Publications
"Human beings are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing
for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that
a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part
of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbour is
to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation
to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity
for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent,
to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture
and to kill him. Homo homini lupus; who has the courage
to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?
This aggressive cruelty usually lies in wait for some provocation, or
else it steps into the service of some other purpose, the aim of which
might as well have been achieved by milder measures. In circumstances
that favour it, when those forces in the mind which ordinarily inhibit
it cease to operate, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals
men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own kind is
alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities of the early migrations,
of the invasion by the Huns or by the so-called Mongols under Jenghiz
Khan and Tamurlane, of the sack of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, even
indeed the horrors of the last world-war, will have to bow his head humbly
before the truth of this view of man."
'Civilization
and its discontents' by
Sigmund Freud
[Photo: Sigmund Freud writing at his desk in Bergasse 19, Wien, Austria, circa 1936, before the invasion by the dictatorship of the National Socialist Party of "Leader" Adolf Hitler, which forced Freud to take refuge in the United Kingdom, greatly helped by Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece and Danmark and by the British Monarchy.
Why War?
The
correspondance between Albert
Einstein and Sigmund
Freud on War (1931-32)
"...Thus, under primitive conditions, it is superior force --brute violence, or violence backed by arms-- that rules 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. Union overcomes brute force; 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. But, for the transition from crude violence to the reign of law, a certain psychological condition must first be obtained. ..."
Two unread genius in a prophetic reflexion of great actuality, which is
also at the basis of the actual organization of United Nations (UN)
Available to read here
if you want to understand this enduring problem of our Humanity.
The Borromean knot or rings
According to Jacques Lacan, the Borromean knot or rings is a geometrical
figure apte to represent the interplay of three factors: the R(eal)
+ S(ymbolic) + I(maginary). This topological
figure was employed by theologians since the XIII (when Can Mossenya was
born) to represent the Divine Trinity and joins the pre-Socratic philosophers
who realized that was the Mind who has the daunting task of making meaning
(or order) out of the original Chaos. This philosophical thinking has laid
the foundation of Christianity, with the Christ equating the Logos, the
divine Light of the human spirit and indeed, of all ancient and contemporary
scientific discourses or fields of knowledge.
The Möbius band
This geometrical figure is another one also made
famous by Lacan to represent the dialectic nature of the human mind,
tear as it is between unconscious forces and the governing censorship of
the conscious, which the pre-Hellenic myths of Crete represented in the
double nature of Asterion, a human-beast, as an appropriate metaphor indicating
the conflictual nature of all human beings.
Thus the geometrical expression of our Asterion nature is the Möbius
strip; and has inspired the logo created for us by artist and webdesigner
David Guest
