[Psychology of war (civilization as Thanatos or civilization as Eros)]

Freud saw war as the prevailing of death over love, this being a metapsychological concept whose roots lie in the dynamics of urges within the individual and civilisation in general. In his opinion, this dialectic tension could not be overcome. Reich noted that the analytic theory was in conflict with practice. Freud's premisses concerning the philosophy of civilisation and their implications have been taken up by Marcuse, who solves the conflict between the love-death urges by treating work as reduced to love or a game, in which death is merely the negative to be overcome.