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WorkSigmund Freud

The Future of an Illusion

Freud argues with an imagined believer that religion is a childhood wish for a father, and that humanity can outgrow it.

by Sigmund Freud99 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Zukunft einer Illusion
First published
(aged 71)
Original language
German

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Overview

Partway through this short book Sigmund Freud invents an opponent, a reader who distrusts every step, and lets him speak; much of what follows argues with him. Freud's case is that religious doctrines are illusions — not necessarily false, but believed because people wish them to be true. Civilisation, he argues, rests on making people give up the satisfaction of their drives, and religion is one of its chief means of making that bearable. Faced with a nature that can crush them and a death that will come, adults feel again the helplessness they felt as children, and reach for the same remedy: a powerful father who protects and rewards. Freud weighs two defences of faith and sets both aside — the ancient one, which holds a belief because it is absurd, and the modern philosophy of "As If", associated with Hans Vaihinger, which keeps useful fictions while admitting they are untrue, a demand he says only a philosopher could make. He takes illustrations from the news: the "monkey trial" over the teaching of evolution at Dayton, Tennessee, and America's attempt to ban intoxicants, which he sets beside religion's work as a narcotic. To the opponent's warning that without religion people would stop obeying the rules that hold civilisation together, Freud answers that people cannot remain children for ever and must be educated to face reality. The Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag published the book in 1927. The next year Oskar Pfister, a Zurich pastor who had corresponded with Freud since 1909 and was among the first in Switzerland to take up psychoanalysis, answered it in Imago with "The Illusion of a Future", which he subtitled a friendly disagreement. The French writer Romain Rolland, to whom Freud sent a copy, objected that the true source of religion was a feeling of oneness with the world, and Freud took up the objection in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Key concepts

How does an illusion differ from a delusion?

Both, for Freud, are beliefs that spring from wishes. A delusion, in the psychiatric sense, essentially contradicts reality. An illusion need not: it is defined by its origin in wishing, not by being false, and may even come true. Most religious doctrines, he concludes, can be neither proved nor refuted, though some are so improbable that they come close to delusions.

What are the psychical assets of a civilisation?

They are what a culture offers its members to reconcile them to the sacrifices it demands, as distinct from the coercion it uses. Freud counts among them the ideals a culture holds up, the satisfaction of belonging to a superior group, art, which gives substitute satisfaction for the oldest renunciations, and most important of all, religious ideas.

What does Freud mean by the primacy of the intellect?

It is his ideal for a mature humanity: that reason, not wishes, should govern how people live together and master their drives, since intelligence is the only means they have for that. Freud doubts that people raised under bans on thinking about religion can reach it, and admits, through his opponent's mouth, that this hope may itself be an illusion.

Who is 'our god Logos'?

Logos, the Greek word for reason, is Freud's ironic name for the god of science. Unlike the gods of religion he promises no bliss after death and no exemption from necessity. He will fulfil only what nature outside us allows, and only very gradually, for generations still to come. Freud presents this modest promise as the only one that does not deceive.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Price of Civilisation

Why does a civilisation that protects us also feel like an enemy? Freud begins not with God but with what every culture must take from its members.

Civilisation, Freud argues, rests on coercion and on giving up the satisfaction of drives, and so each person is virtually its enemy. The oldest renunciations, of incest, cannibalism and murder, have been taken inside and are mostly kept; newer ones, against greed and lying, are broken whenever it is safe. To reconcile people to their sacrifices a culture offers ideals, art and, above all, religion. A culture that leaves most of its members unsatisfied, he adds, neither can nor deserves to last.

  • culture
  • cultural theory
  • social order
  • social norms
  • cultural norms
  • law
  • social contract
  • morality
  • human nature
  • instinct

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Belief Born of Wishing

What kind of thing is a religious doctrine, psychologically speaking? Freud calls it an illusion, and is careful to say what that word does and does not mean.

Helpless before nature and death, people humanised the forces around them and later gathered them into a father who protects and rewards. Such doctrines, Freud argues, are illusions: beliefs held because they fulfil the oldest and strongest wishes, which does not make them necessarily false. He weighs the defences offered for them, that the ancestors believed, that questioning is forbidden, that one believes because it is absurd, or that useful fictions may be kept 'as if' true, and finds none convincing.

  • religion
  • belief
  • illusion
  • wish fulfillment
  • childhood
  • human vulnerability
  • afterlife
  • anthropomorphism
  • nature
  • evidence
  • epistemology
  • truth

Enter a dialogue

Growing Up Without Consolation

Could people live without religion's comfort? An imagined opponent says no, and Freud answers him point by point.

The opponent warns that people stripped of faith would kill without restraint and sink into despair. Freud replies that the ban on killing is safer grounded in reason than in divine command, and that religion, like a childhood neurosis, may be outgrown. Teaching children not to question it stunts their thinking, and its comforts work like a narcotic, which he sets beside America's attempt to ban intoxicants. People must be educated to reality; science is no illusion, and its god Logos promises only what nature permits.

  • education
  • reason
  • science
  • rationality
  • reality
  • psychology
  • social psychology

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
99
distinct concepts
165
by passages held, corpus-wide
#502

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “belief” and “religion”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
beliefreligion12
culturereligion9
psychoanalysisreligion9
moralityreligion8
educationreligion7
human naturereligion5
cultural theoryhuman nature4
educationhuman nature4
culturemorality2
human naturemorality2
beliefculture1
beliefeducation1
beliefhuman nature1
beliefpsychoanalysis1
cultural theoryeducation1
cultural theorypsychoanalysis1
cultureeducation1
educationpsychoanalysis1
moralitypsychoanalysis1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) you are here DE
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