The Psychology and Mythology of War
I had just finished a final draft of a war novel, “When War Becomes Us,” when Russia invaded Ukraine and turned the world map upside down. Russia has been accurately labeled a criminal, pariah nation and much of the West has shut Russia out. Ukraine has responded heroically and intelligently, but Russia will likely continue to lay waste to as much territory as it can reach. Vladimir Putin seems to have a “terrible love of war.”
I am neither a student of history nor a psychiatrist. However, I have studied Jungian psychology for about twenty-five years, and this work included a focus on the pathology of war. I’m especially drawn to “A Terrible Love of War” by psychologist James Hillman who pays particular attention to what is right in front of our faces: our fascination with war.
I served on an ammunition ship for three years during Vietnam and have a sense of what he is talking about. I was born during the Battle of Britain and later perhaps it was the V1 and V 2 rockets that turned my left eye in its socket. My first book of poetry, “That Kingdom Coming Business,” explored some of these martial themes.
Hillman begins his book with a reference to the movie, “Patton.” “One sentence in one scene from one film, ‘Patton,’ sums up what this book tries to understand. The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burnt tanks, dead men. He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc, and says, ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.’”
Hillman argues that war is a matter for psychology because lives are at stake and all of us are threatened with thermonuclear rage, including at this moment when Putin has put nuclear weapons on the table, a tactic to keep America out of the war in Ukraine. The author also suggests “War is first of all a psychological task because philosophy and theology, the specialties supposed to do the heavy lifting for our species, have neglected war’s overriding importance.”
He adds: “We think in warlike terms, feel ourselves at war with ourselves, and unknowingly believe predation, territorial defense, conquest, and the interminable battle of opposing forces are the ground rules of existence.”
Hillman suggests that since the other disciplines don’t address “the higher mind’s central contemplation,” war tends to be examined by historians, think tanks and journalists where the chaos of battle too often become “scenarios,” bloodshed becomes “body counts,” and bombs become “smart.”
The author cites Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during much of the Vietnam War, who attributed the “catastrophes” in Vietnam as a “failure of imagination.” When comparing the surprise of Pearl Harbor with that of the Twin Towers, the director of the National Security agency, Michael Hayden, said, “perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last.”
Hillman refers to Barbara Tuchman, who has studied wars from Troy to Vietnam and who suggests that an “unimaginative mindset” of “political and bureaucratic life that subdues the functioning intellect in favor of ‘working the levers” ignores the psychological and philosophical implications. The last piece of wisdom was courtesy of Carl von Clausewitz, a master of war theory.
Hillman moves to Tolstoy who mocked in his postscript to “War and Peace” the idea of finding the root cause of war. “Why did millions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it was clear to each of them that this could not benefit any of them, but would be worse for them all. Why did they do it? Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in one purpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserves to be called the cause.”
Hillman adds that “for Tolstoy war was governed by something like a collective force beyond individual human will.” And this is the essential nature of Hillman’s task, to imagine the nature of this collective force. In this framing the imagination becomes the method of choice and “sympathetic psychologizing learned in a century of consulting rooms takes precedent over the outdates privileges of scientific objectivity.”
The author seems somewhat apologetic about this stance but has a library of support at his fingertips. He reveals his bafflement in his psychological practice between the science of the moment and the vast array of psychological inputs. His words: “Later on, I learned that the division that baffled me in practice — explaining and the method of science on the one hand and, on the other, understanding and the approach of psychology — had already been made clear by German thinkers from Nietzsche” on. The author seems particularly focused on the “Neapolitan genius, Giambattista Vico who invented a ‘new science’ in revolt against unsatisfactory explanations of human affairs” associated with Newton and Descartes.
To Hillman, Vico is more like him, a depth psychologist who, like Freud, attempted to get below the surface layers of events. Causal reasons come late in the game. For Vico, “The basic layer of the mind is poetic, mythic, expressed by ‘universali fantastici,’ which I translate as archetypal patterns of imagination.” Vico’s interest was in the “recurring themes, the everlasting, ubiquitous, emotional, unavoidable patterns and forces that play through any human life and human society, the forces we must bow to and are best generalized as archetypal. …War is one of those timeless forces.”
Hillman explains that archetypal patterns of imagination embrace both rational and irrational events. He suggests war and art, both timeless themes of human existence, are given meaning by myths or what Hillman refers to as the “norms of the unreasonable.” He considers this the greatest achievement of the Greek mind through its tragic dramas about the psychology of war. Therefore, to understand war we have to get at the myths where we find fortune, accidents, unpredictability, and intervention by the ravaging gods. As Hillman writes, “at that point a leap of imagination is called for, a leap into myth.” And the god of war — whether Mars, Ares, Indra, or Thor — is a “divinity who rages, strikes death, stirs panic, driving individual humans mad and collective societies blind.”
