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8 Ladies and Gentlemen, - Allow me in conclusion to sum up what I had to say of the relation of psycho-analysis to the question of a Weltanschauung. Psycho-analysis, in my opinion, is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own. It does not need one; it is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung. This, however, scarcely deserves such a grandiloquent title, for it is not all-comprehensive, it is too incomplete and makes no claim to being self-contained and to the construction of systems. Scientific thought is still very young among human beings; there are too many of the great problems which it has not yet been able to solve. A Weltanschauung erected upon science has, apart from its emphasis on the real external world, mainly negative traits, such as submission to the truth and rejection of illusions. Any of our fellow-men who is dissatisfied with this state of things, who calls for more than this for his momentary consolation, may look for it where he can find it. We shall not grudge it him, we cannot help him, but nor can we on his account think differently.

THE ACQUISITION AND CONTROL OF FIRE (1932)

In a footnote to my Civilization and its Discontents I mentioned - though only incidentally - a conjecture which could be formed on the basis of psycho-analytic material, about primal man’s acquisition of control over fire. I am led to take up this theme again by Albrecht Schaeffer’s contradiction (1930) and by Erlenmeyer’s striking reference in the preceding paper to the Mongolian law against ‘pissing on ashes’.¹

For I think my hypothesis - that, in order to gain control over fire, men had to renounce the homosexually-tinged desire to put it out with a stream of urine - can be confirmed by an interpretation of the Greek myth of Prometheus, provided that we bear in mind the distortions which must be expected to occur in the transition from facts to the contents of a myth. These distortions are of the same sort as, and no worse than, those which we acknowledge every day, when we reconstruct from patients’ dreams the repressed but extremely important experiences of their childhood. The mechanisms employed in the distortions I have in mind are symbolic representation and turning into the opposite. I should not venture to explain all the features of our myth in this fashion; apart from the original set of facts, other and later occurrences may have contributed to its content. But the elements which admit of analytic interpretation are, after all, the most striking and important - viz. the manner in which Prometheus transported the fire, the character of his act (an outrage, a theft, a defrauding of the gods) and the meaning of his punishment.

¹ This refers no doubt to hot ashes, from which fire can still be obtained, and not to ashes which are quite extinct. - The objection raised by Lorenz (1931) is based on the assumption that man’s subjugation of fire only began when he discovered that he could produce it at will by some sort of manipulation. As against this, Dr. J. Hárnik refers me to a remark made by Dr. Richard Lasch (in Georg Buschan’s compilation Illustrierte Völkerkunde, 1922, 1, 24), who writes: ‘Presumably the art of conserving fire was understood long before that of kindling it; we have evidence of this in the fact that, although the present-day pygmy-like aborigines of the Andamans possess and conserve fire, they have no indigenous method of kindling it.’

The myth tells us that Prometheus the Titan, a culture-hero who was still a god¹ and who was perhaps originally himself a demiurge and a creator of men, brought fire to men, having stolen it from the gods, hidden in a hollow stick, a fennel-stalk. If we were interpreting a dream we should be inclined to regard such an object as a penis symbol, although the unusual stress laid on its hollowness might make us hesitate. But how can we bring this penis-tube into connection with the preservation of fire? There seems little chance of doing this, till we remember the procedure of reversal, of turning into the opposite, of inverting relationships, which is so common in dreams and which so often conceals their meaning from us. What a man harbours in his penis-tube is not fire. On the contrary, it is the means of quenching fire; it is the water of his stream of urine. This relationship between fire and water then connects up with a wealth of familiar analytic material.

Secondly, the acquisition of fire was a crime; it was accomplished by robbery or theft. This is a constant feature in all the legends about the acquiring of control over fire. It is found among the most different and widely separated peoples and not merely in the Greek myth of Prometheus the Bringer of Fire. Here, then, must be the essential content of mankind’s distorted recollection. But why is the acquisition of fire inseparably connected with the idea of a crime? Who is it that was injured or defrauded by it? The Promethean myth in Hesiod gives us a straight answer; for, in another story, not itself directly connected with fire, Prometheus so arranged the sacrifices to the gods as to give men the advantage over Zeus. It is the gods, then, who were defrauded. We know that in myths the gods are granted the satisfaction of all the desires which human creatures have to renounce, as we have learnt from the case of incest. Speaking in analytic terms, we should say that instinctual life - the id - is the god who is defrauded when the quenching of fire is renounced: in the legend, a human desire is transformed into a divine privilege. But in the legend the deity possesses nothing of the characteristics of a super-ego, he is still the representative of the paramount life of the instincts.

