Why War? Making Sense of Self and Consciousness by Mario Rendón
$35.00
From the Preface:
“Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same.”
Pope [i]
The Argument of Pope could be the argument of this book. It is remarkable that he wrote it in 1733 foretelling so many modern themes. That the total set of interrelations of the universe must include society (Hegel), that everything stands in relationship to everything else (Darwin), that happiness and love are reciprocal (Freud), that reason is a continuation of instinct (Darwin), that instinct produces social institutions (Veblen), that patriarchy had a historical origin as did religion, and that therefore unlike material imperatives they are reversible (Morgan, Meszaros), that governments based on love and those based on fear are antipodes (Marx), and that true self-love results in public good (Adam Smith). These are all themes of this book, based on the Spinozist principle that God and Nature are one, and therefore God is only the good sense of nature, its awesome intelligence of which humanity partakes. This shows how old the fundamental ideas of this book are. Our lack of action is not due to lack of ideas.
The title of the book expresses its main thesis. Freud got close but answering the question but his ideology blurred his vision to the dialectical nature of instinct, to the effect that altruism, the phenomenon that so productively puzzled Darwin, is his Eros, the feminine instinct. Thanatos its opposite unrestrained manifests itself in constant war today. This is based in the Freud-Einstein correspondence after, in 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited Einstein to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. Einstein chose Freud and asked hum Why War? within the parameters of might and right that Freud, interestingly, substituted for violence and right. Einstein was hoping for a psychological explanation and Freud answered only partially and rather hopelessly through his instinctual construct of-Thanatos but rather unilaterally and mechanically.[ii] Freud did not see his contradiction: that his whole theory of culture was based on sublimation and therefore the question why is war an exception to sublimation? This book endeavors to answer this question by placing history in the psychoanalytic couch in the first part, by interpreting its trauma that repressed altruism. A deeply traumatized animal species, we ourselves inflicted the trauma when we abandoned the morality of evolution,[iii] and compromised our inherent moral uprightness.
[i] Pope, A. (1733) Epistle III. An Essay on Man. In: Epistles to a Friend. London. Printed for J. Wilford. Online in Poets’ Corner. Bookshelf. Alexander Pope. Accessed from <http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/pope-e3.html> on 2016-06-10.
Since 2009, we’ve been dedicated to publishing cutting edge books in the field of psychoanalysis: clinical, theoretical, and applied. We also publish books of interest to the wider mental health profession and a broader informed audience.
In an age in which truthtelling has been under siege, Richard Reichbart—scholar, teacher, author, President of a major psychoanalytic institute—tells a truth many would choose to hide.
Written in the form of a modern epistolary novel, the email correspondence between Ella and Itamar, this is the tale of a psychologist and patient caught in an impossible situation, raising the everlasting question about the essence of psychotherapy.
A poignant story of life, loss, tragedy, aging, death and birth. The main character Sine and her internal world and life are vividly captured through the images evoked within the reader with beautiful language.
This remarkable novel takes us through a girl’s struggles with adversity from midteen age on an early twentieth century shtetl to womanhood through encounters with abusive uncles, consignment to a Budapest brothel and escape to Manhattan’s teaming poverty stricken lower east side.
Dr. Strickman, a psychoanalyst turned amateur gumshoe, sets off to uncover how his brother died–murder or suicide? A subplot of Israeli Palestinian conflict masterfully adds depth and tension to this engaging, dark and, yet, humorous tale.
The Science of Psychoanalysis: The Realization of Freud’s Promise
Festschrift in Honor of Howard Shevrin
Howard Shevrin would love to be present at scientific gatherings, and/or to hear about those people writing about his endeavors. Because that was really one of his main wishes and hopes: to see that there are others who will carry on his work.