Reflections on War and Death

by Sigmund Freud

"Reflections on War and Death" by Sigmund Freud is a set of twin essays written in 1915, six months after World War I began. Freud explores the profound disillusionment that accompanied the war's outbreak, examining how conflict exposed the fragility of European civilization and revealed humanity's primitive impulses beneath its civilized veneer. He argues that peacetime society had cultivated "cultural hypocrites" and dangerously shielded people from confronting death's inevitability, leaving them unprepared for the war's industrial-scale carnage.