Freud had no reason to delude himself about human nature. Three of his children took part in World War I, in which he lost a nephew. He escaped the Nazi persecution that preceded World War II only through the work and grace of Marie Bonaparte, Princess of Greece and psychoanalyst.
He felt firsthand the collapse of the Enlightenment’s claim to civilization, which projected the horrors of humanity onto others: essentially onto the original peoples who were to be colonized on the grounds that they were savages. However, as wars broke out between European brothers, Eurocentric rhetoric became more difficult to sustain. As you know, pepper is eye candy in the eyes of others. The colonial brainwashing is so persistent that there are still people who are appalled by the war in Ukraine as if warlike conflicts were something from the Global South.
Freud went further, to the dismay of the optimists on duty, saying that the malaise in culture was the result of the civilizing process itself. The demand to give up some of our instinctual gratifications always takes its toll. Their fault, on the other hand, is barbarism. Bad with, worse without. It is left to us to discover how each era’s malaise presents itself in order to find the best ways to counter it.
But humanity is also capable of marvels of creation that fire our imaginations and empower our spirits. Goethe, Shakespeare and Cervantes were role models who inspired Freud in his search for values in debilitated humanity.
The great creators of humanity have a desire to learn, problem solve, create and receive due credit, which leads them into a cycle of fear and contentment. Discovery, social recognition, and power—financial and political—are so seductive that they overshadow interest in the consequences. If something spectacular can be created, why should we care about the effects of creation, wouldn’t glory justify it all?
I have more than once treated descendants of the victims of the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I heard reports of the suffering and mental illness of family members of survivors, parents and grandparents who as children had to watch neighbors die on their doorstep without being able to help them. They also inherited a significant risk of developing cancer from radiation. It is a generation that has harnessed the splendor of our intellectual and imaginative abilities to create the greatest expression of human violence yet. Like Primo Levi, who tried in vain to communicate the dehumanization machinery created by the Nazis, these victims seek to name the unnamable of the experience of the anonymous and programmatic annihilation of one human being by another.
What else can be said about such a tragedy, which celebrates its 78th birthday on August 6th?
The film “Oppenheimer” about the father of the atomic bomb attempts an approach. Actor Cillian Murphy masterfully sustains a character in which genius, loyalty to his family, and an inability to put himself in the shoes of the victims of his creation coexist until it’s too late and perhaps not then, given the psychotic potential. Of course, the author of the bomb is not alone. Such an undertaking is always a collective and gigantic action, just like slavery and the Holocaust. Christopher Nolan, director of this masterpiece, does not grant the viewer the right to catharsis and makes him experience a deep sadness that accompanies him during and after the session. As in the best works, this sadness does not come without fear and reflection.
A mustsee for anyone who insists on seeing science as a lucrative toy whose consequences are blatantly neglected.