Our species has gradually evolved over hundreds of thousands of years from small groups of hunters-gatherers into families, clans, tribes, city-states, principalities, kingdoms, empires, and nations. Our world today is divided into some two hundred nations, each with its own territory and its own language (or languages), with a dominant ethnic group, and with its own myths of origin. Each nation has its physical and psychological borders. The psychoanalyst Erik Homburger Erikson (1902-1994) called nations “pseudo-species” because they act as though each were a separate species from all the others, whereas in reality they are all part of the same species. Each “large group,” as the psychoanalyst Vamık Djemal Volkan (born 1932) calls nations, religions and other large-scale human groupings, has its “chosen glory” and its “chosen trauma.” The chosen glory is a glorified victory, whereas the chosen trauma is a humiliating defeat.

In some fascinating cases, however, a single historical event has been chosen as both the glory and the trauma. This is the case with the Shi’ite Muslim narrative of the Battle of Karbala (680 of the Christian Era), in which the Shi’ite Imam Hussein ibn Ali was killed. Shi’ite myth has it that Hussein deliberately martyred himself for his people, who were therefore victorious, creating a Shi’ite nation of Islam ruled by an imam who is a descendant of Ali. Every year the Shi’ite believers revive the Battle of Karbala on the day of Ashura (the tenth day of the month of Muharram in the Muslim calendar), during which they beat their own chests repeatedly and rhythmically, or even whip and bloody themselves with iron chains, while chanting, “every place is Karbala and every day is Ashura!” This belief has been central to the Shi’ites for over fourteen centuries by the Lunar Muslim calendar. The Islamic rulers of Iran and the majority of Iranians being Shi’ites, this myth has played a crucial role in the Iran war.

Similarly, for the Christian Serbs, the Battle of Kosovo (1389 of the Christian Era) is both the chosen glory and the chosen trauma. That battle was fought between a Serb army led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and an invading Muslim Ottoman army under Sultan Murat Hüdavendigâr. It was one of the largest battles of the Late Middle Ages in Europe. While both Lazar and Murat were killed, the Serbs were defeated and became Ottoman subjects for nearly five centuries before becoming independent. The Serbian myth converted the defeat into a victory. By this myth, on the eve of battle God offered Lazar a choice between an earthly kingdom (victory) and a heavenly kingdom (defeat and martyrdom). He chose defeat in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The myth crowns Lazar a martyr and a saint and frames the catastrophe as a triumph. In 1989 Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia (and later of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), used the Battle of Kosovo as a rallying cry to a civil war in which Serbs, Croats, and Muslims fought and killed one another, culminating six years later in the infamous massacre at Srebrenica.

Like the Jews, the Serbs saw themselves as God’s chosen people, who secured a covenant with God and a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. The myth of election is not particular to the Jews and to the Serbs, however. Each ethnic and religious group has such myths. When each “large group” is convinced of its election and of its collective narrative being the divine truth, the potential for conflict, war, killing and destruction is enormous. The medieval crusades were a case in point (see Franks and Saracens).

For over a century, psychoanalysis has given us a new and revolutionary way to understand ourselves. This website is about the application of psychoanalysis to human history and politics, and to the wonders of human civilization, such as literature, art, science, music, architecture, films, and urban planning, as well as to the horrors of human destruction, such as war, genocide, slavery, rape, murder, environmental pollution, and the annihilation of other species.

There has never been a time in recorded human history which was free of armed conflict. Such conflicts were traumatic to their survivors, not only to those who were defeated and enslaved, but also to those who were victorious, but who could never forget the horrors of battle. The traumatized survivors consciously or unconsciously transmitted their trauma to their children. As the historian Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) has put it, “writing history is writing trauma.”

The interdisciplinary fields of psychohistory, psychobiography, political psychology, psychogeography, and psychoanthropology, among others, seek to achieve a better understanding of our collective experience as humans. Here you will find my books, articles, and blogs on these subjects. 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, the Iran war, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or U.S. President Donald Trump, perhaps the greatest current threat to the existence and well being of our species. It is not an exaggeration to say that the existence of our species is gravely threatened by global warming, climate change, and the ever present danger of nuclear war. This is not a prophetic or an apocalyptic fantasy. It is an unthinkable but real possibility.

Apocalyptic, eschatological and millennial movements have been with us at least since the Persian religion of Zarathushtra Spitama predicted the “end times” some three thousand years ago. In this “Manichaean” world view, as it would later be called by the Europeans, which derives from an unconscious psychological process called “splitting,” human history was seen as a cosmic struggle between good (Ahura Mazda) and evil (Ahriman), ending in a final judgment and the renewal of the world. The “Zoroastrian” eschatology influenced Greek and later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic apocalyptic thought.

The apocalyptic movements of our own time seem much more realistic. We live in turbulent times. There have been scholarly books titled 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).

Still, 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. U.S. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has drafted a plan to end its own ability to fight climate change (see here). On September 5, 2025, 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 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 become the only country in the world with a War Department.

No one could tell what war Trump had in mind. During his first term in office Trump had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen before.” In 2019 he sent a top-secret Navy SEAL team to North Korea with orders to install a listening device that would intercept the telephone conversations of Kim Jong-un. Coming out of the water on the North Korean coast, the Navy SEALs encountered a boat full of Korean civilians and killed them before retreating without installing the device (see here). While Trump and his “War Secretary” Peter Hegseth conducted a minor war with Venezuela and a major war with Iran, a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea, or between Russia and Ukraine, remains as unthinkable as it is a remote but real possibility.

This website attempts to explain how and why we have come to this pass. 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 involving Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mexico, Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia, Congo, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Haiti, to name but a few.