot, indeed, imagine
our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves
as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom
no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the
unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.

As far as the death of another person is concerned every man of culture will
studiously avoid mentioning this possibility in the presence of the person in
question. Only children ignore this restraint; they boldly threaten each other
with the possibility of death, and are quite capable of giving expression to
the thought of death in relation to the persons they love, as, for instance:
Dear Mama, when unfortunately, you are dead, I shall do so and so. The
civilized adult also likes to avoid entertaining the thought of another's death
lest he seem harsh or unkind, unless his profession as a physician or a
lawyer brings up the question. Least of all would he permit himself to think
of somebody's death if this event is connected with a gain of freedom,
wealth, or position. Death is, of course, not deferred through our
sensitiveness on the subject, and when it occurs we are always deeply
affected, as if our expectations had been shattered. We regularly lay stress
upon the unexpected causes of death, we speak of the accident, the
infection, or advanced age, and thus betray our endeavor to debase death
from a necessity to an accident. A large number of deaths seems
unspeakably dreadful to us. We assume a special attitude towards the dead,
something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very
difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he
may have done, and issue the command, de mortuis nil nisi bene: we act as
if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe
only what is to his advantage on the tombstone. This consideration for the
dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth
and to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the
living.

This conventional attitude of civilized people towards death is made still

more striking by our complete collapse at the death of a person closely
related to us, such as a parent, a wife or husband, a brother or sister, a child
or a dear friend. We bury our hopes, our wishes, and our desires with the
dead, we are inconsolable and refuse to replace our loss. We act in this case
as if we belonged to the tribe of the Asra who also die when those whom
they love perish.[1]

But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our
lives. Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the
highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked. It becomes as
hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from
the beginning that nothing is to happen, in contrast to a continental love
affair in which both partners must always bear in mind the serious
consequences. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief,
make us disinclined to court dangers for ourselves and those belonging to
us. We do not dare to contemplate a number of undertakings that are
dangerous but really indispensable, such as aeroplane flights, expeditions to
distant countries, and experiments with explosive substances. We are
paralyzed by the thought of who is to replace the son to his mother, the
husband to his wife, or the father to his children, should an accident occur.
A number of other renunciations and exclusions result from this tendency to
rule out death from the calculations of life. And yet the motto of the
Hanseatic League said: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse: It is
necessary to sail the seas, but not to live.

It is therefore inevitable that we should seek compensation for the loss of

life in the world of fiction, in literature, and in the theater. There we still
find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing
others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is
fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life a permanent life still
remains to us. It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess,
where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference,
that we cannot begin a return match. In the realm of fiction we find the
many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a
certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to
die again with the next hero.

It is obvious that the war must brush aside this conventional treatment of
death. Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it.
People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten
thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems
accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the
survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the
accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed
become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance.

Let us make a division here and separate those who risk their lives in battle
from those who remain at home, where they can only expect to lose one of
their loved ones through injury, illness, or infection. It would certainly be
very interesting to study the changes in the psychology of the combatants
but I know too little about this. We must stick to the second group, to which
we ourselves belong. I have already stated that I think the confusion and
paralysis of our activities from which we are suffering is essentially
determined by the fact that we cannot retain our previous attitude towards
death. Perhaps it will help us to direct our psychological investigation to
two other attitudes towards death, one of which we may ascribe to primitive
man, while the other is still preserved, though invisible to our
consciousness, in the deeper layers of our psychic life.
The attitude of prehistoric man towards death is, of course, known to us
only through deductions and reconstructions, but I am of the opinion that
these have given us fairly trustworthy information.

Primitive man maintained a very curious attitude towards death. It is not at

all consistent but rather contradictory. On the one hand he took death very
seriously, recognized it as the termination of life, and made use of it in this
sense; but, on the other hand, he also denied death and reduced it to
nothingness. This contradiction was made possible by the fact that he
maintained a radically different position in regard to the death of others, a
stranger or an enemy, than in regard to his own. The death of another person
fitted in with his idea, it signified the annihilation of the hated one, and
primitive man had no scruples against bringing it about. He must have been
a very passionate being, more cruel and vicious than other animals. He
liked to kill and did it as a matter of course. Nor need we attribute to him
the instinct which restrains other animals from killing and devouring their
own species.

