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Thoughts for the Time of War and Death (German: Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod) is a set of twin essays written by Sigmund Freud in 1915, six months after the outbreak of World War I.
In this essay, written about six months after the outbreak of the First World War, Freud expresses his disillusionment about human nature and the supreme institution of the civilized world, namely the state.
Sigmund Freud begins "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" by lamenting Europe's degenerate state. Millions of soldiers are caught up in World War I (1914–18) while people at home feel disillusioned by the unwelcome changes that have befallen the continent.
114 Thoughts for the Times on War and Death disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life; the text vacillates between them.3 There is much more, however, than the mere juxtaposition of two attitudes, one denying and the other valorizing death’s importance.
The war years brought death to the center of Freud's thinking and his personal life. In his bleak outlook, Freud understood war to be a resurgence of the violent past that humankind was incapable of leaving behind.
These two essays were written round about March and April, 1915, some six months after the outbreak of the first World War, and express some of Freud's considered views on it. His more personal reactions will be found described in Chapter VII of Ernest Jones's second volume (1955).
There are two essays in Sigmund Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," one on disillusionment and the other on our relation to death as revealed or modified by war. Freud wrote them in March and April 1915, six months after war was declared.
