Society--"A Gang of Murderers": Freud on Hostility and War

Like primeval men, we are a gang of murderers.

—Sigmund Freud, "Reflections on War and Death"

However much Freud regretted the anxieties with which society burdens its members, he also believed that presocial humans were guilt-free homicidal maniacs and that therefore a guilt-ridden social order is preferable to no social order at all. The overview of Freud's social psychology given in the preceding sentence is based largely on standard readings of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and it is worth testing them against a less famous and even less hopeful essay of his, "Reflections on War and Death."¹ Writing in 1915 during World War I, Freud maintained that the establishment and growth of civilized society had done nothing to change the situation of primitive human beings except to develop technology for the exercise of their homicidal mania. Among the basic needs that societies have labored to satisfy is the need for tools to help make everyone's wish—the wish to harm others—come true. In the gradual development of social order, this primal aggressive instinct grows more potent to the degree that it is brought under the pressures of domestication. The untransformed quanta of aggression, pooled in the unconscious, are subjected to an "unceasing suppression," one symptom of which is guilt, a subcategory of anxiety brought on by turning aggression inward—in a suppression that is never effective.²

From time to time, developments within the social order permit a release of the aggression pent up in its citizenry, and "relief" is obtained "for awhile from the heavy pressures of civilization."³ The primordial wish to do harm breaks out in war—in homicidal acts sanctioned by society as heroic or, in any case, legal. Freud applies a financial metaphor of overdrawn credit: modern citizens live in an artificial "civilized society (die Kulturgesellschaft) which exacts good conduct and does not trouble itself about the impulses (Triebbegründung) underlying it; thus compelled to live by socially useful precepts (Vorschriften) rather than instincts (Triebneigungen), these moderns are living on borrowed time, psychologically speaking, living beyond their means (psychologisch verstanden, über seine Mittel)."⁴ Time is in a sense borrowed from nature, which is to say from death. During war, it is as if the lender suddenly demanded exorbitant payments for the principal borrowed. But this argument is in any case circular in that society or culture is itself produced in response to death, as a way of warding off the acknowledgment of death. In World War I, Freud reasoned, death on an unprecedented scale—the "multitude of simultaneous deaths" (Häufung von Todesfällen) enabled by modern technology—changed the relationship of humanity to death.⁵ Compared to their ancient counterparts, the relatively protected people of modern society had been in general less exposed to death, except during time of war and "acts of God." In World War I, death became a weapon for timed delivery in paper bombs (newspapers, war reports, propaganda) aimed at noncombatant civilians who thus became a captive audience. It became less possible to deny death, which also made society (a complex prosthetic device against death) less secure.

The last sentence of Freud's 1919 introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses reminds us that the basis of every neurosis is trauma, or, more precisely, the defensive reaction called repression (Verdrängung). Repression transforms the trauma into a repressed content (das Verdrängte).⁶ Far from dissolving the trauma, the repression preserves it (intact but encrypted), with anxiety as the cost of preservation. But the shell-shocked subjects of modern war have to deal with a double trauma—not only the trauma of cannonfire and aerial bombing but also, Freud speculates, the trauma of having to repeat the primitive warrior's trauma, whose repression is the foundation of society, of "civilization." The trauma of the primitive warrior was his discovery of an enemy in his own tribe, on his own side, but an enemy already dead, or rather an enemy because dead. For this enemy's "attack" (death) was an event in the warrior...