Pleasura and Realitas: The Dialectic of Dominating Impulses

Stone aims to update Freudian theory by positing two central forces akin to Freud's id and ego. The volcanic ``Pleasura'' encompasses human instincts for survival, self-improvement and self-gratification, and it unleashes the gamut of passions for good or evil. ``Realitas,'' the countervailing force, is the impulse to create order out of chaos and to maintain social control. To Stone, formerly an attorney in Canada, the persecuted early Christians, who resembled a close-knit, loving family, were ``a group in ascendant Pleasura'' amid the Realitas of imperial Rome. In simplistic fashion he uses the Pleasura-Realitas conflict to explain the Mongol conquest of India, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Nazism, the Tiananmen Square uprising and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. This treatise yields new insights into charisma, totalitarianism, democracy as the rule of narrow vested interests and the psychodynamics of war. (Feb.)