In 1932, amidst a world edging toward another catastrophic war, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud with a deceptively simple question: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? Freud’s response, later published as Why War?, offers a psychoanalytic lens on humanity’s destructive impulses. While deeply rooted in drive theory and Freud’s dualistic model of Eros and Thanatos—the life and death drives—his reflections continue to resonate, particularly when reframed through the insights of modern psychoanalysis. Thinkers such as Hyman Spotnitz and Phyllis Meadow, founders of modern psychoanalysis, extend and reframe Freud’s ideas in ways that illuminate the enduring psychic roots of violence.
Freud’s core argument is that war is not merely a political or economic phenomenon but an expression of an innate human aggression—the death drive, directed outward. Civilization, he writes, is a fragile dam holding back this tide of destructiveness, a dam constructed from law, morality, and identification with others. Yet this dam constantly leaks. For Freud, man is biologically and psychically predisposed to violence.
Modern psychoanalysis builds on this view but shifts the emphasis from instinctual drives to emotional communication and the pathology of unprocessed affects. Spotnitz, working primarily with narcissistic and preoedipal patients, moved the field from the classical emphasis on insight into drives and toward the therapeutic use of countertransference and the processing of destructive affects. He posited that aggression, in particular, is not merely destructive but also communicative—an expression of psychic pain or unmet developmental needs.
In this light, war—like the symptom in the individual—can be seen as a failure of emotional communication on a collective scale. A nation, like a person, may act out destructively when it cannot symbolically represent its internal states. Phyllis Meadow’s elaboration on Spotnitz’s work deepens this understanding: she proposed that resistance to feeling—especially the resistance to bearing aggressive or painful affects—lies at the heart of both personal and social psychopathology. War may then represent a massive, collective enactment of uncontained, unmentalized aggression.
Freud wrote of the difficulty of controlling aggression because it originates not only from interpersonal conflict but from intrapsychic tension. Modern psychoanalysts would say this tension arises from the inability to symbolize or metabolize painful feelings. In individuals, such failures result in somatic symptoms, acting out, or emotional deadness. In groups, the result may be scapegoating, dehumanization, or militarized nationalism. Spotnitz’s view of aggression as a defense against feelings of aloneness, inadequacy, or unacknowledged trauma offers a compelling lens through which to understand war as a response to psychic helplessness. When individuals or groups are unable to mourn, to feel loss, or to tolerate dependency, they may lash out, seeking omnipotent restoration through violent means.
Furthermore, the theory of emotional communication suggests that aggression, even when destructive, can be understood as a desperate attempt to be known. In this way, war could be conceived as a brutal, primitive form of relational protest—a cry from one group to another: See me, hear me, know my pain. The failure to respond empathically at earlier levels—through diplomacy, through justice, through mutual recognition—sets the stage for this collapse into violent discharge.
Freud ends his letter to Einstein with a fragile hope: that identification—one of the psychic pillars of civilization—might one day evolve to include all of humanity. Modern psychoanalysis similarly holds a cautious optimism: that through therapeutic relationships, through the containment of destructive affects, and through the development of reflective capacities, aggression can be transformed. Not eliminated, but reworked into symbol, into language, into connection.
In our time, when war persists in both overt and subtler forms, the Freud-Einstein correspondence remains a vital touchstone. Its integration with modern psychoanalytic thinking reminds us that violence is not just political, but deeply personal. And perhaps, in our clinical work, in our communities, and in our inner lives, we can begin to answer Freud’s haunting question—not by denying aggression, but by daring to feel it, name it, and transform it.