When, in 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote his Current Considerations on War and Deathconfessed, first of all, a disappointment. He believed — like so many educated Europeans of his time — that technical and scientific progress, the sophistication of the arts and institutions, would have erected a sufficiently solid dam against barbarism. The First World War showed him otherwise: civilization is a thin film, a veneer that cracks under pressure.
A century later, the varnish is not only still fragile, it has become translucent. War no longer just breaks out on battlefields: it settles on screens, infiltrates cell phones, enters living rooms.
If the Vietnam War was designated as the “first televised war”, it was the Iraq War that became the first truly live war, broadcast 24 hours a day, with spectacular graphics and permanent commentators. The war now has a soundtrack, breaking news and sharing in real time.
Today, the experience has intensified. Social networks, instant transmissions, raw images, fragmentary testimonies: the war is experienced at a distance, but felt as if it were just around the corner. The paradox is this: the further we are, geographically, from the conflict, the closer we feel, from an emotional point of view — and, at the same time, the more powerless.
Psychoanalysis offers a key to understanding this phenomenon
Freud introduced the notion of instinctual dualism: Erosthe life drive, and Thanatosthe death drive.
War is not an accident of history; is one of the possible expressions of the structural tension between these two forces. In 1933, in his correspondence with Einstein, he wrote: “If the desire to join the war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious recommendation will be to oppose it to its antagonist, Eros.”
This is not about pacifist naivety, but about lucidity: the only force capable of containing destructiveness is the strengthening of bonds, identifications, and cultural work.
What happens, then, when war becomes a permanent spectacle?
Continuous exposure to images of violence activates primitive defense mechanisms in us. Denial — “this isn’t real— it can’t be!”; the cleavage — “there are absolute good and absolute bad”; projection — “cruelty belongs only to the Other”; massive identification with one side of the conflict.
We oscillate between hyperexcitation and anesthesia. Between panic and indifference. Between the compulsion to watch and the need to switch off.
The unconscious, Freud recalled, is timeless. It does not clearly distinguish past from present, far from close. The repeated image of the explosion, the mutilated body, the escaping child, is not metabolized as simple information: it is inscribed as a trace.
The mediated war thus becomes a direct psychic experience, even if not experienced on the ground. Trauma is no longer exclusive to combatants, or to affected populations; spreading in the form of diffuse anguish, fear of the future, a feeling of imminent collapse.
But there is another effect, perhaps more disturbing: trivialization.
When everything is transmitted, everything runs the risk of becoming consumable. Continuous repetition can desensitize. Death becomes a number; the devastation, in an image that we slide with our thumb. What should call for mourning becomes an information flow. The war begins to coexist with advertisements, entertainment, and light comments. The scopophilic drive — the desire to see — mixes with the destructive drive.
This is where Jacques Derrida’s reflection becomes particularly incisive. By defining Psychoanalysis as “knowledge without an alibi”, in States-of-the-soul of Psychoanalysisreminds us that it focuses on what is most unique about psychic cruelty. It does not allow us to take refuge in the comfortable idea that barbarism belongs only to the Other. It forces us to recognize our own participation, however ghostly, in the desire for violence.
The mediated war also favors what Freud called “narcissism of small differences”. Aggressiveness is directed not at absolutely strangers, but at those who threaten our identity. Networks amplify this mechanism: polarizations, hate speech, Manichaean simplifications. External conflict echoes the internal fractures of societies. Distant war fuels domestic symbolic wars.
On the other hand, virtual proximity can create an illusion of moral participation that dispenses with the political act. Sharing an image sometimes replaces reflection; indignation replaces responsibility. Politics, as a space for symbolic mediation, is progressively disinvested, giving way to immediate reaction. Now, when the symbolic fails, violence finds a direct path.
It is not about defending ignorance as protection, nor news avoidancea phenomenon that has increased in the last ten years at an astounding pace. Ignorance has never been an antidote against barbarism. But it is legitimate to question the way we see. What do we do with what we see? Can we transform the image into thought, or do we limit ourselves to reacting?
War, when it breaks out, always belies the fantasy of linear progress. This reminds us that civilization does not eliminate aggression; it only displaces it, sublimates it, contains it, provisionally. “Everything that promotes the development of culture also works against war,” wrote Freud. Culture, here, is not ornament. It’s work on the drive. It is the ability to symbolize loss, to recognize otherness, to bear ambivalence.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of live warfare is this: preserving the possibility of thinking. Or, as Bion said: “The ability to think thoughts.” Do not give in, neither to destructive excitement nor to anesthesia. Do not reduce conflict to a spectacle, nor suffering to statistics. Sustain the discomfort of knowing that violence is not external to the human condition.
Absolute peace is a structural impossibility. But between total war and the “peace of the cemetery” there is a fragile space — the space of the political, the symbolic, the bond. If the death drive inhabits each subject and each community, so does the ability to connect, to Erosconstitutes us.
Live war confronts us, daily, with our own ambivalence. We can transform this confrontation into mere voyeuristic excitement, or into cultural work. There are no guarantees. There is only responsibility.
Thinking about war, even from a distance, is already a way of not consuming it passively. And perhaps this is, today, the first gesture of resistance.
The ethical mission of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is not just a clinical theory, nor a cultural commentary. It is configured as an active ethical position in the face of human phenomena and historical reality.
As “knowledge without alibi”, Psychoanalysis refuses complicit neutrality. Its ethics do not consist of absolving, justifying, or morally condemning, but of understanding – in a radical way – the unconscious mechanisms that structure hatred, violence, collective identification and adherence to destructiveness. It is about sustaining thought precisely where it is most difficult: in the face of cruelty, perversion, barbarism.
Thinking about perversion, in this framework, does not mean reducing it to a circumscribed clinical category, nor to a political label applied to the adversary. It means recognizing it as a way of relating to the Other, characterized by the refusal of otherness, the instrumentalization of similarity and the denial of subjective responsibility. Perversion, as a relational structure, is not just “outside”, in regimes or ideologies; it can be installed in speeches, in institutions, in the masses — and in each subject.
It is at this point that Psychoanalysis is called upon as ethics: it demands from each of us a non-complicit responsibility, both in the public space and in the intimate forum. It is not enough to denounce external violence; It is necessary to interrogate the subtle forms of destructive enjoyment, indifference, or dehumanization that permeate the social bond. Sustaining the democratic possibility implies recognizing this dimension and not projecting it exclusively onto the enemy.
Democracy is not maintained only by legal devices or institutional balances. It also depends on each subject’s ability to bear difference, tolerate frustration, symbolize loss and renounce omnipotence. Now, this work is, in the deepest sense, psychic work.
Thus, the ethical mission of psychoanalysis consists of keeping the space of thought open, preventing Manichaean simplification and refusing collective lack of responsibility. It offers no guarantees of redemption; rather, it offers a practice of lucidity. And this lucidity — exercised inside and outside oneself — is an indispensable condition so that the democratic bond does not slip into perverse forms of relationship, where the Other is no longer recognized as a subject and starts to be treated as a disposable object.
In this sense, understanding is already a political act.
And not being an accomplice starts by not giving up thinking.
Writes under the Old Orthographic Agreement
Leave a Reply