Why War? Freud, Einstein, and the problem of mass psychosis

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a historical and theoretical analysis of the correspondence Why War? between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, situating it within the transition from the European Kriegsideologie to an understanding of war as a process capable of altering collective judgment. Einstein emphasizes the capacity of political, economic, and cultural elites to mobilize collective emotions through propaganda, employing the notion of Massenpsychose to describe the transformation of hatred into a collective will to annihilate. Freud, by contrast, interprets war through the relationship between law and violence and the conflict between Eros and the death drive. The article reconstructs key developments in the twentieth-century genealogy of the concept of mass psychosis, examining its psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and propagandistic uses while distinguishing between its clinical meaning and its function as a political-psychopathological metaphor. The critiques advanced by Wilhelm Reich and Massimo Fagioli regarding the Freudian naturalization of destructiveness are then discussed. Finally, the theory of the annulment pulsion is presented as an alternative conceptual model for understanding the processes through which the human reality of the other may be denied and violence transformed into a collective political project.