EINSTEIN, Albert and Sigmund FREUD. Why War? A Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. [London:] Peace Pledge Union, April 1939. 8vo (214 x 139mm.) Original printed wrappers (some loss at top of spine). Note: first published in 1933 by ‘The International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations’ as No. 2 in their series of ‘Open Letters’. With the threat of war looming, Einstein asks what psychological insight Freud’s discipline can bring to the threat of a war that would be incalculably more destructive than at any other time in history. Einstein’s own suggestion is to establish ‘a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations’ because the ruling classes of each nation have the means ‘to sway the emotions of the masses’. Freud suggests the best hope is to encourage the ‘eros’ impulse through cultural processes of ‘identification’. Failing that, we might instead learn to accept that war is ‘biologically sound and practically unavoidable’. And yet also, it might be asked, ‘if the community, in its turn, cannot claim a right over the individual lives of its members’. – And a further volume (‘Annual Report of a Residential War Nursery’ by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, 1942, 8vo, and several newsletters of the ‘Pacifist Service Unit’, 1943, 8vo) (2).