The author argues that war remains in the landscape and in the human psyche long after the soldiers have left the battlefield. General Patton trained his tank crews in the Mojave Desert in 1940. Tank tracks are still visible in the desert and could take hundreds of years to heal. Likewise, Vietnam could take a century to heal from the millions of gallons of Agent Orange dumped on its forests. My Navy ship transported some of this incendiary weaponry there. Unexploded ordnance still resides underground in most of the world’s battle zones. The soul and the soil never heal.
Hillman could be talking about the current Russian invasion of Ukraine when he quotes General Sherman’s words: “War is cruelty, and we cannot refine it.” Before the Japanese left Manila in March 1945, they slaughtered some “sixty-thousand Filipinos, including babies, young children, old women and hospital patients.” The author adds that cruelty has no national boundaries. Body parts from Japanese war dead became trophies for American troops. Gold teeth, hands and skulls were collector’s items sent home to loved ones as gifts. “War turns humans into parts, spare parts.”
The author notes that in battle, a deadening comes before an actual death. He quotes the language infantrymen use to talk about the death of their comrades: “Fuck it. They’re dead. No big fucking deal. Move on. — — — -’s dead.”
Hillman suggests that the language of this exchange is not incidental. “The martial concatenation of sex and anger, together with frustration and helplessness, terror and grief, explodes into furious yet apathetic violence especially vented onto women. Rape accompanies war and follows in its path, even though rapes are not recorded in the statistics.”
The psychologist suggests war’s inhuman potential can be grouped into three main kinds. “First, disfiguring the human frame, whether maiming the body, crippling the soul, or shattering the structure of human civilization.” Second, deranged human behavior on the part of the combatants. Third, the use of inhuman weaponry.
We are seeing all these examples of war’s inhuman potential in Ukraine at this moment. It will likely get worse. We have seen it throughout recorded history. Hillman adds as a proviso a fourth consideration: war’s mysterious power called uncontrollable autonomy. “The fantasy of war spreads across continents, into star wars, cyberspace. The horizon recedes into the next field of operation.” A new crusade follows the last. And this is the current fear in Europe.
Hillman’s account is psychological and historical. It is not about morality, per se. He apparently had little patience with religion, including a chapter in this book titled, “Religion Is War.” He writes that “The role of religion in providing the motivating trigger for war is not in their religion, but in literal monotheistic religions as such, anywhere.” For the author the key to this trigger is the militant belief in monotheism.
He adds: “You may be a Jew or Muslim, pay tribute to your god in Santeria fashion, join with other Wiccas, but whatever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits.”
In a sidebar he wonders how and when the Christian psyche became so belligerent and starts with Constantine and the Battle of Milvian Bridge in AD 313 under the proper cover of the Christian cross and others symbols. The God marks would long hold and were honed in the faith down through Martin Luther to the present day.
Hillman finds some help and hope in classic texts like “The Hymn to Ares,” the god of war, attributed to Homer, in which there are suggestions of ways to cure wars. While the poem suggests honoring the phenomenon, war, it also emphasizes attention to civilization, its history, culture, and frailty. Ares also defends the others gods in the pantheon, suggesting an archetypal tolerance of polytheism. And perhaps most important, Ares cautions about the rush into war.
The author seems to asks at the conclusion of his book, in the words of the poet Auden, for “new styles of architecture, a change of heart.” Since “all haste comes from the devil,” he wants us to slow down our eagerness for war. He asks why is Christianity, “which entered the world as a religion of love and has distinguished itself from other world religions by the message of love in its founder and its apostles and exemplified in its martyrs and saints, is also so martial.”
Hillman has many other suggestions for slowing down, reigning in, and restraining the gods of war. Or, at the very least, ways to give Venus a seat at the table, perhaps restraining war by aesthetic passion, “which does not mean mere protection of cathedrals and libraries. Coventry, Louvain, Cologne, Leipzig, Monte Cassino, Bamian, Hue were ruined after due decision. No, not the shield of aesthetic value, but the fury of aesthetic engagement.” The main ingredients are temperance, slowness and restraint.
Hillman died more than a decade ago and did not really have occasion to reflect on the effects of the Internet, social media and mobile phones in “hastening” the coverage and reporting of war and the response. Perhaps technology gave quick birth to the diminutive, archetypal war god who now sits at some long, lonely desk in some dungeon in Russia, full of archaic bluster, and finger on the trigger. The carnage is no less severe, even as the world is seeing and listening to the horror in real time.
“A Terrible Love of War” is a fitting read for the moment when Russia is brutalizing the Ukraine in a manner perfectly despicable and predictable. Perhaps this time there is hope that the archetype Putin embraced will swallow him because his mechanistic spiritless vision of Ukrainians makes him incapable of seeing their myth, their warrior spirit, and their soul that is on display daily on all of our platforms.
Ukraine seems to understand the psychology and mythology of war very well.
