The Future of an Illusion (Dover Thrift Editions: Psychology)

by Sigmund Freud

mean by that all those respects in which human life has raised itself above animal conditions and in which it differs from the life of the beasts,

It includes on the one hand all the knowledge and power that men have acquired in order to master the forces of nature and win resources from her for the satisfaction of human needs; and on the other hand it includes all the necessary arrangements whereby men’s relations to each other, and in particular the distribution of the attainable riches, may be regulated.

One might suppose that a reorganization of human relations should be possible, which, by abandoning coercion and the suppression of the instincts, would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with culture, so that undisturbed by inner conflict men might devote themselves to the acquisition of natural resources and to the enjoyment of the same. That would be the golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can ever be realized.

But with the discovery that every culture is based on compulsory labour and instinctual renunciation, and that it therefore inevitably evokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it became clear that the resources themselves, the means of acquiring them, and the arrangements for their distribution could not be its essential or unique characteristic; for they are threatened by the rebelliousness and destructive passions of the members of the culture. Thus in addition to the resources there are the means of defending culture: the coercive measures, and others that are intended to reconcile men to it and to recompense them for their sacrifices. And these last may be described as the psychical sphere of culture.

The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are born anew with every child; there is a class of men, the neurotics, who react already to this first group of frustrations by an asocial attitude. Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism, and of murder.

one could kill without hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with one in any other way, and one could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods without asking his leave: how splendid, what a succession of delights, life would be!

It was because of these very dangers with which nature threatens us that we united together and created culture, which, amongst other things, is supposed to make our communal existence possible. Indeed, it is the principal task of culture, its real raison d’être, to defend us against nature.

It had revealed the father nucleus which had always lain hidden behind every divine figure; fundamentally it was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God. Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to the father.

I have tried to show that religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. And there was a second motive: the eager desire to correct the so painfully felt imperfections of culture.

the psycho-analytic motivation of the forming of religion turns out to be the infantile contribution to its manifest motivation. Let us imagine to ourselves the mental life of the small child. You

religion consists of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality, which tell one something that one has not oneself discovered and which claim that one should give them credence.

The second attempt is that of the philosophy of “As If.” It explains that in our mental activity we assume all manner of things, the groundlessness, indeed the absurdity, of which we fully realize. They are called “fictions,” but from a variety of practical motives we are led to behave “as if ” we believed in these fictions.

Again, it is merely illusion to expect anything from intuition or trance; they can give us nothing but particulars, which are difficult to interpret, about our own mental life, never information about the questions that are so lightly answered by the doctrines of religion.

We see that an appallingly large number of men are discontented with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke that must be shaken off; that these men either do everything in their power to alter this civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing whatever to do either with civilization or with restraining their instincts. At this point it will be objected that this state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has forfeited a part of its influence on the masses, just because of the deplorable effect of the advances in science. We shall note this admission and the reasons given for it, and shall make use of it later for our own purposes; but the objection itself has no force.

you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion,