The correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in “Why War” and the socio-political perspective of Alfred Adler

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, published in the Standard Edition of Freud's writings under the title of “Why War”. Freud's answers to some of Einstein's questions are compared to Alfred Adler's ideas on the role of “striving for power” versus “community feeling” and the role of these two forces in the development of war. Adler had begun to develop an object relations line of thinking in his early papers on the aggressive drive and the need for affection (Adler 1908a and 1908b). It is suggested that if Freud and Adler had been able to continue working together, they might have been able to bring their differing perspectives on the issue of war together to address both the role of power and loss of power, as well as the role of narcissistic defences in the development of war. As it is, this was left to later psychoanalytic thinkers, in particular the Kleinian analysts, who underlined the role of reverting to paranoid-schizoid thinking in the face of humiliation, rather than facing depression and the work of mourning. The work of mourning is illustrated using excerpts from Benjamin Britten's “War Requiem”.

KEYWORDS:

• Death drive
• striving for power
• community feeling
• narcissistic defences
• guilt
• mourning

Notes

1 Reprinted here by kind permission of Boosey and Hawkes music publishers (Britten 1961).