Nowhere else might the saying `it's one thing to say it and another to see it` apply more than in the situation Freud found himself in March 1915, six months after the outbreak of the First World War.

Indeed, it's one thing to have said just two or three years earlier in `Totem and Taboo` that modern man is in a psychological sense an unbroken continuation of the primal man, whom he secretly carries within himself and to whom he openly returns every time he sheds the mantle of civilization, and quite another to see with your own eyes that very man sowing destruction and death across an entire continent, the man in whom you had placed your hopes and from whom you expected that at least through his achievements in spiritual and technological culture he would have become better than his primitive ancestor.