Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)

Helena S. Gibbs
Other Freud texts on cultural theory relevant to our reading:
Totem and Taboo (1912)
I strongly recommend assigning Chapter IV (The Return of Totemism in
Childhood, particularly pp. 123-61 in Norton, 1950) since it may be hard
to make sense of what Freud does in the Future without having read it.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Helpful for consultation of terms:
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973)
Roland Chemama, Dictionnaire de la Psychanalyse (2005)
Also helpful:
Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
I. Freuds Cultural Theory
Different from sociology and other social sciences because of his method, based on the
analogy between individual and collective minds. The text is misleadingly simple, hence
the need to call the students attention to the complexity of this approach.
Totem and Taboo: At the conclusion of this exceedingly condensed inquiry I should like
to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art
converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psychoanalytic
finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our
present knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of
social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one simple concrete point
mans relationship to his father (p. 156).
1. The Structure of the Future
Two paths converge in the Future: from the Future itself, where Freud investigates the
relationship between religious belief and the human need for protection (the manifest
motives); and from T+T, where he inquires about the paradox of totemic culture and the
origins of the two taboos, of incest and murder (the deeper motives).
In relation to the first path, Freud investigates religion as a defense formation that makes
human helplessness vis--vis nature tolerable. God is mans creation, based on the

infantile experience of a protective, although strict father. Motivated by wishfulfillmentthe longing for a protective fatherreligious belief is an illusion (or even
delusion).
In relation to the second path, Freud posits the father complex as the original
motivation of religion. Here he uses a mythof the killing of the primeval father by his
sonsto account for the origins of father God religions. In the primeval horde, the allpowerful father enjoyed all the women in the clan and prohibited his sons the same
enjoyment. The sons revolted, killed their father, and ate him in order to become like
him. But instead becoming free to enjoy, they introjected the prohibition that the father
embodied while alivethus turning it into a symbolic law.
In T&T Freud tells how first the filial sense of guilt gave rise to totemic religion, where
the father was substituted by a totemic animal that became a taboo. The prohibition to
kill the totem animal later extended to fratricide and later to killing a human being in
general. Eventually, the totemic animal was replaced by father/God. Although the
original deed has been forgotten, the repressed memory of the event keeps returning,
albeit distorted. It had been commemorated by totemic meals and continues being
commemorated by the Christian communion. Patricide reappears, distorted, as original
sin. Christs sacrifice, although seen as attenuation for the original sin (i.e. the reversal of
the killing), is still a patricide in that the father religion becomes son religion.
In this second account, religion (and civilization) are an effect of the repressed remorse
associated with pre-historic patricide, which gave rise to a feeling of guilt. In this sense,
religion is posited as an infantile obsessional neurosis, hence as a symptom through
which the repressed affect returns.
The connection between the two paths, between the manifest and deeper motives:
religious belief (as illusion) contains traces of historical truth in that the original image of
God was indeed the (primal) father. Freud calls these traces historical truth because
they are unconscious memory transmitted over generations (the philogenetic dimension).
Freuds subversive contribution to cultural theory: it was the original patricide, the
impious deed with momentous consequences (Future 54) that inaugurated culture
and civilization (including religion). See also the last words of T&T: in the beginning
was the deed (161).
Freud ends the Future with an uncharacteristically optimistic hypothesis that religion has
no future: it will fade away (the symptom will dissolve) as the human race matures, the
scientific spirit will replace the religious motivations, and the commands will lose their
rigidity. By way of defending himself against the accusation that he, too, is susceptible to
illusions motivated by wish-fulfillment, he expounds his view of the ethics of science.