As a matter of fact the primitive history of mankind is filled with murder.

The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a
series of race murders. The dimly felt sense of guilt under which man has
lived since archaic times, and which in many religions has been condensed
into the assumption of a primal guilt, a hereditary sin, is probably the
expression of a blood guilt, the burden of which primitive man assumed. In
my book entitled "Totem and Taboo," 1913, I have followed the hints of W.
Robertson Smith, Atkinson, and Charles Darwin in the attempt to fathom
the nature of this ancient guilt, and am of the opinion that the Christian
doctrine of today still makes it possible for us to work back to its origin.[2]

If the Son of God had to sacrifice his life to absolve mankind from original
sin, then, according to the law of retaliation, the return of like for like, this
sin must have been an act of killing, a murder. Nothing else could call for
the sacrifice of a life in expiation. And if original sin was a sin against the
God Father, the oldest sin of mankind must have been a patricide—the
killing of the primal father of the primitive human horde, whose memory
picture later was transfigured into a deity.[3]
Primitive man was as incapable of imagining and realizing his own death as
any one of us are today. But a case arose in which the two opposite attitudes
towards death clashed and came into conflict with each other, with results
that are both significant and far reaching. Such a case was given when
primitive man saw one of his own relatives die, his wife, child, or friend,
whom he certainly loved as we do ours; for love cannot be much younger
than the lust for murder. In his pain he must have discovered that he, too,
could die, an admission against which his whole being must have revolted,
for everyone of these loved ones was a part of his own beloved self. On the
other hand again, every such death was satisfactory to him, for there was
also something foreign in each one of these persons. The law of emotional
ambivalence, which today still governs our emotional relations to those
whom we love, certainly obtained far more widely in primitive times. The
beloved dead had nevertheless roused some hostile feelings in primitive
man just because they had been both friends and enemies.

Philosophers have maintained that the intellectual puzzle which the picture
of death presented to primitive man forced him to reflect and became the
starting point of every speculation. I believe the philosophers here think too
philosophically, they give too little consideration to the primary effective
motive. I should therefore like to correct and limit the above assertion;
primitive man probably triumphed at the side of the corpse of the slain
enemy, without finding any occasion to puzzle his head about the riddle of
life and death. It was not the intellectual puzzle or any particular death
which roused the spirit of inquiry in man, but the conflict of emotions at the
death of beloved and withal foreign and hated persons.

From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep
death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased,
but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself
dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but
denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the
death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during
his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his
consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief
brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil
demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to
him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in
this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process
inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the
basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of
a future life after apparent death.

These later forms of existence were at first only vaguely associated

appendages to those whom death had cut off, and enjoyed only slight
esteem until much later times; they still betrayed a very meagre knowledge.
The reply which the soul of Achilles made to Odysseus comes to our mind:

Erst in the life on the earth, no less than a god we revered thee,
We the Achaeans; and now in the realm of the dead as a monarch
Here thou dost rule; then why should death thus grieve thee,
Achilles?
Thus did I speak: forthwith then answering thus he addressed me.
Speak not smoothly of death, I beseech, O famous Odysseus,
Better by far to remain on the earth as the thrall of another,
E'en of a portionless man that hath means right scanty of living,
Rather than reign sole king in the realm of the bodiless phantoms.

—Odysseus XI, verse 484-491

Translated by H. B. Coterill.

Heine has rendered this in a forcible and bitter parody:

The smallest living philistine,

At Stuckert on the Neckar
Is much happier than I am,
Son of Pelleus, the dead hero,
Shadowy ruler of the Underworld.

It was much later before religions managed to declare this after-life as the
more valuable and perfect and to debase our mortal life to a mere
preparation for the life to come. It was then only logical to prolong our
existence into the past and to invent former existences, transmigrations of
souls, and reincarnations, all with the object of depriving death of its
meaning as the termination of life. It was as early as this that the denial of
death, which we described as the product of conventional culture,
originated.

