Human Aggressivity and War

Abstract

Albert Einstein in 1932 initiated a discussion and an exchange of letters with Sigmund Freud concerning the causes and prevention of war. In writing to Freud, Einstein wished to understand the psychological bases of war, while recognizing the role of political, economic, and other such factors. Einstein notes, “As for me, the normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling …. There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental science may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom. You, I am concerned, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles ” (Nathan & Nordon, 1968, p. 188). During the course of his letter to Freud, Einstein poses three interrelated questions. He first asks, “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” (p. 188). He wonders why it is that the quest for international security is endangered so often by small groups in every nation who exploit the aspiration of governing groups for political power to further their own economic and political interests. He queries, “How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the survival of their ambition?” (p. 190). Einstein recognizes that there are social and institutional forces that provide the mechanism by which small groups can manipulate and control the attitudes and behavior of the populace. However, he also feels there is a propensity in people to respond to the emotional manipulation of the controlling elite. He reluctantly concludes that “man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction” that usually remains dormant, but that one can relatively easily “call into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis”. He then arrives at his final question,“Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?” He adds, parenthetically, that he by no means has in mind the so-called “uncultured masses” but rather believes that it is the “so-called’ intelligentsia’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form — upon the printed page” (p. 190).