The Einstein-Freud Correspondence (1932)
Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?
In 1932, physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) took it upon himself to write an open letter to neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) to initiate a public conversation on the origins of war and peace, human nature and the role of the sciences in these matters.
At the time of the writing of the letter, public scrutiny of Jewish intellectuals in Germany and Austria was mounting. The following May, a viciously anti-Semetic illustrated brochure entitled Juden Sehen Dich An (“Jews are Watching You”) would feature Einstein in its prologue alongside some sixty other prominent (alleged and actual) Jewish intellectuals (Robinson, 2019a p. 225). Written by a close collaborator of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the author of the brochure would include a photograph of Einstein alongside the caption:
“Discovered a much-contested theory of relativity. Was greatly honoured by the Jewish press and the unsuspecting German people. Showed his gratitude by lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler. Not yet hanged.”
No doubt, even in 1930 Einstein was feeling pressured to leave his native Germany. A world-famous intellectual, he had been vocal in his opposition to the Nazi populist movement and because of this (among other reasons) become a target of its hate campaigns. He would flee Germany for good two years later, a journey I detailed in a previous newsletter:
Famously, following the “Actions against the Un-German Spirit” proclamation in 1933, ceremonial book burnings were held throughout both Germany and Austria, were Freud had his psycholalysis practice. Both his and Einstein’s works were frequent and prominent targets, as the “exclusion of ‘Left’, democratic, and Jewish literature took precedence over everything else” (Bracher, 1970). Indeed, central to the ritualistic cultural cleansing that was taking place was the extinguishing of what Goebbels referred to as “intellectual filth”. As he would procclaim in 1933:
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you.” - Joseph Goebbels, speaking to students in Berlin
No doubt foreshadowing these events, Einstein thus took it upon himself to write a fellow famous Jewish intellectual, Sigmund Freud. Still living in Vienna, Freud would be late to recognize the immediate danger of the Nazi movement to both his own and his family’s safety. Upon hearing of the first book burnings, Freud supposedly remarked to Ernest Jones (1879-1958) “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books” (Gay, 2006, p. 592-93).
Origins of the Letter
In 1931, an organization called the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation was instructed by a committee of the League of Nations to arrange for an exchange of open letters between intellectuals to promote discussions of topics deemed important and relevant to scientific inquiry (Leith, 2000; Strachey, 1964). Einstein (who was actively involved in the League) was approached directly and chose to write Freud, whom he had met five years earlier at the home of Freud’s youngest son in Berlin. During this little known meeting, the two reportedly discussed their work and respective—rather disparate—fields of theoretical physics and psychoanalysis (Leith, 2000).
The topic of Einstein’s letter to Freud was the age-old question of how to understand human beings’ innate and ever-present appetite for warfare. As he begins the letter:
Dear Mr. Freud
The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem:
Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?
According to German military historian Wolfram Wette, Einstein’s involvement in the peace movement traces back to before World War I, when he openly opposed German militarism and use of violence in foreign policy. As World War I broke out in 1914, Einstein refused to take part in a manifesto formulated by the German cultural and academic elite in support of German nationalism. Even in this case, he was in a tiny minority of scientists opposing war, even going so far as to try to publish a counter-manifesto denouncing the war (Ghodsee, 2015).
Let us continue:
It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for Civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.
Despite Einstein’s wording to Freud, the discovery of nuclear fission in uranium was still seven or so years away and when announced, famously took Einstein by surprise. Moreover, the notion that his own discovery of the mass-energy equivalence principle would later enable atomic bombs capable of destroying whole cities had indeed never occurred to him. His response when introduced to the idea by Leo Szilárd (1898-1964) and Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) on that famous visit to Long Island was, again famously, "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht" ("I did not even think about that!").
Indeed, Einstein’s innocent, somewhat naive world view seems to have been central to his choosing of Freud as the recipient of his letter. As he wrote,
The normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. Thus, in the inquiry now proposed, I can do little more than to seek to clarify the question at issue and, clearing the ground of the more obvious solutions, enable you to bring the light of your far-reaching knowledge of man's instinctive life to bear upon the problem. There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom; you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles.
Indeed, quite the task for the now 76 year old Freud, who was 23 years Einstein’s senior. By 1932, Freud was still dealing with health issues related to his cancer of the jaw diagnosed in 1932. His love of cigars indeed persisted through painful treatments, multiple surgeries and the removal of part of his jaw. He received Einstein’s letter and told Leo Steinig of the League of Nations to “thank [Einstein] for his kind words and to tell [him] that he would do his best to explore the thorny problem of preventing war.” As Steinig went on to write to Einstein, “He will have his answer ready by early October”.
