Future of an Illusion (1927)

This is Freud’s “emphatic psychoanalytic exploration of religion” - or to put in more bluntly in the words of Christopher Hitchens - Freud’s “famous anti-religious essay”. The main idea is that religion is an illusion that provides an outlet for instinctual “wish fulfillment”. Religious doctrines are transmitted by civilization, through historical recollections of our ancestors, and reinforced by forbidding us to question their authority. This creates “obsessional restrictions” that are on the same level as individual obsessional neurosis. Freud links human helplessness, with the need for religion, which is caused by the Oedipus complex.

This is not an in-depth analysis of the subject, but serves as an introduction to “Civilization and Its Discontents”. The essay feels personal and is not a tirade against religion. Freud acknowledges the emotional value of religion especially in children. He believes children would shed religion, in favor of the scientific method as one develops intellectually. Secular rationalism wasn't a new idea, but Freud’s approach is interesting.
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Freud, in most modern opinions, oscillates wildly between being beautifully right and spectacularly wrong. This book contains some of his most piercing insights and acerbic wit.

Freud analyzes the old dinosaur of religion as he saw it, finding it to serve as a type of cure for a childlike helplessness in the world. He delves briefly into his idea of a 'father complex', but this idea is well applied here - modern theorists have built off of his ideas here to an astonishing degree.

He also re-examines the role of religion in modern life, saying that it is very appealing to those who are most downtrodden in society - again, a statement that history has gratified. However, Freud also says that having a society totally reliant on atheism would also be a fault, too.

A profoundly interesting book, and one of the great ideas in history is here - one with which many still grapple. ( )

Freud brings up a number of interesting arguments. Perhaps not everyone will agree, but I think this book has an interesting take on the mechanics of religious faith, and offers one possible explanation for its manifestation. ( )

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggests as a foundational postulate of religion, “Life in this world…signifies a perfecting of man’s nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul….” (23) The Greek for soul is psyche. Psychoanalysis, which set itself the task of diagnosing and treating the psyche (and not merely the conscious mind, nor the organic brain as such), seems to be a phenomenon in some measure tailor-made to supplement, supplant, or substitute for religion. Freud presented a clear claim that religion is a mass neurosis, not only in The Future of an Illusion, but also in his later work Moses and Monotheism. To the extent that one sees the collective problem of religious ‘delusion’ as analogous to obsessional neurosis in the individual, one might take psychoanalysis, the custodian of techniques to address the latter, as a point of departure to cope with the former. And while he does not make light of the difficulty in coming to do without traditional religions, Freud insists on the desirability and even “fatal inevitability” of such “growth” in the human mental constitution. (55)

For all that the religious character of psychoanalysis becomes more vivid in further developments of the tradition (including both the "left" fork emblemized by Wilhelm Reich and the "right" by C. G. Jung), its ingredients are already to hand in Freud’s work. The “care of souls” is the pastoral function in Christian religion, and equally a mission of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic institution, with its priestly class of analysts. Freud does not hold himself back from the pleasures of religiously-based rhetoric. For example, he writes that “the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer” ... “might be called too sacred” to be addressed in a traditional, unquestioning manner. (40) Taking a cue from the Dutch anti-colonialist Multatuli, Freud makes reference to “our God, Logos” slowly fulfilling the desires of mankind. (69) And he sometimes shows a rather “religious” tendency (as he would perhaps describe it) to pick and choose among scientific theories for the sake of doctrinal coherence in psychoanalysis.

In one of his devil’s advocate passages in The Future of an Illusion, Freud remarks, “If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines,” which would itself engender a functional religion, with all of the concomitant drawbacks. (65-66) In replying to his own objection, Freud emphasizes the desired differences in his post-religious system: it is to be non-delusive and more capable of being corrected. It will be science, not religion. But Freudian psychoanalysis, for all of its scientific trappings, is already at some remove from the positivist territory of the physical sciences. It is no closer to, say, biology, than the monotheism of Moses was to the polytheistic religion of eastern Mediterranean antiquity. In effect, Freud’s proposal is that the superstitious religion of traditions focused on God should be replaced in the future with a scientific religion trained on the soul.

i find freud to be pretty insufferable and full of himself. even if he has good points i am so annoyed by his writing style that i can't get to them. ( )