Abstract
The specter of war in Freud’s thought is a task that, fall from
being fulfilled, we can only hope to contribute in a small
portion. This paper tries to examine the main ideas poured
by Freud in his response to Einstein requirement to expose
some of their assumptions about the causes of war. In
particular, we have to consider the three most important
contributions of his letter, which are in turn a kind of
dialectical reversal of Einstein’s theory, namely: 1) Violence
and Law are strict correlative phenomena; 2) The instincts to
destroy and kill are as indispensable as their opposite,
which we call “erotic”; 3) We shouldn’t ask for the reason of
war, but determine why today we find it unbearable.
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