About war and pacifism

Abstract

The article presents some of the main reflections of Freud on the themes of war and pacifism from the text “About war and death. Current topics”, written during the First World War, the author shows how Freud included psychoanalysis in politics and how this connection requests from the analyst the maintainance of his atention facing the singular contemporaneity. It concludes that for catastrophic dimension of the psyche, we can observe today, for example, in switching to the violent act, in delinquency, in drug abuse; in totalitarism that stands above the law and fundamentalism as an instrument of divine law etc, it should be noted that the existence of these new modes of expression of symptoms tests the becoming of psychoanalysis. There is, finally, a bet: the future of psychoanalysis depends on the analysts’ responsibility to keep their work focused on the individual or collective subject of psychic dynamics, without sacrificing the rigor of Freudian concepts.