The future of an illusion

When one has lived for long within a particular culture[1] and has often striven to discover its origins and the path of its development, one feels for once the temptation to tu...

We have glided unawares out of the economic plane over into the psychological. At first we were tempted to seek the essence of culture in the existing material resources and in...

We have spoken of the hostility to culture, produced by the pressure it exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it demands. If one imagined its prohibitions removed, th...

An enquiry that proceeds uninterruptedly, like a monologue, is not altogether without its dangers. One is too easily tempted to push aside thoughts that would interrupt it, and...

Now to take up again the threads of our enquiry: what is the psychological significance of religious ideas and how can we classify them? The question is at first not at all easy...

I think we have sufficiently paved the way for the answer to both these questions. It will be found if we fix our attention on the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, wh...

Having recognized religious doctrines to be illusions, we are at once confronted with the further question: may not other cultural possessions, which we esteem highly and by whi...

One would suppose that this last proposal could be carried out without any special difficulty. It is true that it would involve some measure of renunciation, but one would gain,...

‘You allow yourself contradictions which are hard to reconcile with one another. First you declare that a work like yours is quite harmless; no one will let himself be robbed of...

‘That does sound splendid. A race of men that has renounced all illusions and has thus become capable of making its existence on the earth a tolerable one! But I cannot share yo...