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In 1915, plunged into the vortex of World War I, Freud (1915) wrote "Thoughts for the Time on War and Death". He saw the impact of war in terms of peoples' disillusionment about human nature and their attitudes toward death. Freud regarded disillusionment about human nature in the face of the barbarity that had been unleashed as literally the destruction of a prevailing illusion that people are not fundamentally destructive. Freud saw benevolence as resulting either from an admixture of fundamentally erotic and destructive impulses, or as a product of defense, that is, a reaction formation in response to the pressure of social norms. War strips away the veneer of civilization to reveal an underlying ruthless, violent nature. Peacetime might allow for the illusion that people are basically good, altruistic. Later, in 1932, in a letter to the pacifist Albert Einstein, Freud (1932/1933) sounded considerably more optimistic as he allowed that anything that promoted cultural development and the bonds between people would make an end to war more likely.
In terms of the impact of war on individual people, Freud saw "war neuroses" as on a continuum with peacetime neuroses. That is, defense mechanisms are invoked in response to a sense of danger, whether that danger arises from within or without. But if the danger is from without, the meaning of neurosis is fundamentally changed in that neurosis arises from inner conflict in the Freudian schema. Freud tries to squeeze war neurosis into the mold of ordinary neurosis by positing conflict between the peacetime state of the ego, presumably immersed in the illusion of immortality, and the war time ego, confronting the possibility of death. But his analysis seems forced.
As much as the Kleinians emphasized the death instinct, their influence in the long run, it seems to me, has been to make war seem less like an expression of the deepest levels of human nature, and thus less inevitable than Freud's analysis suggested. In particular, resort to violence, from a Kleinian point of view, tends to be seen as a paranoid schizoid phenomenon, a manifestation of the manic defense, a defense against depressive anxiety and guilt. Violence rests on a perception of the other as all bad; violence, along with the accompanying fantasies...