Customer Reviews

The Psychology of War : Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness

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There are plenty of good books on strategy and the history of warfare. But a good, easy to follow book on the psychology of war is the proper place to begin.

LeShan's The Psychology of War is a useful, short non-scholarly book. The first hardcover edition lacked a general bibliography and an index. An Index has been added to the new expanded edition. For those others of you having only the 1st edition, The Psychology of War is now a searchable book here on Amazon. I should say that the book does have good footnotes, all gathered together at the end, and which list many useful sources.

I am not surprised by the negative reviews this book has received here. These reviewers appear to be in the grips of the very sort of thinking that LeShan describes as "mythical." No one is immune from mythical thinking, even psychologists.

Get with it, people. War maybe makes you feel good, like you're doing something, but it doesn't really create good.

Ask yourself what need does the war fulfill? Is it the need to be in control? The need to belong to a powerful group? The need to spread democracy? The need to end terrorism? The need to immolate others and ourselves for a vague, long-term, impossibly utopian end?

Then ask yourself what in our life has failed that we need this particular war? Have we really been failed by homeland security? Has the UN failed us? Has religion failed us, failed to make us feel secure and happy?

Violent solutions like war come out of known human impulses. They range from greed to loneliness, to sadism, to a search for justice. A little self-examination on a national level might reveal some of these impulses, and I bet they aren't pretty. Remember, I'm talking about impulses, not the noble, official stories.

LeShan's book is an excellent introduction. You won't look at the news or listen to political speeches the same way after you've read it. And if it has an obvious bias, it's the bias of reason and analysis applied to the universal problem of war.

While doing my post-graduate work I happened on Dr. LeShan's book in our public library. It rode on the seat next to me for several days and then two planes drove into the Twin Towers. I picked up the book and read. It was uncanny the way that LeShan describes the shift from a sensory-based reality to a mythical reality. In the days following 9/11 I watched his words come to life as we widened the gap between Us and THEM. His book offers solid, well-thought out and well-researched ideas on why human beings make war. I was astounded by this book and have since read many of Dr. LeShan's other books. The man is truly one of the great minds of this age.
Jamie Lee, author of Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage

I read this book several years ago and I was immediately struck by how brilliant it was. I recommended it to all my friends, and I just can't understand why this isn't required reading yet. One of the best and most important books of our time and virtually nobody is reading it.

Could it be that Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal are right? Our government thrives off of war? Is this book being intentionally held distant from a public long tired of fighting wars for the rich and the powerful?

I would strongly reccommend this book to anyone interested in questioning the process of war and the human disposition towards it. This book is an interesting look into how human behavior affects war and vice versa. A must-read for anyone.

As the author lucidly points out, at least two of the realities people operate in are sensory (daily) reality and mythic reality.

In sensory reality you buy bread at the store, put a bandaid on a cut, and a million other day-to-day things having a whole range of values (rye, white, whole grain, etc. bread; strip, clear, round, waterproof, antibiotic, etc. bandaids and so on).

In mythic reality you slip into the great error of the Excluded Middle and it's as if there are only two values - the right and the wrong.

This book opened a world of ideas to me. Certainly religion could not be explained as mythic reality, and the hateful angry politics we see today is not a mythic reality. Not as long as people, through emotion not reason, insist it's the "real" reality. And the religious wars of the 16th and 17th Centuries (and the Crusades before that) were in no way grounded in mythic realities.

Oh yeah, and the angry one-star reviews on this book do not reflect a mythic reality. Read them. Can't you people see what's right and what's wrong?! Can't you see this author is wrong!

This is a book that loses your intersted about 1/3 of the way through because the conclusions don't follow from the premises. An example is that the author states that war has always caused economic conditions to worsen. But he compares prewar conditions to post war, rather than comparing projected post-war conditions to those that would have been had there been no war. None of us likes war, and delving into why humans always wind up fighting them would be interesting, but this book doesn't really go there.

The author of this book has had no real military experience or leadership. He is not knowledgeable on the subject at hand and has many unsound opinions. I do not recommend buying this book. This author should stick to writing Principles of Psychology 101 books.

This book is a sheer waste of time. It as nothing to do with why we, as human beings, make war. It is just a base for the author's anti-war sentiments and liberalist ideals. In essence, this book is a just a pendantic essay showing the author's incredible ill-sense but there are some good sections which consist of quotes that are more valuable than the author's opinion.

His views on why we cause war is completely one-sided and not original and his ideas on the formation of alternative realities is narrow and does not sound like a psychologist.

Do not waste your time and money on this book. Better buys would be the writings of John Keegan, Carl Von Clausewitz and Mao Tse-Tung. These are just some of the examples that can help anyone form an idea of why we make war that is more relevant than the author's.

I was hoping that this book would provide me with some insight into how individuals are actually affected by war, but this book is nothing more than a forum for the author to express his blatent anti-war opinions. As a psychologist myself, I found this book to contain no real psychology, and the author's statements and accusations were not bolstered by any solid research. If you are interested in reading about the true psychology of war, I would not recommend this book.