On a rainy November weekend in Santa Barbara, California, the sky as dismal as the possibility of our country's going to war, hundreds of people gathered to hear James Hillman, Jungian analyst and founder of archetypal psychology, discuss "Our Terrible Love of War". Although the day-and-a-half lecture covered many ideas of military conflict pertinent to our current political climate, the heart of Hillman's presentation revealed his paradoxical thinking: the archetypal phenomenon of love in war.

     Hillman believes that the American consciousness has no place for war, labeling it politically incorrect, unthinkable and wrong. Yet, over the past four thousand years, at least five thousand conflicts have been fought, averaging "two to three wars each year of human history" (lecture). Sacred manuscripts including the Mahabarata, the Bhagavad Gita, as well as Hebrew and Christian texts all recite long descriptions of wars. Yet, the American psyche places war on the sidelines, imagining battles as small incidents in its history, thus alienating combat from everyday thought. If we insist that we hate war, how can we fully understand it? "To know war," says Hillman, "we must enter its love" (ibid).

     A close look at the myth of Ares, the Greek god of war, reveals a character of brute force and a horrendous desire to destroy. The deity does not care on whose side he fights, nor does he care whether his troop wins or loses. He simply wants to do battle. His seemingly single-mindedness often brings wrath and disrespect from his father, Zeus, and other pantheon members, yet Ares is one of the few gods who does not forcefully seduce women. His love affair with Aphrodite is mutual, suggesting an archetypal connection between combat and passion.

     The movie, Patton, closely portrays the archetype of Ares. George C. Scott plays the American General who, like Ares, loves the battlefield. He insists on competent and disciplined soldiers and cannot tolerate slovenliness and above all cowardliness. In one remarkable and confusing scene as men lay burnt and dying on an earth singed from battle, Patton lifts the body of a soldier, surveys the colorless landscape, and exclaims: "I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life."

     At the conference, Hillman discussed this intense emotion that men often experience during and after combat, using testimonies of World War II veterans. One soldier described surviving a conflict as thrilling and auspicious; another described being infused with a bolt of courage that gave him the ability to attack; while others said living through battle brought a sense of clarity and new perspectives. Several Viet Nam veterans, after hearing Hillman’s accounts, spontaneously came to the microphones in the front of the audience to testify about the intense friendships and group bonding that they felt with the men in their units after surviving a conflict.

     From Glenn Gray's book, The Warriors, Hillman quotes a particularly sensitive passage of a man's military experience: . . . "veterans who are honest with themselves will admit the experience in battle has been a high point in their lives." Despite the horror, the weariness, the grime, and the hatred, participation with others in the chances of battle had its unforgettable side. For anyone who has not experienced it himself, the feeling is hard to comprehend and for the participant hard to explain to anyone else -- that curious combination of earnestness and lightheartedness so often noted of men in battle.*

     These men speak of the joy of warfare, the thrill of killing, and the psychological rush of destroying. They do not speak of hating the enemy. Nor do they show concern for victory. Instead, the experience brings an inexplicable, renewed zest for life, perhaps an experience that is not dissimilar to the bliss and heightened sense of self that comes from romantic love. War calls up a god; it invokes an archetype and has the ability to transcend ordinary life in the presence of death. War is a manifestation of the holy, of the divine.

~Martha Peacock, Ph,D

*Hillman, James. "War, Rams, Arms, War: On the Love of War." Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior: Faces of Mars and Shiva in the Crisis of Human Survival. Ed. Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, pp 247-67. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1984.