¹ Heracles, at a later time, was a demi-god, and Theseus wholly human.3

Transformation into the opposite is most radically present in a third feature of the legend, in the punishment of the Bringer of Fire. Prometheus was chained to a rock, and every day a vulture fed on his liver. In the fire-legends of other peoples, too, a bird plays a part, and it must have something to do with the matter; but for the moment I shall not attempt an interpretation. On the other hand, we feel on firm ground when it comes to explaining why the liver was selected as the location of the punishment. In ancient times the liver was regarded as the seat of all passions and desires; hence a punishment like that of Prometheus was the right one for a criminal driven by instinct, who had committed an offence at the prompting of evil desires. But the exact opposite is true of the Bringer of Fire: he had renounced an instinct and had shown how beneficent, and at the same time how indispensable, such a renunciation was for the purposes of civilization. And why should the legend treat a deed that was thus a benefit to civilization as a crime deserving punishment? Well, if, through all its distortions, it barely allows us to get a glimpse of the fact that the acquisition of control over fire presupposes an instinctual renunciation, at least it makes no secret of the resentment which the culture-hero could not fail to arouse in men driven by their instincts. And this is in accordance with what we know and expect. We know that a demand for a renunciation of instinct, and the enforcement of that demand, call out hostility and aggressiveness, which is only transformed into a sense of guilt in a later phase of psychical development.

The obscurity of the Prometheus legend, as of other fire myths, is increased by the fact that primitive man was bound to regard fire as something analogous to the passion of love - or, as we should say, as a symbol of the libido. The warmth that is radiated by fire calls up the same sensation that accompanies a state of sexual excitation, and the shape and movements of a flame suggest a phallus in activity. There can be no doubt about the mythological significance of flame as a phallus; we have further evidence of it in the legend of the parentage of Servius Tullius, the Roman king. When we ourselves speak of the ‘devouring fire’ of love and of ‘licking’ flames - thus comparing the flame to a tongue - we have not moved so very far away from the mode of thinking of our primitive ancestors. One of the presuppositions on which we based our account of the myth of the acquisition of fire was, indeed, that to primal man the attempt to quench fire with his own water had the meaning of a pleasurable struggle with another phallus.

It may thus well be that, by way of this symbolic analogy, other elements, of a purely imaginative sort, have made their may into the myth and become interwoven with its historical elements. It is difficult to resist the notion that, if the liver is the seat of passion, its significance, symbolically, is the same as that of fire itself; and that, if this is so, its being daily consumed and renewed gives an apt picture of the behaviour of the erotic desires, which, though daily satisfied, are daily revived. The bird which sates itself on the liver would then have the meaning of a penis - a meaning which is not strange to it in other connections, as we know from legends, dreams, linguistic usage and plastic representations in ancient times. A short step further brings us to the phoenix, the bird which, as often as it is consumed by fire, emerges rejuvenated once more, and which probably bore the significance of a penis revivified after its collapse rather than, and earlier than, that of the sun setting in the glow of evening and afterwards rising once again.

The question may be asked whether we may attribute to the mythopoeic activity an attempt to give (in play, as it were) a disguised representation to universally familiar, though also extremely interesting, mental processes that are accompanied by physical manifestations, with no motive other than the sheer pleasure of representation. We can certainly give no decided answer to this question without having fully grasped the nature of myths; but in the two instances before us, it is easy to recognize the same content and, with it, a definite purpose. Each describes the revival of libidinal desires after they have been quenched through being sated. That is to say, each brings out the indestructibility of those desires; and this emphasis is particularly appropriate as a consolation where the historical core of the myth deals with a defeat of instinctual life, with a renunciation of instinct that has become necessary. It is, as it were, the second part of primal man’s understandable reaction when he has suffered a blow in his instinctual life: after the punishment of the offender comes the assurance that after all at bottom he has done no damage.