2. The title: The Future of an Illusion

In the course of Part 1 Freud seems to be clearing his throat, talking about present, past,
and future, but he is setting up the framework of the text. What guides Freuds
investigation of the nature and function of contemporary religion and its future is the
fundamental assumption of individual psychoanalysis: that the reconstruction of the past
(here of the deeper, Oedipal motivations of religious beliefs) enables better understanding
of the present (here of the manifest motivation of religious beliefs, the need for protection
against cruel external reality) and opens up the possibility of foreseeing, or changing the
future.
The way Freud sets up the investigation enacts the past/present/future dynamics in that
the Future never fully addresses the myth of the primal father; it only alludes to it. The
reader has to dig it out from memory (or reread T&T, written ten years earlier) in order to
understand.
3. Key notions
Instinct: A misleading translation of Trieb, drive. Freud uses Instinkt where he means
instinct. In distinction to instinct, drive has a psychic component; it persists, as it were, on
the borderline between the psychic and somatic (mind and body).
Culture and civilization: slightly problematic rendition of Kultur.
Section I: For Freud, civilization causes unhappiness but is unavoidable: it is built and
depends on the renunciation of drives and compulsion to work. Therefore, there is no way
coercion can be entirely eliminated. Neither a more just distribution of wealth nor a more
rational understanding will do away with the frustrations caused by the necessary
demands of civilization (because affect is involved).
Section II: Culture regulates drives through prohibitions: the earliest prohibitions, those
that established civilization, were those against incest, murder, and cannibalism. Major
mental advances of civilization take place when the external prohibitions become
assimilated (introjected) by individuals through the establishment of the cultural superego: the same principle is applied to all other wishes that are detrimental to civilization
(analogy between individual and collective psychic processes). Art, as one of the major
achievements of civilization, provides substitutive narcissistic satisfaction for the
renunciation of fundamental wishes.
Section III: We need civilization as defense against nature, both external (the elements,
fate) and our human nature (be it the violence of our neighbors, disease, death, or
excesses of our enjoyment). It is our helplessness vis--vis nature and harsh reality that
makes us long for a protective benevolent father/God who knows the meaning of our
suffering and who will reward us for it in the afterlife, and project this wish onto the
forces of nature.

Illusion & Primary and Secondary Processes: According to Freud, the psychic
apparatus functions through the primary and secondary processes. The former are
governed by the pleasure principle (hallucination, disavowal of reality; the realm of the
Id), the latter by the reality principle (external reality is taken into account and acted
upon; the realm of the Ego). Freud posits reality in the sense of necessity (Ananke, p.
68), that is, death. Religious belief, because motivated by wish-fulfillment and because
it cannot be proved or refuted, functions according to the pleasure principle. By contrast,
science functions according to the reality principle because it involves perceptual testing
of reality and rational elaboration (Logos, p. 69). We might note the relevance of Freuds
distinction between religion and science to the contemporary debate on the intelligent
design theory.
Note also how different Freuds notion of religion as illusion is from Marxs notion of
religion as opium of the masses; (see also his skeptical allusion to the experiment
taking place in Russia at the time of his writing the Future).
Manifest/Deeper Motives of Religious Beliefs: This is an implicit reference to the
distinction between the manifest and latent contents of dreams that is part of Freuds
general theory on the interpretation of dreams. The manifest content is what we
remember of the dream; the deeper (latent) content is usually veiled by the manifest
content and needs to be uncovered through interpretation. Freud likens this work of
interpretation to that of deciphering hieroglyphs: the manifest content of the dream can
lead us to the latent content only insofar as the right key (that has to do with the history of
that particular individual) to its interpretation is found. That is why in psychoanalysis
one can never assume that identical dreams would carry the same meaning for different
persons. Analogy with the Future: Human helplessness and need for protection are the
manifest motives of religious belief; the father complex is the deeper (because repressed)
motive.
Oedipus complex (in anticipation of the students questioning of Freuds presumption of
its universality since for him Oedipus complex is at the root of cultural prohibitions):
Universal is the fact of the prolonged helplessness of human infants and the need for
someone to take care of them in order to survive; this predicament inaugurates certain
dynamics whose outcome have a life-long effect on human subject.
The structure of the Oedipal triangle: the initial mother/child dyad + father as the third
term that takes away the mothers exclusive attention, imposes limits to their incestuous
enjoyment (i.e. the story of the primeval father as the one who inaugurates the prohibition
of incest). In the individual Oedipal situation, these three positions are functions that can
be filled by a variety of figures and sexes.
Mother-figure: the first object of desire (in the sense of libidinal object). This is because
the pleasure associated with caring inaugurates the eroticized zones (usually orifices:
feeding, cleaning, and eliminating become sexualized); thats how instinct (which has to
do with survival, hunger, thirst, etc.), common to both humans and animals, turns into

drive (which has nothing to do with survival), and how drives (those mysterious
motivations of our actions and preferences) are determined in the early infancy.
Father-figure: the first object of love (in the sense of an ideal, a model for
identification); but ambivalence, because he is both admired and feared. The
ambivalence of love and admiration on one hand, and of fear on the other, is the
characteristic dynamic of the Oedipal complex. The child desires to kill the father and
take his place with the mother but fears his punishment. The Oedipal complex is
successfully resolved when instead the child makes the father into a love object,
identifying with him in the sense of incorporating the prohibitions the father represents.
Hence the father function as a law-giver.
Historical truth (Freuds term): Freud distinguishes historical truth from a material,
factual, or rational account of an event. He recognizes that the origins are impossible to
know but something about them can be accessed through reconstruction (hence his
notion of truth as construction or fiction); although not factual, the reconstruction
contains a grain of truth about the structuring experience of human condition. (Myth and
illusion are therefore not devalued by Freud.) Historical truth is an unconscious
knowledge, whose traces are contained in the cultural memory and manifest through
rituals and traditions of peoples.
Here, the two levels of manifest and deeper contents are at work, for the (manifest)
rational account often veils the (deeper) unconscious truth, be it the case of an individual
or of society. In this vein, Freud refutes the notion that cultural prohibitions derive from
social necessity, that they are a product of human will invested with God
(commandments) to make them more solemn. This attitude, in his view, is nothing more
than rationalistic construction, the veil that hides the (historical) truth.
Freud develops the idea of historical truth more fully in his last text, Moses and
Monotheism (1939). There he shows how the transmission over generations of a psychic
trait or affect, in this case the trauma associated with killing Moses, formed certain traits
in Jews as people.
II. Relevant Passages
Civilization and Culture
(6) . . . every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is
supposed to be an object of universal human interest.
(7) . . . civilization has to be defended against the individual, and its regulations,
institutions and commands are directed towards that task.
(13-14) It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion
gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental agency, mans super-ego, takes it

over and includes it among its commandments. . . . Those in whom it [super-ego] has
taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles.
(17) As we discovered long since, art offers substitutive satisfactions . . . . they also
minister to his narcissistic satisfaction.
Civilization as Defense Against Nature
(19) She [nature] destroys uscoldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and
probably through the very thing that occasioned our satisfaction. . . . the principal task of
civilization, its actual raison detre, is to defend us against nature.
(21) In the same way, a man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons with
whom he can associate as he would with his equalsthat would not do justice to the
overpowering impressions which those forces make on himbut he gives them the
character of a father. He turns them into gods, following in this, as I have tried to show
[in Totem and Taboo], not only an infantile prototype but philogenetic one. [Infantile
prototypeour father; philogenetic prototypethe primal father.]
(23ff) Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only
seemingly stern . . . .
Analogy of Human & Cultural infancy
(26) I have tried to show that religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all
the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the
crushingly superior force of nature.
(28-29) In Totem and Taboo it was not my purpose to explain the origins of religion but
only of totemism. . . . It is, of course, my duty to point out the connecting links between
what I said earlier [in T&T] and what I put forward now, between the deeper and the
manifest motives, between the father complex and mans helplessness and need for
protection. The connections are not hard to find. They consist in the relation of the
childs helplessness to the helplessness of the adult that continues it. So that, as was to be
expected, the motives for the formation of religion which psychoanalysis revealed now
turn out to be the same as the infantile contribution to the manifest motives . . .
(30ff) But the childs attitude to its father is colored by a peculiar ambivalence . . . a
reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.
Religion / Science
(39ff) What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In
this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion
when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we
disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. . . .

But scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside
ourselves.
Historical Truth
(53 ff) But does our account of it tally with historical truth? . . .
Perhaps his descendents would even now kill one another without inhibition, if it were
not that among those murderous acts there was onethe killing of the primitive father
which evoked an irresistible emotional reaction with momentous consequences. From it
arose the commandment: Though shall not kill.
. . . the primal father was the original image of God, the model on which later
generations have shaped the figure of God. Hence the religious explanation is right, God
actually played a part in the genesis of that prohibition; it was His influence, not any
insight into social necessity, which created it. And the displacement of mans will onto
God is fully justified. For men knew that they have disposed of their father by violence,
and in their reaction to that impious deed, they determined to respect his will
thenceforward. Thus religious doctrine tells us the historical truththough subject, it is
true, to some modification and disguisewhereas our rational account disavows it. We
now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfillments but
important historical recollections.
Religion as Neuroses
(55ff) Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the
obsessional neuroses of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation
to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is
bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth . . .
(56ff) And it tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree
against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis
spears them the task of constructing a personal one.
Scientific Spirit
(67) I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions; perhaps the hopes I have confessed to
are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no
penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones,
incapable of correction. They have not the character of a delusion. If experience should
shownot to me, but others after me, who think as I dothat we have been mistaken,
we will give up our expectations.