Page:Freud - Reflections on war and death.djvu/53

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WAR AND DEATH

tives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance, but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance has been overcome. This blindness to logic which this war has so frequently conjured up in just our best fellow citizens, is therefore a secondary phenomenon, the result of emotional excitement and destined, we hope, to disappear simultaneously with it.

If we have thus come to a fresh understanding of our estranged fellow citizens we can more easily bear the disappointment which nations have caused us, for of them we must only make demands of a far more modest nature. They are perhaps repeating the development of the individual and at the present day still exhibit very primitive stages of development with a correspondingly slow progress

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