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dopeguru's avatar

What's Freud's stance on war?

Asked by dopeguru (1928points) March 12th, 2016

“The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk. The Bolshevists, too, aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by insuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man. To me this hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of outsiders is not the least of the factors of cohesion among themselves. In any case, as you too have observed, complete suppression of man’s aggressive tendencies is not in issue; what we may try is to divert it into a channel other than that of warfare.”

-Freud

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5 Answers

RedDeerGuy1's avatar

He sides with the underdog.

janbb's avatar

That it’s an inevitable part of humanity’s natural aggression which it might be possible to redirect.

ragingloli's avatar

That it can all be traced back to penis envy

SquirrelEStuff's avatar

Here’s a great, but long, corespondence between Freud and Einstein regarding war.

Pazza's avatar

Been a while since ive been on here…. . But, Jordan Peterson lectures on youtube are amazing to me. I would imagine with a bit of searching, he’ll have done a breakdown of frued and war.

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