ABSTRACT
The Future of an Illusion —a transitional paper, as Ethel Spector Person suggests—leads into Freud's more complex consideration of culture in Civilization and Its Discontents. In the Future of an Illusion, Freud expressed confidence, says George A. Awad's, that "religious irrationality could be replaced by reason, by a sensible social contract" and that the teaching of psychoanalysis could transform a culture rooted in illusion. J. Anderson Thomson, Jr, a Darwinian fundamentalist and supporter of Freud's anti-religion argument—"its fierce wisdom, its insistence on an objective analysis of religion, and its rousing defence of science"—focuses upon the contemporary nightmare of religious belief gone awry. Freud's desha and karma are obvious. Europe is between two World Wars and the concerns of the time—fear of loss of individual autonomy to the socialist collectivity and the anti-religious stance of radical rationalism—both inform and mould Freud's thesis.
