Text: Page 75

Although Freud died before the atomic bombs fell on Japan, the atomic bomb symbolizes Freud’s nihilistic view and his twentieth-century concern about the destructive unconscious forces in modern civilization. On August 6, 1946, an American B-29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed 80,000 civilians and 90 percent of the population of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second B-29 bomber dropped another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, immediately killing 40,000 civilians. Humanity now had the capacity for total annihilation. The reality is that the nuclear threat remains. For Freud the way to avoid the horrific reality of nuclear war is to become conscious of the aggressive and violent impulses that reside in the unconscious. Otherwise, those impulses will imperil the future of human existence.