Psychodynamics of War and ReligionAbstractWar and Religion, Conflict and Ideology, are inextricably intertwined, like the two sides of a coin they present the twin faces of social psychosis, for both are encodings of the social defences of humanity. It is the argument of this paper that both religion and war have common roots in the pre and perinatal experience of the species, that the social defences are laid down in response to the universal trauma of birth. In concentrating on the social system, the paper ignores the effects of any individual-specific pre and perinatal imprinting insofar as it generates behaviour that deviates from the norm. The paper was first presented in Heidelberg in June 1991 at the Conference of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology. 
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