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Sigmund FreudThe Future of an Illusion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1927A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Religion as an Illusion
One of the principle ideas Freud argues in his book is that religion must be understood as an illusion that exists to assist in civilization’s functioning. Such an argument goes against views of religion as sacred teachings provided by God, as Freud’s argument suggests that religion was created by humans to fulfill certain of society’s needs.
For Freud, to call religion an illusion goes beyond arguing that its teachings are merely erroneous or false: “An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error” (30). While Freud believes most illusions are false, he notes that some illusions, like the idea that a prince will marry “a middle-class girl,” are not necessarily “in contradiction with reality” (31). For Freud, whether something is an illusion has to do with its relation to “human wishes.” When false or erroneous ideas exist to fulfill certain human wishes, Freud believes that they can be considered illusions.
Freud believes that religion can be deemed an illusion due to its role in fulfilling “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” (30). In Chapter 3, Freud explores how religion emerged in response to early humans' feelings of helplessness. At the dawn of civilization, humans felt themselves to be at the whim of dangerous natural forces that seemed to arbitrarily threaten their livelihoods. Freud argues that a “humanization of nature” took place in which nature was imagined to be ruled by Gods (16). In turn, early humans gained a sense of control by imagining that they could enter a relation with these gods, which appeased them to avoid feeling the wrath of nature.
As civilization developed, humans developed deeper understanding of natural forces, and they no longer needed to imagine gods to explain it. As a result, religion’s focus switched from many gods to a single God who prevails over a heavenly kingdom for his devout followers. For Freud, this emphasis on the afterlife in Christian religion serves to “allay our fear of the dangers of life” (30). By imagining that there exists a “moral world-order” that will reward the just and punish the evil through “the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life” (30), religion dispels any of its followers’ feelings of helplessness.
The Individual Versus Society
Though The Future of an Illusion is mostly an investigation of the institution of religion, Freud grounds his analysis of religion in a theory of the role of civilization. For Freud, civilization first arises as a means of elevating “human life […] above its animal status” (6), separating humans from the state of nature from which they first emerge. Whereas animals are primarily motivated by individual self-interest, humans enter into a societal contract with each other so that they can elevate their quality of life and better ensure the likelihood of their survival. In Chapter 8, Freud outlines how initial societies came about through the desire to prohibit the practice of murder:
Insecurity of life, which is an equal danger for everyone, now unites men into a society which prohibits the individual from killing and reserves to itself the right to communal killing of anyone who violates the prohibition (40).
As civilization developed, its focus shifted towards regulating how to “control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs” as well as “the distribution of the available wealth” (6). However, Freud believes that civilization cannot ensure the creation of wealth without simultaneously providing methods for “the coercion and renunciation of [man’s natural] instinct” (7). Although humans enter into civilization to better their own lives, Freud argues that their innate instinctual urges for violence and other aggressive acts do not go away. As such, Freud believes that coercion will continue to play a central role in civilization.
However, such coercion leads individuals to develop negative feelings towards civilization, so that “every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization” (6). Freud argues that civilization will forever remain in conflict with the individual, whose violent instincts lead the individual to see society in a critical lens and sometimes seek its destruction. In Freud’s argument, religion thus emerges as one of the core methods for integrating individuals into society, turning laws into sacred institutions so as to ensure that humans follow them.
Education Based Around Scientific Thinking
In The Future of an Illusion’s final chapters, Freud proposes how civilization could provide alternatives for the institution of religion. Freud seems to acknowledge that religion plays an important role in civilization’s functioning, through its prohibition of immoral behavior. However, Freud sees religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” (43)—a behavior that emerges through the struggle to repress one’s instinct. If individual neuroses can be resolved in psychoanalysis by replacing neurotic thought patterns with rational thinking, then, Freud argues, the neurosis of religion can be similarly resolved.
Freud’s proposal hinges on replacing the religious education most children receive at a young age with what he calls an “education to reality” (49). Such an educational system would be focused around helping individuals “to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe” (49). Though Freud remains vague on what such an educational system would look like, in Chapter 10, he explains it as essentially replacing religious thinking with a scientific education based around rational inquiry. Freud believes that such a shift in education will provide individuals with the tools to repress their instincts autonomously, rather than relying on the external coercion of religious laws. In turn, Freud argues that individuals will focus on their time on earth rather than on the afterlife promised by religion, helping to transform society for the better.
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