Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Mad props for discovering the unconscious and the tropes of the dreamweaver, but in other ways this innovative thinker is a hidebound reactionary, sexist, homophobic. He also treats his arbitrary assumptions as facts: we can be quite sure that fathers in the pre-civilization epoch were monsters, etc. Can we, though? Which anthropological studies of hunter gatherer families are you (not) citing? Maybe fathers who weren't under the cruel yoke of capitalism suffered no bullying to pass on to show more the nearest available victim. Freud also seems quite sure that civilization is restraining our aggressive urges; I think, rather, civilization is responsible for war. Civilization, the state, is institutional violence. In 1930 this should have been apparent to the good doctor. By September 1939, when he died, the writing in blood was certainly on the wall. Apparently Gandhi's "What do you think about Western civilization?" "It would be a good idea" is apocryphal. A shame; Freud might have learned something. Jung wanted the id and the ego to unite against the superego; Freud wanted the superego and the ego to unite against the id. Jung remains correct. show less

This is a short book (Ten Chapters in 92 pages) but is especially important for understanding Freud’s mature thought. This was published in 1927 after Freud had already made a name for himself in the early 1900’s. Although Freud mentions that this book might never have been published in his lifetime or ever, this work is given to readers after the First World War and prior to the Second World War. Freud, for all his bluster about the virtues of science and the uselessness of religion, show more stayed in Vienna, Austria until the advent of the Nazis before fleeing to England where he died in 1939. It seems he was not able to read the signs of the times in which he lived.

Freud fancied himself a world figure in the history of ideas and his psychoanalysis as a central part of humanity’s evolution to pass beyond the “Illusion of Religion” and the psychical origin of religious ideas. Freud clearly sees himself as an equal to Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, G.W. Hegel, and Immanuel Kant.
The rigidity of all western religious prohibitions, he says, is a universal neurosis of western civilization which we must leave behind. He says that it is like children’s obsessional neurosis (e.g., Oedipus complex) which is a temporary disavowal of the reality. Here he is trying to parallel Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit which poses the triumph of self-consciousness of spirit as inevitable in world history.
The unusual positions Freud takes here in The Future of an Illusion is indicative that he has said all he needs to say already and is just cleaning up the last fragments his wildest ideas excised from his previous other publications. Here’s a sample: all people are instinctual, and their first impulses are a lust for killing, incest, and cannibalism; God’s existence cannot either proven or disproven; the two most important issues for real science are how did the world begin and what is the relation between mind and body. Freudianism is still present in deconstructive philosophy (Derrida) but on its own it has lost any real logical force or influence. A good short read which will illustrate Freud’s pomposity as a self-asserted world leader of western Science.
Index, Bibliography of Freud’s work, Footnotes are the editors’ citations. show less

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggests as a germinal 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 show more 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 condition (55).

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 (65-6). 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. show less

Freud é um grande escritor e sua maneira de ordenar as coisas, seu ensaismo, é fascinante, ao criar preâmbulos, exposições, contra-exposições, antecipações de críticas e um fechamento decisivo mas que abre ao que pensar (a decisão que estaria aberta à experimentação e incerteza). O futuro da ilusão trata da religião vista de modo geral como uma etapa infantil da sociabilidade, voltada para o asseguramento emocional e simplificação dos problemas; para estratégias de show more conforto social-psicológico frente à complexidade e dificuldade da manutenção da cultura perante os instintos desagregadores. Nisso, é bastante interessante e pertinente desde que observemos um caráter datado (foi escrito em 1927), especialmente no que diz respeito a uma contraposição massas x elite, caduca desde os tempos de indústria cultural 2.0. Parece-me também que para Freud o impulso religioso e o gregarismo da religião instituída estão juntos, mas imagino uma tomada diferente (de todo modo lembro dele dizer não compreender bem o "sentimento oceânico" em outro texto, creio que o mal estar na civilização). show less