A reversal into the opposite is unexpectedly found in another myth which in appearance has very little to do with the fire myth. The Lernaean hydra with its countless flickering serpent’s heads - one of which was immortal - was, as its name tells us, a water-dragon. Heracles, the culture-hero, fought it by cutting off its heads; but they always grew again, and it was only after he had burnt up the immortal head with fire that he overcame the monster. A water-dragon subdued by fire - that surely makes no sense. But, as in so many dreams, sense emerges if we reverse the manifest content. In that case the hydra is a brand of fire and the flickering serpent’s heads are the flames; and these, in proof of their libidinal nature, once more display, like Prometheus’s liver, the phenomenon of re-growth, of renewal after attempted destruction. Heracles, then, extinguishes this brand of fire with - water. (The immortal head is no doubt the phallus itself, and its destruction signifies castration.) But Heracles was also the deliverer of Prometheus and slew the bird which devoured his liver. Should we not suspect a deeper connection between the two myths? It is as though the deed of the one hero was made up for by the other. Prometheus (like the Mongolian law) had forbidden the quenching of fire; Heracles permitted it in the case in which the brand of fire threatened disaster. The second myth seems to correspond to the reaction of a later epoch of civilization to the events of the acquisition of power over fire. It looks as though this line of approach might take us quite a distance into the secrets of the myth; but admittedly we should carry a feeling of certainty with us only a short way.

In the antithesis between fire and water, which dominates the entire field of these myths, yet a third factor can be demonstrated in addition to the historical factor and the factor of symbolic phantasy. This is a physiological fact, which the poet Heine describes in the following lines:-

Was dem Menschen dient zum Seichen

Damit schafft er Seinesgleichen.

The sexual organ of the male has two functions; and there are those to whom this association is an annoyance. It serves for the evacuation of the bladder, and it carries out the act of love which sets the craving of the genital libido at rest. The child still believes that he can unite the two functions. According to a theory of his, babies are made by the man urinating into the woman’s body. But the adult knows that in reality the acts are mutually incompatible - as incompatible as fire and water. When the penis is in the state of excitation which led to its comparison with a bird, and while the sensations are being experienced which suggest the warmth of fire, urination is impossible; and conversely, when the organ is serving to evacuate urine (the water of the body) all its connections with the genital function seem to be quenched. The antithesis between the two functions might lead us to say that man quenches his own fire with his own water. And primal man, who had to understand the external world by the help of his own bodily sensations and states, would surely not have failed to notice and utilize the analogies pointed out to him by the behaviour of fire.

WHY WAR? (1933) (EINSTEIN AND FREUD)

Caputh near Potsdam, 30th July, 1932

Dear Professor 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? 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.

I believe, moreover, that those whose duty it is to tackle the problem professionally and practically are growing only too aware of their impotence to deal with it, and have now a very lively desire to learn the views of men who, absorbed in the pursuit of science, can see world-problems in the perspective distance lends. As for me, the normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. Thus, in the enquiry now proposed, I can do little more than 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.

As one immune from nationalist bias, I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial (i.e. administrative) aspect of the problem: 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 accepts its judgements unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact with which we have to reckon; law and might inevitably go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) in so far as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal. But at present we are far from possessing any supranational organization competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the execution of its verdicts. Thus I am led to my first axiom: 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.

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 paralyse these efforts. Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have specially in mind that 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 interests and enlarge their personal authority.

But recognition of this obvious fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: 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? (In speaking of the majority, I do not exclude soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of their race, and that attack is often the best method of defence.) An obvious answer to this question would seem to be that the minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.

Yet even this answer does not provide a complete solution. Another question arises from it: How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.

And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘Intelligentzia’ 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.

To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible.

I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.

Yours very sincerely, A. EINSTEIN.2

Vienna, September, 1932.

Dear Professor Einstein,

When I heard that you intended to invite me to an exchange of views on some subject that interested you and that seemed to deserve the interest of others besides yourself, I readily agreed. I expected you to choose a problem on the frontiers of what is knowable to-day, a problem to which each of us, a physicist and a psychologist, might have our own particular angle of approach and where we might come together from different directions upon the same ground. You have taken me by surprise, however, by posing the question of what can be done to protect mankind from the curse of war. I was scared at first by the thought of my - I had almost written ‘our’ - incapacity for dealing with what seemed to be a practical problem, a concern for statesmen. But I then realized that you had raised the question not as a natural scientist and physicist but as a philanthropist: you were following the promptings of the League of Nations just as Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer, took on the work of bringing help to the starving and homeless victims of the World War. I reflected, moreover, that I was not being asked to make practical proposals but only to set out the problem of avoiding war as it appears to a psychological observer. Here again you yourself have said almost all there is to say on the subject. But though you have taken the wind out of my sails I shall be glad to follow in your wake and content myself with confirming all you have said by amplifying it to the best of my knowledge - or conjecture.

3 You begin with the relation between Right and Might. There can be no doubt that that is the correct starting-point for our investigation. But may I replace the word ‘might’ by the balder and harsher word ‘violence’? To-day right and violence appear to us as antitheses. It can easily be shown, however, that the one has developed out of the other; and, if we go back to the earliest beginnings and see how that first came about, the problem is easily solved. You must forgive me if in what follows I go over familiar and commonly accepted ground as though it were new, but the thread of my argument requires it.

It is a general principle, then, that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men have no business to exclude themselves. In the case of men, no doubt, conflicts of opinion occur as well which may reach the highest pitch of abstraction and which seem to demand some other technique for their settlement. That, however, is a later complication. To begin with, in a small human horde, it was superior muscular strength which decided who owned things or whose will should prevail. Muscular strength was soon supplemented and replaced by the use of tools: the winner was the one who had the better weapons or who used them the more skilfully. From the moment at which weapons were introduced, intellectual superiority already began to replace brute muscular strength; but the final purpose of the fight remained the same - one side or the other was to be compelled to abandon his claim or his objection by the damage inflicted on him and by the crippling of his strength. That purpose was most completely achieved if the victor’s violence eliminated his opponent permanently - that is to say, killed him. This had two advantages: he could not renew his opposition and his fate deterred others from following his example. In addition to this, killing an enemy satisfied an instinctual inclination which I shall have to mention later. The intention to kill might be countered by a reflection that the enemy could be employed in performing useful services if he were left alive in an intimidated condition. In that case the victor’s violence was content with subjugating him instead of killing him. This was a first beginning of the idea of sparing an enemy’s life, but thereafter the victor had to reckon with his defeated opponent’s lurking thirst for revenge and sacrificed some of his own security.

Such, then, was the original state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might - domination by brute violence or by violence supported by intellect. As we know, this régime was altered in the course of evolution. There was a path that led from violence to right or law. What was that path? It is my belief that there was only one: the path which led by way of the fact that the superior strength of a single individual could be rivalled by the union of several weak ones. ‘L’union fait la force.’ Violence could be broken by union, and the power of those who were united now represented law in contrast to the violence of the single individual. Thus we see that right is the might of a community. It is still violence, ready to be directed against any individual who resists it; it works by the same methods and follows the same purposes. The only real difference lies in the fact that what prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community. But in order that the transition from violence to this new right or justice may be effected, one psychological condition must be fulfilled. The union of the majority must be a stable and lasting one. If it were only brought about for the purpose of combating a single dominant individual and were dissolved after his defeat, nothing would have been accomplished. The next person who thought himself superior in strength would once more seek to set up a dominion by violence and the game would be repeated ad infinitum. The community must be maintained permanently, must be organized, must draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of rebellion and must institute authorities to see that those regulations - the laws - are respected and to superintend the execution of legal acts of violence. The recognition of a community of interests such as these leads to the growth of emotional ties between the members of a united group of people - communal feelings which are the true source of its strength.

Here, I believe, we already have all the essentials: violence overcome by the transference of power to a larger unity, which is held together by emotional ties between its members. What remains to be said is no more than an expansion and a repetition of this.5

The situation is simple so long as the community consists only of a number of equally strong individuals. The laws of such an association will determine the extent to which, if the security of communal life is to be guaranteed, each individual must surrender his personal liberty to turn his strength to violent uses. But a state of rest of that kind is only theoretically conceivable. In actuality the position is complicated by the fact that from its very beginning the community comprises elements of unequal strength - men and women, parents and children - and soon, as a result of war and conquest, it also comes to include victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and slaves. The justice of the community then becomes an expression of the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it; the laws are made by and for the ruling members and find little room for the rights of those in subjection. From that time forward there are two factors at work in the community which are sources of unrest over matters of law but tend at the same time to a further growth of law. First, attempts are made by certain of the rulers to set themselves above the prohibitions which apply to everyone - they seek, that is, to go back from a dominion of law to a dominion of violence. Secondly, the oppressed members of the group make constant efforts to obtain more power and to have any changes that are brought about in that direction recognized in the laws - they press forward, that is, from unequal justice to equal justice for all. This second tendency becomes especially important if a real shift of power occurs within a community, as may happen as a result of a number of historical factors. In that case right may gradually adapt itself to the new distribution of power; or, as is more frequent, the ruling class is unwilling to recognize the change, and rebellion and civil war follow, with a temporary suspension of law and new attempts at a solution by violence, ending in the establishment of a fresh rule of law. There is yet another source from which modifications of law may arise, and one of which the expression is invariably peaceful: it lies in the cultural transformation of the members of the community. This, however, belongs properly in another connection and must be considered later.

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