Freud and his war. A socio-historical perspective from the awareness to the metaphor of “draining” the Zuider Zee (1910-1932)

In the preface of the The Age of Extremes: Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Eric Hobsbawm states: “For the poet T.S. Eliot ‘this is the way the world ends – not with a bang but a whimper’. The Short Twentieth century ended with both.” (1994, 24). In less than one hundred years, with an incredible and, at the same time, terrifying timing and ways, the Twentieth Century has experienced the best and the worst of the processes started in the previous centuries. The complex framework of international alliances built among the European great powers since the preceding decades steeply led to a so-called ‘periodizing event’, namely the Great War (Ibidem, 1994). Furthermore, the Twentieth Century welcomes the outcomes of the industrial revolution, the scientific progress, thanks to the implementation in the industrial sector of the technological discoveries and the affirmation of laissez-faire in most of the countries of the ‘Old Continent’. The demographic boom led the global population from one to six billion people in a century, followed by the rise in number and dimension of the main cities and a massive urbanization. In that period, new ideas related to the individual, as well as to the concept of ‘mass society’ – an entity that plays a main role in the Western countries both at political and social level, thanks to the recent and innovative tools for political participation, such as the universal suffrage – emerged (Appadurai 1990, Giddens 1990, Robertson 1992, Lash 1996, Beck 2000). The society resulting from these deep transformations has been mainly analysed by social scholars, such as Scipio Sighele (1891) and Gustave Le Bon (1895), sociologists as Max Weber (1922), Emile Durkheim (1897), Vilfredo Pareto (1916), Gabriel Tarde (1898), José Ortega y Gasset (1930) and writers such as Robert Musil (1930): they all studied the common behaviour of individuals as an act that crosses the sum of the single wills, as a collective experience of bodies and minds. The individual-centred approach does not disappear, but it changes and thus becomes collective. This research perspective - although originally urged by social changes to undertake a democratic direction - is progressively moving towards a homologated vision and at risk of ideological deviations, by giving up the individual freedom, weakening the individual accountability and thus considering the new collective entities available to irrational instincts. According to this idea, it was emerging in Europe even an intellectual and scientific interest for the ‘irrational’ path of individuals, a new way for conceiving the human being, its nature and its peculiarity, that stimulates different levels of reflection – sociological, philosophical, political, economic and psychological – that outlines a modus agendi including some impulsive, wild and primordial elements (Benda 1947). From a socio-historical point of view, this scenario stimulates the ruling classes to curb the new leading entities, potentially dangerous for the traditional balances, through the development of new monitoring tools aimed at influencing and affiliating the societies to the existing economic and political models (respectively capitalism and liberalism). The main objective is to manage and guide the consensus through the ‘mass nationalization’, as defined by George Mosse (1974). Some topics - like the irrationality of impulses, the identification in the cause, the reduction of morality, susceptibility, the faith in the ideal that claims the individuality and weakens the individual accountability (Canetti 1960, Rutigliano 1993) – follow one to another in the natural laboratory of conflict and raise the scholars’ interest that are defencelessly assisting – together with the rest of the world – to the ‘brutalization of politics’ due to the war. Given this context, with which Freud and the family are often in conflict, the theoretical framework of a sort of "collective perspective" of psychoanalysis proposed by him, faces a relevant transition.