4 - Future of an Illusion

Summary

If Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism can be framed as “the bookends” (being the first and last of Freud’s works on religion), then Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents can be called “the twins.” Written a scant three years apart (1927 and 1930, respectively), they form the essential core, the most widely known and influential of Freud’s varied analyses of religion. While the two works are joined by central themes that continue to preoccupy Freud’s ruminations on the relation between the individual, civilization, religion, and the historical process, they also evince a striking disparity in tone. Future of an Illusion exudes an enlightenment agenda, valorizing the power of reason, the efficacy of psychoanalytic modes of personal transformation, and the eventual victory of humanism, science, and tolerance. Civilization and Its Discontents, on the other hand, prescient in what was to come (namely, World War II), is more pessimistic, warning of the ascendancy of the darker forces of human nature, the “unpsychological” structures of social institutions, and the growing uneasiness of humans in civilization. In this chapter we will focus on Future of an Illusion, leaving our treatment of Civilization and Its Discontents for Chapter 5.