Wk. 10 Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)

Question 1

Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915)

Answer 1

Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915) – Freud was also interested in the psychology of entire societies. In the essay excerpted here, he tried to explain the effects of World War I on ordinary people. The key concept is what he called “disillusionment.”

Why were Europeans disillusioned by the war?

What did he think might be the long-term social and psychological effects?

What did he mean by “Disillusionment”?

• Disillusionment: loss of belief of illusion (things are not the way you thought)
  
  • Europeans thought they were the most civilized societies, far too civilized to engage in war with each other. That was something they expected only of ‘primitive nations’. These important rules in most moral standards were the “disillusion” because they vanished, as though they never existed.
    
    • “We had expected the great world-dominating nations of the white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen […] we had expected these peoples to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest.”
    • “But the great nations themselves, it might have been supposed, would have acquired so much comprehension of what they had in common, and so much tolerance for their differences, that “foreigner” and “enemy” could no longer be merged”
• War seemed to give civilized society an excuse to become ‘primitive’. It’s so destructive because of the technological advances of INDUSTRIALIZATION.
  
  • “Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought – disillusionment. Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defense”
  • “[War] disregards all the restrictions know as International Law, which in peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe”
  • “It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over.”
  • “Two things in this war have aroused our sense of disillusionment: the low morality shown externally by states which in the internal relations pose as the guardians of moral standards, and the brutality shown by individuals whom, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behavior.”
• The intensity of World War I causes a warped sense of reality, uses words like disproportionately“, “disillusionment“, and “forces upon us“ and focuses on uncertainty and confusion.
  
  • “In the confusion of wartime”
  • “relying as we must on one-sided information”
  • “without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped”
  • “confused so many of the clearest intelligences”
  • “debased what is highest.”
  • Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy.”
  • “our sense of these immediate evils is disproportionately strong”
• Seeks to explain the mental distress among non-combatants, something he believes will give some solace or “orientation” to those who must endure this war:
  
  • “I propose to pick out two among the factors which are responsible for the mental distress felt by non-combatants, against which it is such a heavy task to struggle, and to treat of them here: the disillusionment which this war has evoked, and the altered attitude towards death which this – like every other war – forces upon us.”
• Thinks that disillusionment is so obvious that everyone will know what he means. He sees conflict inherent in the disparity that exists between the resources and development of nations.
  
  • “When I speak of disillusionment, everyone will know at once what I mean. One may perceive the […] necessity for suffering in the economy of human life, and yet condemn war both in its means and ends and long for the cessation of all wars.”
  • “We have told ourselves, no doubt, that wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is so variously assessed among them, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful motive forces in the mind. We were prepared to find that wars between the primitive and the civilized peoples, between the races who are divided by the color of their skin – wars, even, against and among the nationalities of Europe whose civilization is little developed or has been lost – would occupy mankind for some time to come.”