“All my life I have had to tell people truths that were difficult to swallow. Now that I am old, I certainly do not want to fool them” — Freud
Einstein’s Thoughts and Questions for Freud
Although Einstein was frank in his letter about his limited insights into human nature, this (naturally, he’s Einstein!) did not restrain him from offering an opinion. Einstein, already an active member of the League of Nations, emphasized in his letter his certainty in the need for:
The setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgments unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees.
Despite his naivete even Einstein, thus, was capable of recognizing the immediate challenges of erecting a supranational organization in charge of policing individual nations. Following a brief discussion of these matters, including the relationship between law and might, Einstein is in his letter lead back to what he refers to as his first axiom, namely that:
The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
As such, as Einstein puts it,
The ill success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work which paralyze these efforts.
In particular, Einstein takes aim at the psychological factors driving two groups of individuals whose interests are in conflict with lasting world peace:
Politicians. The governing classes in each nation and their “craving for power”, which he deems is "hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty”;
The military-industrial complex. Although the term itself would not be coined until 1961 (by Eisenhower), Einstein describes “another group” whose aspirations are on “purely mercenary, economic lines”. As he writes, “a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interest and enlarge their personal authority”.
Einstein goes on to describe the mechanisms that allow such limited groups of individuals to set the world’s agenda. In particular, he emphasizes the relationship between governing bodies and the schools, press and church as important in shaping “the emotions of the masses, and makes its tool of them”.
In addition to his general inquiry regarding the hope for a solution to the problem of war, Einstein in his ruminations to Freud formulates three questions for the doctor:
How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?
How is it that these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives?
Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?
Regarding the last point, as Einstein points out, he is not merely thinking of the “so-called uncultured masses”, but rather that:
Experience proves that it is rather the so-called "intelligentsia" that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form--upon the printed page.
Food for thought.
Freud’s Response (September 1932)
Although he took his time in formulating a response to the question of “how to prevent war”, Freud’s letter back to Einstein, written by hand, promptly arrived that September. His reply sets out with a cordial comment about the two mens’ familiarity with tackling problems that lay “on the borderland of the knowable”. Following some clarifications of the purpose of his reply (“to explain how this question of preventing wars strikes a psychologist”), and his expression of general agreement with Einstein’s observations, Freud addresses Einstein’s inquiries in turn.
You begin with the relations between might and right, and this is assuredly the proper starting point for our inquiry. But, for the term might, I would substitute a tougher and more telling word: violence. In right and violence we have today an obvious antinomy. It is easy to prove that one has evolved from the other and, when we go back to origins and examine primitive conditions, the solution of the problem follows easily enough. I must crave your indulgence if in what follows I speak of well-known, admitted facts as though they were new data; the context necessitates this method.
In looking to address Einstein’s first inquiry, Freud proceeds by laying out the history of conflict resolution by means of violence, pointing to the distinction between individual and group violence, the advent of weaponry, the role of cognition and the role of violence in subjugation. His narration culminates in the observation that:
Under primitive conditions, it is superior force—brute violence, or violence backed by arms— that lords it everywhere. We know that in the course of evolution this state of things was modified, a path was traced that led away from violence to law. But what was this path? Surely it issued from a single verity: that the superiority of one strong man can be overborne by an alliance of many weaklings, that l'union fait la force. Brute force is overcome by union; the allied might of scattered units makes good its right against the isolated giant.
Thus we may define "right" (i.e., law) as the might of a community. Yet it, too, is nothing else than violence, quick to attack whatever individual stands in its path, and it employs the selfsame methods, follows like ends, with but one difference: it is the communal, not individual, violence that has its way.
From this observation Freud motivates a distinction between the state of “crude violence” of prehistoric man and “the reign of law” strived for by modern man. The distinction, he argues, rests on “a certain psychological condition” which has to be named, namely:
The union of the majority must be stable and enduring.
If its sole raison d'etre be the discomfiture of some overweening individual and, after his downfall, it be dissolved, it leads to nothing. Some other man, trusting to his superior power, will seek to reinstate the rule of violence, and the cycle will repeat itself unendingly. Thus the union of the people must be permanent and well organized; it must enact rules to meet the risk of possible revolts; must set up machinery insuring that its rules—the laws—are observed and that such acts of violence as the laws demand are duly carried out. This recognition of a community of interests engenders among the members of the group a sentiment of unity and fraternal solidarity which constitutes its real strength.
As Freud later summarizes, “All the rest is mere tautology and glosses”. The key to suppressing brute force (i.e. warfare) rests on the “transfer of power to a larger combination, founded on the community of sentiments linking up its members”.
