Avner’s Website

The third decade of the twenty-first century of the Christian Era is not the first time in recorded human history people have feared that the end of the world was nigh. In the Olivet Discourse of the New Testament, written in Greek at the end of the first century of the Christian Era, Jesus spoke of wars, earthquakes, false prophets, persecution, and cosmic signs preceding his return (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). The Book of the Revelation of St. John provided apocalyptic visions of trials and tribulations, the rise of evil powers, Jesus Christ’s return, the creation of a new heaven and new earth, the final battle between God and Satan, the defeat of Satan, and the Last Judgment (Revelation 21–22). In the years leading to 1,000 of the Christian Era a millennial panic gripped medieval Europe. During the bubonic plague or Second Pandemic of 1347-1353, which Europeans called the Black Death, people believed that the Last Judgment had arrived. In 1910 people around the world feared that Halley’s Comet would strike the Earth and end all life on it. In 2012 there was a global fear of “the Maya Apocalypse,” a misinterpretation of the ancient Maya Long Count calendar that led many people to believe the world would end on December 21 of that year (the winter solstice).

Unlike the previous prophecies and fears of the end of the world, the likelihood of the end of our species is all too real. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has drafted a plan to end its own ability to fight climate change (see here). There has been a series of scholarly books entitled The End of the World (see here). The Doomsday Clock stands at 89 seconds to Midnight, the closest to a global catastrophe it has been since its inception in 1947. Our species faces imminent extinction from global warming, environmental catastrophe, or nuclear war. An international movement named Extinction Rebellion is desperately trying to stop our slide toward self-extinction, but it is somewhat like the proverbial finger plugged into the hole in the dyke by the Little Dutch Boy (see here).

On Friday, September 5, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the U.S. Department of Defense the Department of War. If his order is implemented he will have reversed the creation of the National Military Establishment by the U.S. Congress, which was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1947, and which the Congress renamed the Department of Defense in 1949. One might speculate as to why Trump, who graduated from a military academy at the age of eighteen but never served in any armed force, and who believes he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, needs to see himself as a warrior and his country as a war-making power. The president of the United States, in any event, does not have the constitutional authority to rename a government department. Renaming a cabinet-level department requires an Act of the U.S. Congress. However, Trump’s incredible hold on the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate could mean that the U.S. would soon become the only country in the world with a War Department. No one could tell what war Trump had in mind. Trump had threatened North Korea with nuclear war during his first term in office. On the day of his executive order renaming the Pentagon The New York Times revealed that Trump had sent a top secret Navy SEAL team to North Korea in 2019 with orders to install a listening device that would intercept Kim Jong-un’s secret telephone conversations. Coming out of the water on the North Korean coast, the Navy SEALs had encountered a boat full of Korean civilians and had killed them before retreating without installing the device.

This website attempts to explain how and why we have come to this terrible pass. It is my belief that without the insights of psychoanalysis, both on the individual and on the collective level,  we can neither answer these questions nor save ourselves from an unprecedented catastrophe. What has become of our species and of our civilization — and why? Why are we divided into nations or pseudo-species which can make war on one another and bring about the death of tens of millions of people as was the case in the Great War of 1914-1918 and in the Second World War of 1939-1945, and as we see on a smaller scale in the international and civil wars in Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mexico, Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia, Congo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Haiti, to name but a few.

Applied psychoanalysis uses the insights of psychoanalysis to study the wonders of human creation, including literature, art, science, music, architecture, films, and urban civilization, as well as the horrors of human destruction, including war, genocide, environmental pollution, and the annihilation of other species. This website is about the interdisciplinary research fields of psychohistory, psychobiography, political psychology, psychogeography, and psychoanthropology, among others. Here you will find my books, articles, and blogs on the psychoanalytic interpretation of history, politics, geography, literature, music and other aspects of human behavior and endeavor. From time to time you will find new pages here about subjects such as the tragic mass murders in Norway and France, the Scottish referendum, U.S.-Israeli relations, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or U.S. President Donald Trump and his followers, perhaps the greatest threat to the existence and well being of our species.

Avner Falk, Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist
Jerusalem, Israel