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Freud, Sigmund 1927c, The Future of an Illusion, SE 21: 1-56, trs. from Die Zukunft einer Illusion, GW 14: 325-380. [Editor's note 3-4; text begins 5.]
The Future of an Illusion ends in optimism. Briefly, Freud's hopeful conclusion as this: Just as healthy individuals overcome their childish ways as they mature, as reason comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives, so too healthy societies should overcome their primitive practices as they mature, as science comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives.
analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis: 1927c, SE 21: 42-4.
ABSTRACT, from
Freud, Sigmund 1973, Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Carrie Lee Rothgeb, International Universities Press, New York.
VOL. XXI The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works (1927-1931)
Editor's note (1961)
Part I. Civilization rests upon renunciation of instinctual wishes.
The Future of an Illusion began a series of studies which were to be Freud’s major concern for the rest of his life. Human civilization presents 2 aspects to the observer. It includes all the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs, and, all the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available wealth. One gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends. All is well if these leaders are persons who possess superior insight into the necessities of life and who have risen to the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes. But there is a danger that in order not to lose their influence they may give way to the mass more than it gives way to them, and it therefore seems necessary that they will be independent of the mass by having means to power at their disposal.
Part II. Consequences of instinctual renunciation.
Part III. In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie.
Every civilization rests on a compulsion to work and a renunciation of instinct and therefore inevitably provokes opposition from those affected by these demands. The fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied is a frustration. The regulation by which this frustration is established is called a prohibition, and the condition which is produced by this prohibition is called a privation. The privations which affect everyone include the instinctual wishes of incest, cannibalism, and lust for killing. People will be only too readily inclined to include among the psychical assets of a culture its ideals. The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal rests upon pride in what has already been successfully achieved and is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. A different kind of satisfaction is afforded by art to the participants in a cultural unit; it offers substitutive satisfaction for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations. A store of religious ideas was created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race. The possession of these ideas protects him in 2 directions, against the dangers of nature and Fate, and against the injuries that threaten him from human society itself.
Part IV. Origins of religions.
Freud tried to show that religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this, a second motive was added: the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt. When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness. The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge, a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.
Part V. The psychological significance of religious ideas.
Part VI. Religious ideas are illusions.
Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external or internal reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one’s belief. Since they give us information about what is most important and interesting to us in life, they are particularly highly prized. Religious teachings base their claim to belief firstly because they were already believed by our primal ancestors; secondly, we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from these same primeval times; and thirdly, it is forbidden to raise the question of their authentication at all. Illusions are derived from human wishes. Freud maintains that religious doctrines are psychological illusions and are therefore insusceptible of proof.
Part VII. Relations between civilization and religion.
Religion has performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much, but not enough, towards the taming of the asocial instincts. It has ruled human society for many thousands of years and has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making the majority of mankind happy, in comforting them, in reconciling them to life and in making them into vehicles of civilization, no one would dream of attempting to alter the existing conditions. However, there is an appalling large number of people who are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy with it. Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain workers. In them, the replacement of religious motives for civilized behavior by other, secular motives would proceed unobtrusively; moreover, such people are to a large extent themselves vehicles of civilization. But it is another matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilization. Either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.
Part VIII. Religion is a substitute for rationality.
When civilization laid down the commandment that a man shall not kill the neighbor whom he hates or who is in his way or whose property he covets, this was clearly done in the interest of man’s communal existence, which would not otherwise be practicable. The primal father was the original image of God, the model on which later generations have shaped the figure of God. God actually played a part in the genesis of that prohibition; it was His influence, not any insight into social necessity, which created it. Men knew that they had disposed of their father by violence, and in their reaction to that impious deed, they determined to respect his will thence forward. The store of religious ideas includes not only wish fulfillments but important historical recollections. The analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis has been repeatedly demonstrated. Many of the peculiarities and vicissitudes in the formation of religion can be understood in that light. It is proposed that certain religious doctrines should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. The religious teachings are viewed as neurotic relics and Freud states that the time has come for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
Part IX. Is rationality possible.
Part X. Relation of religion to science.
A believer is bound to the teachings of religion by certain ties of affection. It is certainly senseless to begin by trying to do away with religion by force and at a single blow. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis, so mankind will surmount this neurotic phase. The primacy of the intellect lies in a distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one. It will presumably set for itself the same aims as those whose realization you expect from your God, namely, the love of man and the decrease of suffering. Our mental apparatus has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency. It is itself a constituent part of the world which we set to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation. The task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization. The ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization. The problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest. Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Wikipedia entry on 'oceanic feeling'.
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