Freud at his Freudiest
Freud goes into some detail in addressing Einstein’s second inquiry, regarding the role of human nature as an antecedent to warfare. As he writes, “you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction […] I entirely agree with you”. In a way only Freud is permitted, he next declares (unfounded?) assumptions about categories of human instincts (“those that conserve and unify”), symbolized by the mythological Greek god of sex and love Eros and “the instincts to destroy and kill”, manifested by Thanatos to explain “recurring patterns of self-defeating and self-destructive behaviours”. From this, he derives postulates about love and hate, “those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within you providence”, which he deems to be “theoretical entities” (Leith, 2000). Indeed, the gist of Freud’s response comes down to his conjectures about men’s instict for self-preservation and of its “erotic nature”. There are however passages in Freud’s letter which are less galaxy-brained, such a when he supposes that:
..when a nation is summoned to engage in war, a whole gamut of human motives may respond to this appeal—high and low motives, some openly avowed, others slurred over. The lust for aggression and destruction is certainly included […] The stimulation of these destructive impulse by appeals to idealism […] naturally facilitate their release.
As he goes on to conclude, “there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies”, though:
In some happy corners of the earth, htey say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish race whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggresion or contraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk.
Aftermath
The Freud-Einstein correspondence was published the following year under the title Warum Krieg? (“Why War?”). Due to Hitler’s ascent to power early the same year, the two mens’ letters never achieved the wide circulation intended for them, only being printed in 2,000 copies in German and 2,000 copies in English.
Einstein was apparently pleased with Freud’s response, writing back on December 3rd 1932 that:
You have made a most gratifying gift to the League of Nations and myself with your truly classic reply. When I wrote you I was thoroughly convinced of the insignificance of my role, which was only meant to document my good will, with me as the bait on the hoof; to tempt the marvelous fish into nibbling. You have given in return something altogether magnificent. We cannot know what may grow from such seed, as the effect upon man of any action or event is always incalculable. This is not within our power and we do not need to worry about it.
You have earned my gratitude and the gratitude of all men for having devoted all your strength to the search for truth and for having shown the rarest courage in professing your convictions all your life. . . .
Sincerely, Albert Einstein
About two weeks later, Einstein left Germany for good. Freud would remain in Vienna until the Anschluss of 1938 before seeking exile in Hampstead, England following the arrest and interrogation of his oldest daughter Anna (b. 1895). He would only live to see 22 days of the Second World War (passing away to due to complications of his cancer of the jaw in September of 1939), and thus never came to witness the atrocioties of the Holocaust.
The Einstein-Freud Correspondence is available in full here:
https://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf
The two men’s correspondence was in 2017 recreated through a Kickstarter campaign.
Thank you for being a subscriber to the Privatdozent newsletter.
Sincerely,
Jørgen
Related Privatdozent Essays
Einstein’s Emigration to America (1932), January 6th 2022
The Einstein-Szilárd Letter (1939), June 7th 2021
When Einstein met Churchill (1933), November 5th 2021
When Wiener met Eintein (1925), April 20th 2021
When Heisenberg met Einstein, June 11th 2021
Cantor and Dedekind’s Early Correspondence (1873-74), June 28th 2021
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References
Bracher, K.D. 1970. The German Dictatorship*. Praeger Publishers.
Einstein, A., 2007. Einstein on politics: his private thoughts and public stands on nationalism, zionism, war, peace, and the bomb. Princeton University Press.
Freud’s letter to Einstein in German: https://www.psyalpha.net/de/literatur/volltexte/freud-sigmund-ausgewaehlte-schriften/freud-sigmund-1933b-1932-warum-krieg-brief-albert-einstein-september-1932
Gay, P. 2006. Freud: A Life in Our Time. Little Books.
Ghodsee, K.R., 2015. Einstein’s Pacifism: A Conversation with Wolfram Wette. Institute for Advanced Study Ideas. Available at: <https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2015/ghodsee-einstein-pacifism>. Accessed on February 12th 2024.
Leith M. 2000. Instinct and survival: an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud. CMAJ. 2000 Oct 31;163(9):1178–9. PMCID: PMC80257. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC80257/
Robinson, A. 2019. Einstein on the Run*. Yale University Press.
Strachey, J. 1965. "Why war?" In: The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol 22. London: Hogarth Press; 1964. p. 197-215. [Ref list]
The Einstein-Freud Correspondence (1931-1932) https://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf
as an aside: you might be interested in a book by David Cohen, "The Escape of Sigmund Freud: Freud's final years in Vienna and his flight from the Nazi rise"