The Psychology of War
I was at my local polling place for a recent New York election and the poll worker asked me for my address. She was already holding my voting address card so I knew the request was pro forma. But for some reason, perhaps as a joke, I responded: 32A the Broadway, Crouch End, London, N8, my birth home in London, England. Everyone laughed, and I said something to the effect that I was testing my memory, then provided my current address. But it was on my lips.
After voting I gave my voting form to another poll worker to run through the scanner. I had known the man for years, He was a Marine veteran, having served for forty years. I had one four-year hitch in the Navy. We always talked war. He focused on World War II and Korea. I talked about growing up in a bomb-damaged London and serving in an ammunition ship in the Gulf of Tonkin during Vietnam. He said he was very concerned about the future of the country. I said I’d see him at the next voting round. He winked and said, “If I’m not dead.” I touched him on the arm and said, “Semper Fi.”
That night I had a dream of a deceased brother, Desi, a veteran of the US Army and Marines. We were both sitting in the tiny kitchen in our north London flat at 32A The Broadway. We were looking at a rather large, towering and flowering hydrangea bush which seemed to overhang and threaten a solitary pink tulip. My brother said: “That hydrangea will devour the little one.”
On waking I recorded dream detail in my diary, noting that my mother, born in a garden-rich area of Kent, England, loved flowers. But why in my birth home where flowers were as rare as eggs and bacon? Why my brother’s presence, as I rarely dream about him, ten years after his death. My father was often a “devouring” presence in the household, buffeted by war and poverty, but why the flowers? Or am I projecting things about a very dark childhood, dreaming a beautiful flower that will devour the young and vulnerable? Or, as if frequently the case, will later dreams provide a fuller picture of the images and perhaps the psychology of the dream?
On another level, there is nothing unusual about a dream placing me in 32A The Broadway or in me regaling the poll workers with my Crouch End address. I have been living in that space, psychologically, for a couple of years, working on a novel, “When War Becomes Us,” a fictional version of my family’s involvement in war.
I have long been captivated and troubled by war. Some years after I left the Navy, I published my first book of poems, “That Kingdom Coming Business,” about the lure and the horror of the sea. A decade ago, I published “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” a novel about life aboard an ammunition ship with hundreds of tons of ordinance to be dropped on Vietnam, which served as a microcosm of the racial, social and anti-war tensions aboard ship and in the greater community.
It was my study of Carl Jung that got me interested more directly in the psychology of war. Jung led me to a “A Terrible Love of War,” by James Hillman, a psychologist and a student of Jung. Hillman opens his book with a reference to the movie “Patton,” in which the general walks through the field after a battle, observing the burnt tanks and dead men. After surveying the scene, he says: “I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”
Hillman argues that “We can never prevent war or speak sensibly of peace and disarmament unless we enter this love of war.” He suggests that, unless we shift our imaginations into a martial state of soul, “we cannot comprehend its pull.” He adds that the first principle of the psychological method is that a phenomenon must be sympathetically imagined. Hillman cites Robert McNamara, secretary of defense for much of the Vietnam War, who wrote that looking back, “we can now understand these catastrophes for what they were: essentially the products of a failure of imagination.”
In a similar vein, when comparing the surprise attack at 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 cites historian Barbara Tuchman in suggesting that a failure of imagination is another way of describing “persistence in error” that Tuchman writes led nations on “the march of folly” that she describes in her study of wars from Troy to Vietnam.
Hillman’s primary point is that “war demands a leap of imagination as extraordinary and fantastic as the phenomenon itself.” He finds company with “Giambattista Vico, who invented a ‘new science’ and revolted against unsatisfactory explanations of human affairs that rested on Newton’s and Descartes’ kind of thinking.” For Hillman, Vico thinks like a depth psychologist, with the basic layer of the mind being poetic, mythic, rich with archetypal patterns of the imagination. This is the path to fully understanding war.
I won’t detail the rest of Hillman’s book that continues on this psychological and archetypal path in fostering our understanding of war. I will add that Hillman also writes that “religion is war,” referring to Marcel Proust who wrote in 1915, “As people used to live in God, I live in the war.” For Hillman, “war replaces religion, becomes religion,” a force that gives us meaning, because war does what religion is supposed to do. A theology of God and the psychology of belief reinforce each other. Hillman asks: “When did our Christianized psyche become so belligerent?”
On a personal note, I think Hillman helped me move away from a clarion call of war, often bathed in religion, and trumpeted by my parents as well my own service during Vietnam. Our ship’s chaplain seemed very adept at martial prayers. I don’t remember Mars in the room but he never felt far away.
If Hillman is correct, my upcoming novel, “When War Becomes Us,” has been in germ for much of my life, as I moved from that literal, martial phase to a fuller, more archetypal view of war. Of course, distancing helped. My mother would rarely talk much about war and her four children from her first marriage — all psychologically or physically damaged by war — were not very talkative while our mother was alive.
“When War Becomes Us” is a dream-laced literary-novel, told largely from a female perspective, about how a century of wars is lived, recorded, remembered and passed down through generations. The book is about how memories are shaped, distorted and repressed. It’s also about a mother’s attempt to control the war narrative. The dozens of actual dreams contained in the novel provide a psychological screen through which to screen and experience the events.
The narrator Neil McGuire, born during the London Blitz and a Vietnam veteran, begins to reflect on his family’s war history after a brother-in-law, a US Army medic during the Battle of the Bulge, decades later commits suicide after revealing to Neil that “These women are killing me.”
Years later McGuire visits his sister Hilda, abandoned with siblings in a London orphanage after her father, a World War I veteran, dies from wounds suffered in the first Battle of the Somme in World War I, reveals that she was raped by nuns and a priest. She pleaded with McGuire to tell them everything about their past, weeks before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.
With Hilda’s entreaty to “Tell them everything,” Neil asks his surviving brother and two sisters to help him fulfill Hilda’s dying wish. They are aided by a heavy flow of letters, documents and other material found in a room in Hilda’s house called “Mum’s room,” a placed used by her mother when she visited and otherwise undisturbed for thirty years. The novel charts how the siblings remember, discover, and imagine stories of war, death, and survival from the Battle of the Somme to Hiroshima that had been lost, hidden or repressed. Before his death Neil’s brother Jack returns to Hiroshima in a vision seeking forgiveness and expiation for that horror.
‘When War Becomes Us” is a psychological novel in that it is comprised of more than sixty actual dreams experienced by the author and those shared by his family, members, particularly his older sister over the years. The dreams give the novel a symbolic and archetypal dimension, another window through which to view the trauma of war.
And in the language of James Hillman from his “A Terrible Love of War,” Mars is in full battle dress and the Christian psyche belligerent. The novel invites a “sympathetic imagination.”
Note: I expect “When War Becomes Us” to be published by the end of this year.
