Publisher's Synopsis
Reflections on War and Death is a set of twin essays written by Sigmund Freud in 1915, six months after the outbreak of World War I. The essays express discontent and disillusionment with human nature and human society in the aftermath of the hostilities; and generated much interest among lay readers of Freud. The first essay addressed the widespread disillusionment brought on by the collapse of the Pax Britannica of the preceding century- what Freud called "the common civilization of peacetime" The second essay addressed what Freud called the peacetime 'protection racket' whereby the inevitability of death was expunged from civilized mentality. Building on the second essay of Totem and Taboo, Freud argued that such an attitude left civilians in particular unprepared for the stark horror of industrial-scale death in the Great War.
