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WorkSigmund Freud

Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

(lit.: Writings from the World War)

Two essays from Vienna in the first years of the Great War, on civilised nations at each other's throats and on beauty that perishes.

by Sigmund Freud64 passages held

  • German, the original language
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First published
(aged 59)
Original language
German

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Overview

Two short pieces that Sigmund Freud wrote in Vienna during the First World War are gathered in this volume on the site; each first appeared on its own. "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" appeared in Imago in 1915, about six months after the war began, in two parts. The first describes the shock of Europeans who had believed that the great civilised nations formed one cultural community, whose states forbade their citizens to lie and cheat, and who now watched those same states lie, cheat and kill. The state, Freud observes, had banned wrongdoing in the individual not to abolish it but to keep a monopoly on it, as it did with salt and tobacco. The disappointment, he argues, rested on an illusion, since civilisation does not uproot the drives but only holds them down. The second part argues that nobody really believes in his own death, that in the unconscious everyone is convinced of being immortal, and that peacetime culture had kept death out of view; Freud ends by rewriting the old Roman advice to prepare for war if you want peace into advice to prepare for death if you want to bear life. An early form of that part had already appeared in 1915, as "We and Death", in the bulletin of the B'nai B'rith, the Jewish society Freud had belonged to since 1897. The second piece, "On Transience", written in November 1915 and printed in 1916, recalls a summer walk before the war with a silent friend and a young but already famous poet, who could not enjoy the flowering landscape because it would fade by winter. Freud answered that transience raises the value of beautiful things, and traced the poet's gloom to a revolt against mourning. A year later, the essay goes on, the war destroyed far more than landscapes. Readers have usually taken the poet to be Rainer Maria Rilke, and some scholars doubt that the walk happened as Freud tells it.

Key concepts

What illusion did the war destroy, according to Freud?

The illusion that civilised people had become good at heart. Freud calls the disappointment, strictly speaking, the destruction of an illusion. Illusions are welcome because they spare us pain, but they must be given up when they collide with reality. The war did not corrupt people; it revealed that their goodness had rested largely on outside pressure.

How are selfish drives turned into social ones?

By two forces working together, Freud argues. From inside, erotic needs, the wish for love, mix into the selfish drives and turn them towards others. From outside, education and surroundings reward good conduct and punish bad. The capacity for this change he calls fitness for civilisation. Because the outside pressure can produce good behaviour without any inner change, many people are better in conduct than in nature.

What does Freud mean by the primeval man in us?

He means the layer of the mind that still treats death as early humans did. Our unconscious, like theirs, denies its own death, wishes death to strangers and enemies without scruple, and feels both love and hostility towards those it loves. Civilisation covers this layer but does not remove it, and the war brought it back to the surface.

What is mourning, in "On Transience"?

Mourning is the slow withdrawal of love from something that has been lost. Freud describes our capacity to love as attached to objects; when an object is destroyed, that love comes free again and could turn elsewhere, yet it clings to what is gone even when a substitute is ready. Mourning ends of its own accord once the detachment is complete, and then the love is free for new attachments.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Disappointed by Civilisation

Why did the war shock educated Europeans so deeply? The first part of "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" argues that what died was an illusion about ourselves.

Freud describes the citizen who believed the great nations shared one cultural home and now watched their states lie, cheat and kill. The state, he observes, had banned wrongdoing only to keep a monopoly on it. Drives are neither good nor evil; education and the wish to be loved reshape them, but many people behave well only under outside pressure, as cultural hypocrites. The disappointment, strictly speaking, was unjustified: the war had not made people worse, it had only shown how little they had risen.

  • war
  • civilization
  • culture
  • moral psychology
  • ethics
  • morality
  • violence
  • illusion
  • social norms
  • moral development
  • socialization

Enter a dialogue

Nobody Believes in Their Own Death

Can anyone actually imagine being dead? The essay's second part answers no, and asks what that refusal costs a culture in peacetime and in war.

In the unconscious, Freud argues, every one of us is convinced of being immortal. Peacetime culture kept death out of view, blaming each death on an accident, and life grew shallow because its highest stake could never be risked; fiction supplied the many lives we lack. Towards strangers and enemies, though, the unconscious kills readily, as primeval man did. War strips the convention away, and Freud ends by asking whether we should give death the place in our thoughts that belongs to it.

  • death
  • mortality
  • afterlife
  • ambivalence
  • guilt
  • religion
  • unconscious
  • meaning of life

Enter a dialogue

Beauty That Will Not Last

Does the fact that beautiful things perish make them worth less, or more? "On Transience" recalls a summer walk and an argument with a melancholy poet.

The poet could not enjoy the flowering landscape because winter would destroy it. Freud answered that scarcity in time raises value: a flower that blooms one night is no less lovely for it. He failed to persuade, and concluded that something else was at work, a revolt against mourning, which spoiled the pleasure in advance. Mourning, he admits, remains a riddle. A year later the war destroyed far more, and he still expected that what it had broken would be rebuilt.

  • transience
  • beauty
  • grief
  • attachment
  • love

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
64
distinct concepts
110
by passages held, corpus-wide
#607

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “death” and “unconscious”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
deathunconscious4
human natureunconscious4
deathmortality3
human naturemortality3
human naturewar3
mortalitywar3
psychoanalysisunconscious3
culturewar2
deathpsychoanalysis2
deathwar2
human naturepsychoanalysis2
mortalityunconscious2
culturedeath1
culturehuman nature1
culturemoral psychology1
culturemortality1
cultureunconscious1
deathhuman nature1
human naturemoral psychology1
moral psychologypsychoanalysis1
moral psychologywar1
unconsciouswar1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg you are here DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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