ABSTRACT
With The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud turned more systematically to the core issues of his long intellectual life: the origins of religion and morality, the complex interactions between human nature and cultural forces, and the course of our culture’s future development. In addition, Freud sought to confront what he believed was the gravest threat that lies before us: mounting discontent, increased hostility to civilization itself, and the threatened release of violent aggression in the pursuit of illusory forms of salvation. But Freud’s analysis of our condition, and his unmasking of “illusory” solutions opened up new problems. By analyzing the mechanisms by which aggression has hitherto been controlled, Freud may have undermined them. By unmasking the erotic and infantile nature of our attachment to leaders, and thereby our attachments to one another, Freud might have weakened the emotional attachment to any authority to the point that he risked the opposite condition: “the psychological poverty of groups.” With our political and religious illusions unmasked, with no hope of redemption or consolation, how were the psychoanalytically enlightened to live under such a burden? In his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, Freud finally confronted this problem.
