On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia: Sigmund Freud

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our `primitive` past and `civilized` modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud`s extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist`s naive pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.