War occupies a peculiar and irreducible position in the depth-psychology corpus — neither condemned outright nor celebrated, but submitted to the same hermeneutical pressure applied to dreams, myth, and symptom. Hillman’s contribution is the most sustained and provocative: he treats war as a phenomenon inseparable from Mars as a living mythic force, arguing that modernity’s rejection of the martial archetype — its refusal to think war imaginally — produces not pacifism but apocalyptic nuclearism and ‘senseless’ repetition. The absence of myth from modern warfare, Hillman contends, is precisely what makes it monstrous. Herman and van der Kolk approach war from the clinical register, tracing the long suppression and rediscovery of combat trauma, from ‘soldier’s heart’ through shell shock to PTSD, and emphasizing the political conditions under which veterans’ suffering is acknowledged or denied. Plato regards war as a necessary evil subordinate to peace, never the proper telos of legislation. Easwaran radicalizes this further, locating war’s origin in the individual human heart — in the conflict between selfishness and selflessness — and reads the Bhagavad Gita’s battlefield as a psychological interior. Across these positions runs a shared conviction: war is not merely a political or military event but a psychological one, shaped by collective unconscious forces, mythic structures, and the failures of inward reckoning.
Our wars become senseless when they have no myths. Guadalcanal, Anzio, My Lai: battles, casualties, graves (at best); statistics of firepower and body count – but no myths. The reign of quantity, utterly literal.
Hillman argues that the demythologization of war — the loss of the god Mars as a regulating imaginal presence — is what renders modern warfare barbarically repetitive and incapable of proper closure.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
We may be a violent people but not a warlike people – and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself. Wanting to put a stop to it was a major cause of the Los Alamos project and Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hillman diagnoses a specifically American psychic complex in which the idealistic rejection of war paradoxically produces the most extreme and total violence, turning anti-martial sentiment into the engine of apocalyptic weaponry.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a violent people but not a warlike people.
In parallel formulation to Mythic Figures, Hillman distinguishes the cultural repression of Mars in American democratic consciousness from the European warrior tradition, identifying this repression as psychologically consequential.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
War is born in the mind: first it comes to our hearts, then to our homes, then to our community, and finally to our world. This is the nature of war.
Easwaran reads the Gita’s battlefield as a map of inward conflict, insisting that war is fundamentally a psychological phenomenon rooted in the opposition of selfish and selfless impulses within the individual.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis
Our Bible is a long account of battles, of wars and captains of wars. Jahweh presents himself in the speeches of a War God and his prophets and kings are his warriors.
Hillman situates war at the very foundation of Western mythic and scriptural imagination, arguing that the ‘war books’ of world literature — Iliad, Mahabharata, Bible — are the roots from which Western languages and consciousness grow.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
War is not unthinkable, and not to think it, not to imagine it, only favors the mystical appeal of apocalyptic nuclearism. Remember Hannah Arendt’s call to thinking? Not to think, not to imagine is the behavior of Eichmann.
Hillman insists that the refusal to think war imaginally — to maintain its mythic distinctness from nuclear apocalypse — is a form of moral and psychological failure analogous to Arendt’s ‘banality of evil.’
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
War, being an abrogation of ethical and cultural systems, recognizes no standard of good and evil. If, as the Gurus teach, men would seriously consider these things, the illogical and impracticable nature of the moral standards of the unenlightened multitude would be evident.
Evans-Wentz, drawing on Tibetan teaching, characterizes war as the complete suspension of ethical systems, revealing the incoherence of ordinary moral standards when examined seriously.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
No one can be a true statesman, whether he aims at the happiness of the individual or state, who looks only, or first of all, to external warfare; nor will he ever be a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace.
Plato subordinates war entirely to peace as its legitimate end, treating the prioritization of warfare as a mark of degenerate statesmanship.
, Laws, -348supporting
For veterans to organize against their own war while it was still ongoing was virtually unprecedented. This small group of soldiers, many of whom had distinguished themselves for bravery, returned their medals and offered public testimony of their war crimes.
Herman charts how systematic study of war trauma required not medical initiative but political pressure from disaffected veterans themselves, situating the psychology of combat within structures of power and recognition.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
After every war, soldiers have expressed resentment at the general lack of public awareness, interest, and attention; they fear their sacrifices will be quickly forgotten. After the First World War, veterans bitterly referred to their war as the ‘Great Unmentionable.’
Herman identifies the social erasure of war’s psychological damage as a recurring cultural dynamic, in which public commemoration systematically distorts or suppresses the actual experience of combat survivors.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for war’s uses they are incommensurably good. These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction.
William James, quoting an Austrian officer, confronts directly the moral inversion war demands, acknowledging that war’s utility requires the deliberate cultivation of humanity’s most destructive impulses.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
They were killed essentially because the military mind, full of tamas, can approach a problem only in terms of killing. If killing doesn’t work, as in the trenches of World War I or the bombing of Vietnam, it tries more killing.
Easwaran reads modern warfare’s escalating civilian casualties through the Gita’s concept of tamas — the guna of inertia and darkness — diagnosing the military mind as psychologically constricted to a single, self-reinforcing mode.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
Zeus and Pan were invoked to instill terror and paralysis in the enemy during times of war. Both had the capacity to ‘freeze’ the body and induce ‘pan-ic.’
Levine traces the somatic phenomenon of traumatic freeze to ancient mythological accounts of war, showing that the Greeks understood combat’s paralyzing effects in divine and bodily terms simultaneously.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
Whereas in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis during the Saturn-Pluto period the focus of collective judgment and division was on power, violence, terrorism, and war (Pluto), both in the United States and abroad.
Tarnas correlates specific historical eruptions of collective violence and war with Saturn-Pluto alignments, situating war within a cyclical astrological psychology of collective shadow.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
In 1918, even before the outbreak of war in Europe, Jung observed: an astonishing development in the German edition of the collective unconscious… I saw Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’ looming up with all that it implies.
Conforti invokes Jung’s pre-war reading of collective unconscious dynamics in Germany as evidence that field-level psychic phenomena can presage and shape the outbreak of war.
, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting
Arms are, of all tools, unblessed. They are not the implements of a wise man. Only as a last resort does he employ them. Peace and quietude are esteemed by the wise man.
Campbell presents the Taoist position on war as emblematic of a wider wisdom-tradition that regards armed force as spiritually inauspicious and politically degenerative when made a primary instrument.
, Myths to Live By, 1972supporting
The official view was that well-trained troops, properly led, would not suffer from shell shock and that the servicemen who had succumbed to the disorder were undisciplined and unwilling soldiers.
Van der Kolk documents the institutional denial of war trauma, demonstrating how military and state authority systematically pathologized the traumatized soldier rather than acknowledging the damage of combat itself.
, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014supporting
War mentality cleaves the world into noble allies and despicable enemies and justifies any measures necessary to prevail, including violence to innocent bystanders… war mentality suspends normal human compassion and intelligence.
Maté employs the structure of war as an analogy for the ‘War on Drugs,’ arguing that war-thinking as a cognitive and moral stance suspends compassion and produces exactly the harms it claims to combat.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008aside
The investigation of veterans from World War II and the Korean War by Elder and Clipp (1989) provides a nice case in point… two commonly acknowledged legacies of war for the veterans: the ‘No Legacy: The War is Over’ involves a denial of any feelings.
Pargament cites research on war veterans to illustrate that coping with extreme experience can produce either pathological denial or genuine resource development, depending on how the experience is processed and recognized.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside