by Richard A. Koenigsberg
Contents
- The Psychological Interpretation of Culture
- Hitler’s Ideology
- War and Genocide
- The First World War
- War as Sacrifice
- Training Soldiers to Die
- Like Sheep to Slaughter
- The Psychopathology of War
Works Cited
VIII. The Psychopathology of War
(Conclusion of "Awakening from the Nightmare of History")
Beneath the sound, fury, and grandiosity of war lies profound psychopathology, this willingness to kill, die and maim in the name of nations. Historical accounts deny psychopathology by depicting war as a normal, even natural human activity. The case study presented here illuminates the pathological quality of warfare. Nations of the world continued to send men to die, day after day, month after month, year after year, producing a quantity of casualties so mind-boggling that even now people are attempting to comprehend and come to terms with what occurred.
Perpetuation of warfare requires a denial of what happens to the body of the soldier. Delusions of honor and glory can be sustained only by turning away from the results of battle. Haig’s son reported that the British Commander-in-Chief felt that it was his duty to “refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill” (in Gilbert, 1994, 221). The French Commander Joffre—after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier—said to his Staff: “I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack” (221). War is about the mutilation of the body of the soldier in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideals, but don’t want to look at the body of the soldier.
The idea of omnipotent bodies politic is a dream that people experience while they are awake. Nations constitute a shared fantasy of immortality. This may seem at times to be a benign, beautiful dream, this fantasy of oneness with a beloved country. However, the dream transmogrifies into a nightmare at the moment when people begin to doubt the omnipotence of their nation.
Wars come into being in order to demonstrate—test the proposition—that one’s nation is all-powerful. Nations bring forth or manifest power by virtue of their capacity to kill and to bring about death, that is, as a result of their willingness to sacrifice the lives of human beings. As long as there are people who are “dying for the country,” we are persuaded that nations are real.
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