Abstract
How does the reviewer approach a book with the title War is Not Inevitable when he believes it is? The book’s subtitle, On the Psychology of War and Aggression, broaches a subject about which much can be written, and that will be a focus of my review. Vamik Volkan, in his introduction, states that Henri Parens’s main reason for writing the book is to tell us Freud was wrong in his response to Einstein’s question: Why war? Does psychoanalysis have any new insights that might deliver us from the scourge of war? Parens points out that Freud based his response on his death instinct theory, which Parens rightly calls into question, as have many others since Freud offered that metapsychological point of view. Melanie Klein in Europe and Karl Menninger in the United States were mostly in agreement with Freud on this matter, but others, particularly Otto Kernberg, have had more nuanced views on the subject. A problem with Parens’s argument is that it is more difficult to prove that war is not inevitable than that it is, given humankind’s experience through the ages. Parens hopes that changes in childrearing patterns and the intervention of international organizational bodies like the UN and the World Court will enable contesting parties to settle disputes peacefully, but I am none too sanguine in this regard.
I think that Parens hoped that after the Holocaust, in which he lost many in his family (and from which he barely escaped himself), there would be no more genocides. However, recent depravities in Africa (Boko Haram, Tutsis vs. Hutus, South Sudan, etc.), and those enacted most recently in Syria by ISIS, cannot support an optimistic point of view. Parens is an outstanding developmental researcher and infant observer. The book’s bibliography references thirty-five works on a wide range of subjects relating to childhood experience of aggression driven by emotional disorders and parental education and prejudice. His ideas, though indeed apt in the consulting room, the family home, and the schoolroom and schoolyard, are less relevant to the world stage.
Parens contends that knowledge gained about individual human beings from clinical work, particularly in regard to the role of narcissism, can inform us about the psychodynamics of groups. There are, of course, psychological factors operating in groups that have implications for conflict resolution and conflict leading to violence, but there are many other determinants as well—historical, economic, cultural, political, and ideological. I am reminded of a line from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: “Till you feed us, right and wrong can wait.” Income disparity, ecological disaster, competition for resources—all, in my view, make conflict and war inevitable. We live in a world in which fundamentalism and fanaticism preclude the peaceful resolution of disputes. We can always hope that this will change. But I do not think it will in my lifetime or that of Parens.
I found his discussion of the exchange between Freud and Einstein in Why War? (1933) the least edifying part of the book, along with his conclusion that war is not inevitable. However, I found the discussion of Freud’s metapsychology of aggression and narcissism quite valuable, a tour de force, in fact. I am reminded of a line from a Mike Nichols and Elaine May skit in which one of them, playing a psychologist, says “aggression need not be hostile.” The concept of aggression not based on the death instinct is very timely, but there remains disagreement about what is inborn and what is experience-driven, such as the frustration aggression hypothesis of Dollard et al. (1939) and, on a larger scale, the cultural and historical determinants of conflict between ethnic groups.
Parens’s discussion of primary narcissism, secondary narcissism, and hypernarcissism, as presented by Freud and developed by others, is an important contribution to our understanding of the operation of narcissism in individuals and groups. His list of “conflict-causing human reactivities”—greed, the need for power, libidinal insufficiency syndrome, envy, the need to blame others, the need for enemies and for revenge—is large and inclusive. In addition, his recognition that there are normal developmental factors that make all of us prejudiced, and his distinction between benign and malignant prejudice, apt and quite timely in today’s world. The book includes a section with responses to Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002) and Franco Fornari’s The Psychoanalysis of War (1966). He agrees with Hedges that “war gives us resolve, a cause . . . allows us to be noble” but follows this with the rather gratuitous “as is the case for the disenfranchised like those in Gaza and in many countries that were once colonized and left many people diminished, impoverished, and without recognition that they are valuable human beings” (p. 174). Who disenfranchised the people of Gaza? The Israelis who withdrew the settlers and who left, some voluntarily, some involuntarily; the Palestinian National Authority that dismantled the greenhouses left by the settlers; or Hamas, which replaced the PNA and sent rockets crashing down on Israeli civilians in the south?
Earlier in the book (p. 115) Parens quotes himself: “Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj—a psychiatrist . . . a sound political activist [made a very similar remark] on the question of the effects on the Palestinians of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He observed . . . [much as did] Baron et al. that elements of a crisis of identity come with this withdrawal, that the Palestinian will have to revise critical aspects of his self-concept, shifting the focus of his everyday motivations from preoccupation with the enemy in his house to coping with his fellow Palestinians in solving problems that exist in his house among his own people, while answering the question ‘Who am I if I do not have my enemy?’” (Parens 2007, p. 288).
This same quote is repeated on pages 140–141. Parens implies that Israelis are colonists and that “terrorists” have legitimate grievances against the colonists who left Palestinians “disenfranchised . . . diminished, [and] impoverished, without recognition that they were valuable human beings” (p. 174). The fact is that Jews were in Palestine before the Arabs and that the majority of Israelis now trace their origin to other Arab states.
In his discussion he considers the alternatives “when we are reared for war, when we start a war, and when war is thrust upon us” (p. 175). He agrees with Hedges that war is abysmally ugly and makes us sick, and that our identity individually and as a group is linked with our national myths of war. But he disagrees with Hedges that Freud’s death instinct is the source of human destructiveness. Parens feels it is “a hypothesis that can neither be proven or disproven, as a result of which it is a matter of faith rather that a matter of psychology and science. It is a simply untestable explanation” (p. 183). But Parens agrees with Hedges that Freud’s Eros is an instinctual force that binds people together. He comes to the same conclusion about Fornari: that his conclusion that war has a self-protective function is a speculation supported solely by unprovable belief.
Yet Parens’s contention that war is not inevitable is itself just such an assertion. Note that Parens writes that Fornari relies heavily on Melanie Klein, who, following Freud, asserts that infants are born with a self-destructive drive, then project their destructiveness onto the mother, only then to experience psychotic anxieties: the paranoid position. Parens counters this with his own observation of three-week-old neonates, in whom he found no evidence of this intense anxiety, which, he argues, develops only in consequence of emotional deprivation or physical abuse. Parens also discusses David Hamburg’s Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps toward Early Detection and Effective Action (2010). Parens supports Hamburg’s pillars of prevention, the last of which is a “global movement to educate children, youth, and political leaders and all humanity to learn to live together in peace through mutual benefit from informed cooperation” (p. 214). Since Hamburg’s book was written, and since Parens’s was written as well, we have seen the rise of two genocidal groups, ISIS and Boko Haram. The international bodies that Hamburg and Parens would like us to rely on to prevent genocide have not succeeded so far. I think what Hamburg and Parens miss is that these entities may not succeed within our lifetimes. We will doubtless see more war and more genocide; our world will become more violent rather than less. We have become inured to the constant barrage of images of brutality. We do not speak out enough; but both Parens and I agree that we should. His book is a commendable argument in support of doing just that.