During the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking the fundamental question: What can be done to liberate humanity from the menace of war? The psychoanalyst replied at length and their exchange of letters (reproduced here) was published in March 1933 under the title Why War?. The book would be included in the book burnings in Berlin on 10th of May that year. Why War? is important in Freud's work because in it he develops a fundamental idea that leads him to conclude that the life and death drives are linked - a thought that he had already entertained in works such as Death and Us (1915), which is also included here. In a terrible irony, Freud dedicated a copy of Why War? to Mussolini, who nonetheless instituted a police investigation of its author. The contributors to this volume explore the reasons underlying the dedication, as well as giving their own reflections on the genesis of war.

This book provides a panoramic history of psychoanalysis at its zenith, as human nature was rethought in the wake of war and the global transformations that followed.

In this challenging collection of essays, the noted historian and philosopher of science John Forrester delves into the disputes over Freud's dead body. With wit and erudition, he tackles questions central to our psychoanalytic century's ways of thinking and living, including the following: Can one speak of a morality of the psychoanalytic life? Are the lives of both analysts and patients doomed to repeat the incestuous patterns they uncover? What and why did Freud collect? Is a history of psychoanalysis possible? By taking nothing for granted and leaving no cliché of psychobabble--theoretical or popular--unturned, Forrester gives us a sense of the ethical surprises and epistemological riddles that a century of tumultuous psychoanalytical debate has often obscured. In these pages, we explore dreams, history, ethics, political theory, and the motor of psychoanalysis as a scientific movement. Forrester makes us feel that the Freud Wars are not merely a vicious quarrel or a fashionable journalistic talking point for the late twentieth century. This hundred years' war is an index of the cultural and scientific climate of modern times. Freud is indeed a barometer for understanding how we conduct our different lives.

Richly nuanced and firmly grounded in literature, biography, and history, The Language of Trauma analyses three major central European writers, revealing how they incorporated and responded to psychological and historical trauma.