Andy may believe that Koenigsburg's question is new and brave, but I think Koenigsburg's just trying to clear an academic niche using the wrong tools. Psychoanalytic writing about war and conflict is nothing new. Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Norman O. Brown, Karl Menninger, Colin Wilson, and Arthur Koestler have all tried to establish working theses about human destructiveness. Many have also studied the effect of group behavior on violence. Few prescriptions result from these studies: Koestler concluded that our warlike nature was the result of a wrong turn in evolution, one that put our neocortex under the control of our limbic system, and that we should all spend our lives on drugs designed to reroute our violent impulses. Fromm and Brown (in "Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" and "Love Against Death: the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History") have concluded that society should change so as to minimize the emergence of "necrophiliac personality types" or hinder the ascendancy of death-centered thinking. Koenigsburg comes late to this strand of humanist psychology and doesn't seem to have much to add to it except his name, a large mailing list, and his ambition. Plus he doesn't respond to objections from any of the groups he spams regardless of their qualifications. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html