Contemplation of the corpse of the person loved gave birth not only to the
theory of the soul, the belief in immortality, and implanted the deep roots of
the human sense of guilt, but it also created the first ethical laws. The first
and most important prohibition of the awakening conscience declared: Thou
shalt not kill. This arose as a reaction against the gratification of hate for the
beloved dead which is concealed behind grief, and was gradually extended
to the unloved stranger and finally also to the enemy.

Civilized man no longer feels this way in regard to killing enemies. When
the fierce struggle of this war will have reached a decision every victorious
warrior will joyfully and without delay return home to his wife and
children, undisturbed by thoughts of the enemy he has killed either at close
quarters or with weapons operating at a distance.

It is worthy of note that the primitive races which still inhabit the earth and
who are certainly closer to primitive man than we, act differently in this
respect, or have so acted as long as they did not yet feel the influence of our
civilization. The savage, such as the Australian, the Bushman, or the
inhabitant of Terra del Fuego, is by no means a remorseless murderer; when
he returns home as victor from the war path he is not allowed to enter his
village or touch his wife until he has expiated his war murders through
lengthy and often painful penances. The explanation for this is, of course,
related to his superstition; the savage fears the avenging spirit of the slain.
But the spirits of the fallen enemy are nothing but the expression of his evil
conscience over his blood guilt; behind this superstition there lies concealed
a bit of ethical delicacy of feeling which has been lost to us civilized beings.
[4]

Pious souls, who would like to think us removed from contact with what is
evil and mean, will surely not fail to draw satisfactory conclusions in regard
to the strength of the ethical impulses which have been implanted in us
from these early and forcible murder prohibitions. Unfortunately this
argument proves even more for the opposite contention.
Such a powerful inhibition can only be directed against an equally strong
impulse. What no human being desires to do does not have to be forbidden,
it is self-exclusive. The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not
kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of
generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is
perhaps also in ours. The ethical strivings of mankind, with the strength and
significance of which we need not quarrel, are an acquisition of the history
of man; they have since become, though unfortunately in very variable
quantities, the hereditary possessions of people of today.

Let us now leave primitive man and turn to the unconscious in our psyche.
Here we depend entirely upon psychoanalytic investigation, the only
method which reaches such depths. The question is what is the attitude of
our unconscious towards death. In answer we say that it is almost like that
of primitive man. In this respect, as well as in many others, the man of
prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, in our conscious.

Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as
though it were immortal. What we call our unconscious, those deepest
layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or
any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not
acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content.
The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses. This is
perhaps the real secret of heroism. The rational basis of heroism is
dependent upon the decision that one's own life cannot be worth as much as
certain abstract common ideals. But I believe that instinctive or impulsive
heroism is much more frequently independent of such motivation and
simply defies danger on the assurance which animated Hans, the stone-
cutter, a character in Anzengruber, who always said to himself: Nothing can
happen to me. Or that motivation only serves to clear away the hesitations
which might restrain the corresponding heroic reaction in the unconscious.
The fear of death, which controls us more frequently than we are aware, is
comparatively secondary and is usually the outcome of the consciousness of
guilt.

On the other hand we recognize the death of strangers and of enemies and
sentence them to it just as willingly and unhesitatingly as primitive man.
Here there is indeed a distinction which becomes decisive in practice. Our
unconscious does not carry out the killing, it only thinks and wishes it. But
it would be wrong to underestimate the psychic reality so completely in
comparison to the practical reality. It is really important and full of serious
consequences.

In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in
our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us. The expression: "The
devil take him," which so frequently crosses our lips in the form of an ill-
humored jest, but by which we really intend to say, "Death take him," is a
serious and forceful death wish in our unconscious. Indeed our unconscious
murders even for trifles; like the old Athenian law of Draco, it knows no
other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain
consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self
is at bottom a crimen laesae majestatis.

Thus, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are

nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man. It is lucky that all
wishes do not possess the power which people of primitive times attributed
to them.[5] For in the cross fire of mutual maledictions mankind would
have perished long ago, not excepting the best and wisest of men as well as
the most beautiful and charming women.

As a rule the layman refuses to believe these theories of psychoanalysis.

