by Richard A. Koenigsberg

Beneath the sound, fury, and grandiosity of war lies profound psychopathology, this willingness to kill, die and maim in the name of nations. Historical accounts deny psychopathology by depicting war as a normal, even natural human activity. The First World War is the clearest case of warfare as severe pathology. Nations of the world continued to send men to die, day after day, month after month, year after year, producing a quantity of casualties so mind-boggling that even today people are unable to come to terms with what occurred.

Perpetuation of warfare requires a denial of what happens to the body of the soldier. Delusions of honor and glory are sustained by turning away from the results of battle. Haig’s son reported that the British Commander-in-Chief felt that it was his duty to “refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill” (in Gilbert, 1994, 221). The French Commander Joffre—after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier—said to his Staff: “I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack” (221).

War is about the mutilation of the body of the soldier in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideals, but don’t want to look at bodies of soldiers. 

The idea of omnipotent bodies politic is a dream that people experience while they are awake. Nations constitute a shared fantasy of immortality. This seems at times a benign, beautiful dream, the fantasy of oneness with a beloved country. However, the dream transmogrifies into a nightmare at the moment when people doubt the omnipotence of their nation.

Wars come into being to demonstrate—test the proposition—that one’s nation is all-powerful. Nations manifest power by virtue of their capacity to kill and bring about death. As people “die for the country,” we are persuaded that nations are real.

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