The Future of an Illusion

by Sigmund Freud

every individual is, in virtual terms, an enemy of culture, which is in fast supposed to constitute a universal human interest. It is a curious fact that human beings, incapable of living in individual isolation, nevertheless find the sacrifices that culture asks of them in order to make human co-existence possible a heavy load to bear. Culture, in other words, needs to be defended against the individual, and its arrangements, institutions and decrees all serve that end. Their purpose is not only to put in place a certain distribution of goods but also to maintain it; there is a need, in fact, for them to protect against the hostile impulses of humanity everything that serves to tame nature and generate commodities. Human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, having built them up, can also be used to tear them down.

This gives the impression that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that has managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.

Untold numbers of civilized human beings who would recoil from murder or incest do not deny themselves satisfaction of their greed, aggression or sexual desires and will not hesitate to harm others through lying, cheating and calumny, if they can get away with it, and this has doubtless always been the case, through many cultural epochs.

It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many participants, driving them to rebellion, has no chance of lasting for any length of time, nor does it deserve one.

People are over- inclined to place the ideals of a culture (i.e. its judgements as to which are the supreme achievements, those most worth striving for) among its psychological assets. It seems at first as if such ideals determine the achievements of the culture group; what actually happens, though, is probably that the ideals emerge in line with the earliest achievements made possible by the combined effects of a culture’s inner aptitude and external circumstance, and those earliest achievements are then captured by the ideal for continuation. In other words, the satisfaction that the ideal gives to those involved in a culture is narcissistic in nature, being based on pride in a culture is narcissistic in nature, being based on pride in what has already been achieved. For it to be complete, it requires comparison with other culture that have plumped for different achievement and evolved different ideals. On the strength of those differences, every culture gives itself the right to look down on the others. This is how culture ideals occasion rupture and hostility between different culture groups-most obviously amongst nations.

Art, as we learned long ago, offers substitute satisfactions for the oldest, still most deeply felt cultural renunciations and therefore has a uniquely reconciling effect with the sacrifices made for it. On the other hand, its creations boost the identification feeling of which every culture group stands in such need by fostering impressions that are experienced jointly and held in high esteem; but they also contribute to narcissistic satisfaction if they represent the achievements of the particular culture, offering impressive remainders of its ideals.

We have spoken of hostility to culture, engendered by the pressure that a culture exerts, the libidinal renunciations that it demands. Imagining its bans lifted, a man is free to choose any woman he wishes as sexual objects; he may without compunction strike his rival for the women dead or kill anyone else who stands in his way, and he may help himself to any of his neighbour’s goods without asking permission. How splendid, what a string of satisfactions life would then have to offer! Before long, of course, the next problem emerges.

What is left then is the state of nature would demand no drive-restrictions of us, it would leave we us be, but nature has its own particularly effective way of placing restrictions on us: it kill us–coldly, cruelly, without a qualm, it seems to us–perhaps on the very occasions of our satisfaction. It was precisely because of the perils with which nature threatens that we got together in the first place and created culture, which is meant among other things to enable us to live together.

Indeed, the main function of culture, the real reason for its existence, is to shield us against nature.

As for humanity as a whole, so too for the individual human, life is hard to bear. A certain amount of privation is imposed on him by the culture to which he belong, some suffering is headed on him by other people, either despite the rules laid down by that culture or because of that culture’s imperfection.

But how does he defend himself against the superior forces of nature, of fate, which threaten him like everyone else? Culture does the job for him; it does it for everyone in the same way; in fact, remarkably, more or less all cultural are alike in this. For instance, culture does not cease to operate once it has performed its task of defending the individual human against nature; it simply continues that task by other means. In this case, the task is a multiple one: man’s badly threatened self-esteem craves consolation, the world and life need to lose their terror, and at the same time humanity’s thirst for knowledge, which is of course driven by the strongest practical interest, craves an answer. With the first step, much is already gained. And that is to humanize nature. Impersonal forces and fates are unapproachable, they remain forever alien. But if passions rage in the elements as they do in the human heart, if even death is not something spontaneous but an act of violence perpetrated by an will, if everywhere in nature a person is surrounded by beings like those he knows from his own society, then he will breathe easier, feel at home in quite unfamiliar surroundings, be able, mentally, to deal with irrational fears; a person may still be defenceless but he is not helpless any longer, not paralysed, he can at least react. In fact, he may not even be defenceless: he can deploy against those violent supermen out there the same resources as he uses in his society. He ca...

As regards the distribution of fates, there remains an uncomfortable suspicion that the bewilderment and helplessness of the human race is beyond remedy. This is where the gods fail most; if they themselves create fate, it has to be said that their ways are mysterious; the most gifted nation in the ancient world glimpsed dimly that Moira stands above the gods and that the gods them-selves have their fates. And the more nature becomes autonomous, with the gods withdrawing from it, the more earnestly all expectations focus on the third function attributed to them and the moral sphere becomes their proper domain. The task of the gods now becomes to mask good the ills and shortcomings of culture, to heed the sufferings that people inflict on one another in living together, and to supervise implementation of the rules of the rules of culture with which humans find it so hard to comply. The rules of culture are themselves deemed to be of divine provenance; exalted above human society, they are extended to nature and world events.

