War, death, safety, and love in life and psychoanalysis

Abstract

In his reflection on the possible motivations for human beings to continue fighting wars, Sigmund Freud pessimistically regarded destruction as inherent in human nature. In “Why war” he wrote, “The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one” (1933, p. 211), answering the questions formulated to him by Albert Einstein in this regard. Freud called this notion “the death drive” and it soon became one of his most controversial concepts. As such, it appeared to many “as one of the most bizarre monster of all of Freud’s gallery of monsters” (Flugel, 1953, p. 43), as the influential social psychologist contemporary with him, William McDougall (1871–1938), put it. But we will return to this later. On February 22, 2022, the Russian army attacked and invaded Ukraine and once again psychoanalysts found themselves sharing with patients some extreme existential conditions. In the opening paper of the present issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, “Voices from the war: Some notes on the emotional experience of the war in Ukraine told by two Ukrainian psychoanalysts,” the Italian colleagues Paola Solano and Michele Vargiu interview Mikhaylo Suslov (a training and supervising analyst of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group and IPA member) and the young psychoanalyst Ksenia Zaitseva (a candidate of the Institute of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group). The interviewees recall their very painful and almost incredible personal and professional experience of the Russian invasion. The interview took place on March 21, 2022 from 3 to 5 p.m. CET on the Zoom platform, with Solano and Vargiu in their offices in Genoa and Cagliari (Italy), respectively, while Suslov had just arrived in Dresden (Germany) and Zaitseva was currently in Lviv (Ukraine) but about to leave Ukraine herself. The article reports some fragments of the complex and painful emotional experience lived by these colleagues for which, as the interviewers observe, “there are no words other than those used by them to describe it.” In the interview, the four of them try to make sense of the horror, yet finally Dr. Suslov concludes: “It is not yet the moment for integration, if we want to use these terms, and we must respect the time of the split without judging it or consider it as a regressive structure.” In fact, from this point of view, those splittings are not the result of a regressive death drive but some kind of posttraumatic wound, which needs time and care in order to be healed. The following article, entitled “Laying the death drive to rest,” takes an even more radical stance. Its author, Alan Michael Karbelnig, is a training and supervising analyst at the NewCenter for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, working in Pasadena, California. After many years of studying the concept of the “death drive,” he proposes the “admittedly controversial recommendation that psychoanalysis get rid of this archaic idea – a proposal consistent with my political and scientific interest in organizing psychoanalysis into a more cohesive field.” This is an old issue. British psychoanalyst John Flugel (1884– 1955) – a founding member of the Independent group (Cassullo, 2014) – stated the following in 1953, in one of his lectures given to candidates in training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London: