ABSTRACT
The Future of an Illusion was written in 1927; Freud’s next book, Civilization and Its Discontents, was completed in 1929. Though both books take as their subject the conditions of civilization, they differ radically from one another. The first book embodies a somewhat old-fashioned, liberal Enlightenment point of view. In the name of scientific rationalism, it attacks religion, characterizes it as wishful illusion, and urges readers to advance beyond their own infantile desire for an all-powerful protective father and enter a new age, one in which human beings, “educated to reality,” come to rationally reconstruct, through the aid of science, the precepts and social arrangements of civilization in the furtherance of their own objective social interest. (Such an optimistic vision, his friend Oscar Pfister charged, led Freud into an illusion of his own, an “illusion of a [rationalistic] future” 1 ). By contrast, Civilization and its Discontents exudes an outlook of melodramatic angst, and envisions a future dominated by discordant forces threatening the annihilation of humankind. This book’s troubled analyses depict the human condition as inherently tragic, and conclude that if civilization can be saved, it will not be by reason and science, but rather by the instinctual power of love.
