On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia

Written against a backdrop of brutal conflict and rising racism across Europe, these works explore the underlying forces of modern neuroses and war. In Totem and Taboo, Freud describes similarities between tribal rites and the obsessive behaviour of neurotics. Timely Reflections on War and Death outlines the way in which war strips away the veneer of civilization to reveal the savagery beneath, while Mourning and Melancholia considers man's ambivalent attitude to death. And Why War , Freud's letter to Einstein, responds to what he perceived to be the physicist's naive pacifism and offers a profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive portrait of human nature.

Written against a background of war and racism, this work sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide.