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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.
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. (1915) Note. 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.
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.
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.
Freud, S. (1915) Thoughts For The Times On War And Death. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:273-300
prepared to find that wars between the primitive and the civilized peoples, between the races who are divided by the colour of their skin - wars, even, against and among the nationalities of Europe whose civilization is little developed or has been lost - would occupy mankind for some time to come. But we permitted ourselves to have other hopes.
