Freud said it first and now Stephen Hawking said it too : The greatest threat to civilization is man’s unbridled aggression. So who am I to disagree?  It seems obvious on the global scale that mankind is doomed to self-extinction. Killing for peace is a contradiction but it has been used as a battle cry since wars began.  Only now we have the means to destroy each other and ourselves on a worldwide scale. We are a warlike species and there seems no end in sight for our thirst for death and destruction.  If there is any hope for the human race, it seems to me that it cannot come through legislation. Peace comes through the resolution of self-hatred and the tolerance of differences.  As a brief psychology explanation  of the origin of self-hatred, Freud’s theory states that we all avoid the experience of psychic  pain through unconscious mechanisms. Projection is one. It is used to externalize personal demons and put them onto others. Individuals do it interpersonal relations and groups, including nations, do it through stereotypes and bigotry.  It seems to me that peace must come from the grassroots,from the people, first. Group therapy can help.  If all that aggressive energy could be channeled by the verbalization of murderous feelings, instead of the enactment of them through war, then perhaps we can harness that energy for good (in both senses of the word).   There is actually ethnographic evidence that such things are possible. In the 1930’s Dr. Kilton Stewart studied an unique tribe of aborigines in the South Pacific, the Senoi Indians, that practice a form of  communal dream therapy that does just that—converts aggressive energy into libidinal energy.  In group therapy the leader facilitates the process of converting negative energy into positive and constructive dialogue. My next blog, my goal is to convert a self-hating woman group member’s enormous psychic pain into useful energy. My method may appear to be cruel and sadistic but it’s goal is not to inflict pain for the pleasure of it but to free the group member from the ‘paper shackles’ of a destructive and massively self-destructive hatred  that both poisons her body and her interpersonal relationships as well.