Henri Parens, War Is Not Inevitable. London: Lexington Books, 2014 Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston The reason Henry Parens believes that war is not inevitable is that over several years of watching babies with their mothers, he noticed that the intense psychic pain they experience owed to maltreatment, traumas, that lead to enormous rage that would eventually need to be discharged. Abuse leads children, not to develop normal, healthy, primary narcissism—a desire for self-empowerment—but rather hyper-narcissism, where the wound all very young children incur when they realize they aren’t actually vastly empowered but rather small and weak, leads instead to greed, envy and a stark need for power and revenge. Children, who need their parents’ love too much to blame them, and who learn psychic “tools” like displacement and projection within the first two years of their lives, end up as adults finding other victims. If a whole populace has incurred psychic distress as c...