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Title: The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay ISBN: 0-393-00831-2 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Introspective
Comment: I would have a more in depth review but I lost my book before I finished it; and have forgotten a lot of it.
Freud is often criticized for not being scientific; maybe they are right.
The reading makes a good introspective reading; I find that questioning myself as I read to see if it is true for me is often revealing.
His writing is as that of a philosopher. At least some of his arguments seem sound to me (abstractly). At the least the book will get you thinking (if you let it).
Rating: 5
Summary: Freud's outlook on religion
Comment: Freud is the founder of a movement in Psychology and science that had created a whole "climate of opinion" leading well into our day. He has given us with Psychoanalysis a tool to look into the deeper layers of our minds, a language with which to communicate our understanding of how the mind functions, and a useful Psychotherapeutic tool.
His insights are especially useful because he was also very honest, courageous, and pushed the limits of rational thinking.
His handling of religion in the "future of an illusion" is very scholarly but is biased by his rigid adherance to his psychoanalytic outlook. He sees religious feelings as attempts to come to grips with painful realities of the loss of the father, fear, undue aggression, and so forth. It is at best in his view a sublimation of these myriad negative forces. He also sees it as threatening to rational thinking and as potentially mind-tranquilizing.
Freud fails to see that many people embrace and practice religion because of some genuinely positive feeling. Most people are not religious because they are fearful, rageful, or stupid. If that was the case it probably would have died long time ago.
Religion is very self-reinforcing, which mean many people actually like it.
To my mind, Freud did not have a first-hand experience of these positive roots of religion (Maybe he was smoking too much, or got caught up in his trade of strict rationalism). The needs of contact, comfort, containment,and control that religion can afford are not necessarily sublimations. They can be end by themselves for the pious to enjoy. Moreover, religion probably appeals to mental faculties other than the one we use for pure rational thinking.
Having said that, the book is truly worth 5 stars as it gives a glimpse into the working of a great mind. Freud is telling everything the way he sees it. But you must feel free to disagree, even with Freud.
Rating: 5
Summary: Scientifc Analysis of Religion
Comment: .
This is Freud's scientific analysis of religion. Religion, along with government and social, moral and ethical codes, or, civilization act as removing man from his true instinctal and destructive nature into a civil society. Religion is a neccessary illusion derived from men's wishes.
Freud can be applauded and admired as a great thinker and psychoanalyst. This is an essential book to read. Yet Freud misses out on the mystical experience, the religious or psychal ability to perceive the irrational, the awe of the numenous, the perceived knowledge apart from rational thinking and intellectual analysis. Or in Rudolph Otto's title, "the idea of the holy."
Freud ends his book, on page 71 with:
"No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion
it would be to suppose that what science
cannot give us we can get elsewhere."
So Freud was amazingly accurate on one religious foundation: human ability to create wishes and to civilize himself and in contrast Freud was missing a great deal in the mystical, the non-rational element, thus he discarded all religion as a universally accepted solution to the conflicts that arise in childhood relation to the father. While this may have some validity, it misses completely the symbolic mythological teachings that attempt to convey what is claimed universal to be real religious experience. This is where Freud leaves off and Carl Jung continues.
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Title: Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay ISBN: 0393301583 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: July, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Totem and Taboo; Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Peter Gay ISBN: 0393001431 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1962 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Ego and the Id (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Joan Riviere ISBN: 0393001423 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Gregory Zilboorg ISBN: 0393007693 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 1990 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud ISBN: 0394700147 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 January, 1955 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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