[War as a psychic fact.]

War is a complex issue and, as such, observable and studyable from different perspectives, including political, economic, anthropological, sociological, ethnological, etological, historical and psychological. Psychiatry's interest in war has a historical root, just think of the Psychoanalytic Congress held in Budapest in September 1918, on "war neuroses". Current interest is directed to psychic mechanisms operating in the war phenomenon and on the consequences that collective trauma produces in acute, chronic and in subsequent generations.