They are rejected as calumnies which can be ignored in the face of the
assurances of consciousness, while the few signs through which the
unconscious betrays itself to consciousness are cleverly overlooked. It is
therefore in place here to point out that many thinkers who could not
possibly have been influenced by psychoanalysis have very clearly accused
our silent thought of a readiness to ignore the murder prohibition in order to
clear away what stands in our path. Instead of quoting many examples I
have chosen one which is very famous. In his novel, Père Goriot, Balzac
refers to a place in the works of J. J. Rousseau where this author asks the
reader what he would do if, without leaving Paris and, of course, without
being discovered, he could kill an old mandarin in Peking, with great profit
to himself, by a mere act of the will. He makes it possible for us to guess
that he does not consider the life of this dignitary very secure. "To kill your
mandarin" has become proverbial for this secret readiness to kill, even on
the part of people of today.

There are also a number of cynical jokes and anecdotes which bear witness
to the same effect, such as the remark attributed to the husband: "If one of
us dies I shall move to Paris." Such cynical jokes would not be possible if
they did not have an unavowed truth to reveal which we cannot admit when
it is baldly and seriously stated. It is well known that one may even speak
the truth in jest.

A case arises for our consciousness, just as it did for primitive man, in
which the two opposite attitudes towards death, one of which acknowledges
it as the destroyer of life, while the other denies the reality of death, clash
and come into conflict. The case is identical for both, it consists of the death
of one of our loved ones, of a parent or a partner in wedlock, of a brother or
a sister, of a child or a friend. These persons we love are on the one hand a
part of our inner possessions and a constituent of our own selves, but on the
other hand they are also in part strangers and even enemies. Except in a few
instances, even the tenderest and closest love relations also contain a bit of
hostility which can rouse an unconscious death wish. But at the present day
this ambivalent conflict no longer results in the development of ethics and
soul theories, but in neuroses which also gives us a profound insight into
the normal psychic life. Doctors who practice psychoanalysis have
frequently had to deal with the symptom of over tender care for the welfare
of relatives or with wholly unfounded self reproaches after the death of a
beloved person. The study of these cases has left them in no doubt as to the
significance of unconscious death wishes.

The layman feels an extraordinary horror at the possibility of such an

emotion and takes his aversion to it as a legitimate ground for disbelief in
the assertions of psychoanalysis. I think he is wrong there. No debasing of
our love life is intended and none such has resulted. It is indeed foreign to
our comprehension as well as to our feelings to unite love and hate in this
manner, but in so far as nature employs these contrasts she brings it about
that love is always kept alive and fresh in order to safeguard it against the
hate that is lurking behind it. It may be said that we owe the most beautiful
unfolding of our love life to the reaction against this hostile impulse which
we feel in our hearts.

Let us sum up what we have said. Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to

the conception of our own death, just as much inclined to kill the stranger,
and just as divided, or ambivalent towards the persons we love as was
primitive man. But how far we are removed from this primitive state in our
conventionally civilized attitude towards death!

It is easy to see how war enters into this disunity. War strips off the later
deposits of civilization and allows the primitive man in us to reappear. It
forces us again to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death, it
stamps all strangers as enemies whose death we ought to cause or wish; it
counsels us to rise above the death of those whom we love. But war cannot
be abolished; as long as the conditions of existence among races are so
varied and the repulsions between them are so vehement, there will have to
be wars. The question then arises whether we shall be the ones to yield and
adapt ourselves to it. Shall we not admit that in our civilized attitude
towards death we have again lived psychologically beyond our means?
Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give
death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and
to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to
now we have so carefully suppressed? This may not appear a very high
achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of
regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a
little more and of making life more bearable again. To bear life remains,
after all, the first duty of the living. The illusion becomes worthless if it
disturbs us in this.

We remember the old saying:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you wish peace, prepare for war.

The times call for a paraphrase:

Si vis vitam, para mortem.

If you wish life, prepare for death.
 ***

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 Endnotes
*
[1] Compare Heine's poem, "Der Asra," Louis Untermeyer's translation, p.
269, Henry Holt & Co., 1917.

[2] Totem and Taboo, translated by Dr. A. A. Brill, Moffat, Yard & Co.,
1918.

[3] Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV.

[4] Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV.

[5] Totem and Taboo, Chapter III.

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