Reaching the Readers Who Drive Us to War : OUT OF WEAKNESS Healing the Wounds That Drive Us to War<i> by Andrew Bard Schmookler (Bantam Books: $21.95 cloth</i> ,<i> $10.95 paper; 384 pp. 0-553-34477-3) </i>

This work contains a wealth of vital information about those psychological and sociological roots of warlike behavior--whether that of the United States, the Soviet Union, Iran or any other bellicose nation--that is unconscious and inherently unhealthy. Ideally, every literate citizen should be familiar with its contents. The concepts it analyzes in depth--such as over-learning and reaction formation, disowned feelings and projection, displacement and compensatory narcissism--deserve to become household words. Indeed, only when there is a grass-roots understanding of the author’s theses will humanity begin to feel and be safe.

In my inexact estimation there are perhaps 10,000 citizens of the United States who are already significantly familiar with these concepts. They are, therefore, likely to find this book unnecessarily long and repetitious. If they are professional educators, however, they will also find it a treasure trove of useful references and quotes--particularly since the author intermittently writes with eloquence.

There are perhaps 5 million U.S. citizens for whom these concepts would be not only relatively new but also welcome. The problem is simply how to get this book into their hands.

The far more challenging problem, however, is that the remaining 95% of the reading public would probably refuse to read this book even if it were bought for them and they were paid thrice their usual wages to do so. As the author repeatedly points out, most people have been sufficiently wounded that they do not want to confront themselves. How do you get human beings who flee from self-understanding to read a book that requires that they face their own souls, even when the human race is at stake? How do you market good news to people who want bad news? It is the problem of being able to preach only to the already converted.

The problem is symbolized by the publisher, who marked the front cover of the bound proof sheets “Category: New Age.” We associate “New Age” with the “flaky” and “far out.” Will this relentlessly realistic book (which takes knee-jerk liberals to task as much as the rest of us) be relegated to the sale shelf as paeans to crystals and the whole variety of “channelled” material?

The author makes no attempt to answer the most significant problem his book raises: how to overcome the extraordinary “market resistance” to his ideas. Despite its subtitle, the book offers only a few provocative hints about how to heal the psychopathology it so thoroughly describes, and none about how to get the message into the hands of those who need it most and want it least. Yet no panaceas can be expected beyond the awareness that he pushes us toward. Any healing must begin with the consciousness that we are sick.

Perhaps Bantam Books, Inc., has it right. Perhaps all that can possibly be done is to place this information where the most receptive (sometimes absurdly receptive) “New Age” people are wont to browse. And hope that somehow an occasional “Old Age” person might, by grace, stumble into the wrong aisle.