Probably the spiritual side of humanity, the soul, which has slowly and reluctantly separated from the body down the ages, is the intended object of such elevation and enhancement. Everything that happens in this world does so in execution of the intentions of a higher intelligence that, albeit in ways (including some roundabout ways) that are hard to follow, ultimately steers it all in the direction of the good, i.e. that which is gratifying to ourselves. A benevolent and only apparently strict providence watches over us all, not permitting us to because the plaything of all-powerful, pitiless natural forces; death itself is no destruction, no return to inorganic lifelessness, but the start of a new kind of existence situated on the path to higher development. Conversely, the same moral laws as our cultures have drawn up also govern all that happens in the world, the only difference being that a supreme judicial instance watches over them with incomparably greater might and rigour. In the end, everything good will find its reward, everything evil its punishment, if not in this form of life then in later existences that start after death. This means that all life’s terrors, sufferings and hardships are destined to be obliterated; life after death, which extends our earthly existence just as the invisible part of the spectrum is appended o the visible, will bring all the perfection that guides this process, the universal goodness that finds expression in it, the justice tha...

The question is: what are these ideas in the light of psychology, why are they held in such high esteem, and (venturing shyly on) what are they actually worth?

‘You have repeatedly used the expression: culture creates these religious ideas, culture makes them avail-able to its participants, there’s something disconcerting about that; I couldn’t say why myself, it doesn’t sound as self-evident as that culture has made arrangements regarding the distribution of the product of labour or regarding rights to woman and child.’

I was trying to show that religious ideas sprang from the same necessity as all the other attainments of culture, from the need to mount a defence against the oppressive dominance of nature. There was a second motive, too, namely the urge to correct the painfully felt imperfections of culture.

‘Another point - more important, it seems to me. You make the humanization of nature proceed from the need to put an end to human bewilderment and helplessness in the face of its dreaded force, establish a relationship with it, and eventually gain some influence over it. But that kind of motive seems superfluous. Primitive man, after all, has no choice, no other way of thinking. It is natural for him (innate, so to speak) to projects his being out into the world and to regard every process that he observes as spring from beings basically similar to himself. That is the only way he can understand things. And it is by no means self-explanatory, in fact it is a remarkable coincidence, if by thus giving free rein to his natural disposition he should succeed in meeting one of his major needs.’

‘And now a third thing. You dealt with the origins of religion before, in your book Totem and Taboo. But there the picture is different. Everything is the father-son relation-ship, God is the exalted father, yeaning for a father is the root of religious need. Since then, apparently, you have discovered the element of human powerlessness and helplessness, to which the biggest role in the formation of religion is in fact generally ascribed, and now you shift on to helplessness everything that was once the father complex. Could you please tell me about this changer?

And there is little points in arguing about whether totemism should be described as a religion. It is intimately related to the later divine religions, with the totem animals becoming the sacred animals of the gods. And the earliest but most deep-rooted moral restrictions (the bans on murder and incest) spring from the soil of totemism.

The libido, following the paths of the narcissistic needs, attaches itself to the objects that promise to satisfy those needs. For example, the child’s mother, who stills its hunger, becomes its first love-object and undoubtedly also its first protection against all the vague dangers that threaten it from the outside world – the child’s first fear shield, we might say. The mother is soon supplanted in this function by the stronger father, with whom it then remains right throughout childhood. However, the child’s relationship to its father is burdened with a curious ambivalence. The father was himself a danger, possibly because of the earlier relationship to the mother. As a result, the child fears him no less than it yearns for and admires him. The signs of this ambivalence in the father relationship are deeply embedded in all religions, as is also explained in Totem and Taboo.

If as person grows older he realizes that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never manage without protection against alien superior powers, he invests those powers with the traits of the father-figure, creating for himself gods of whom he is afraid, whom he seeks to win over, and to whom he nevertheless assigns his protection. The motif of yearning for the father is thus identical with the need for protection against the consequence of human powerlessness; the defence provided against infant helplessness gives the reaction to the helplessness that the young adult is forced to acknowledge (i.e. the information of religion) its characteristics features.

To resume the thread of our investigation-what, then, is the psychological significance of religious ideas, how are we to classify them?

After rejecting various formulations, we are left with one only: they are dogmas, statements about facts and circumstances of external (or internal) reality that convey something we have not discovered for our-selves and that demand to be believed. Since they impart information about what is most important and most interesting for us in life, they are valued particularly highly.

The first is the church father’s credo quia absurdum. This is supposed to mean that religious teachings escape the requirements of reason, they are above reason. Their truth must be felt inwardly, it need not be understood.

The second test is the ‘as if’ philosophy. This says that there are plenty of assumptions in our intellectual activity that we quite agree are unfounded, even absurd. They are called fictions, but for a variety of reasons we allegedly have to act ‘as if’ we believed those fictions. This (we are told) applies with regard to the teachings of religious because of their incomparable importance as regards sustaining human society.

The answer emerges if we examine the psychical genesis of religious ideas. Such ideas, which put themselves forward as dogmas, are not deposits from experience or end products of cogitation, they are illusions, fulfilling the oldest, most powerful, most pressing desires of the human race; the secret of their strength is the strength of those desire.

We have seen already how the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood awakened the need for protection (protection by love), which the father provided, and how awareness of the continuance of that helplessness throughout life prompted the adult to cling to the existence of another (this time mightier) father. Through the gracious action of divine providence fear of the perils of life is allayed.

we refer to a belief as an illusion when wish-fulfilment plays a prominent part in its motivation, and in the process we disregard its relationship to reality, just as the illusion itself dispenses with accreditations. If, armed with this information, we return to the teachings of religion, we may say again: they are all illusions, unverifiable no one should be forced to regard them as true, to believe in them. Some of them are so improbable, so contrary to everything that we have laboriously learned about the reality of the world, that (making due allowance for the psychological differences) they can be likened to delusions.