On reading, or rather rereading, this book by Freud, I learned that he began its composition in May 1927 with a view to bolstering the finances of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. From this point of view, the book is certainly important, although most of the published comments relate to Civilisation and its Discontents , which was written a year or two later. In The Future of an Illusion , Freud argued that man could not do without religion, in spite of his constant progress in the mastery of nature. Drive renunciation is therefore essential.
Religion thus struggles against the impossibility of achieving the necessary cultural progress.
Here he showed his readers with remarkable simplicity that Copernicus had described the place of the Earth in the universe, that Darwin had revealed to us that man was but a stage in the evolution of species and, finally, that psychoanalysis had proved that we were not the masters of our mental functioning. Freud wrote this text at a particularly fruitful time. Its quality defined a good state of health. However, psychoanalysis inflicted the cruellest of wounds by demonstrating to him that his introspection allowed him to control neither his thought nor his acts. Freud seemed to be suggesting that man should accept this wound, and in this respect he remained faithful in particular to Haeckel, who had reminded him of the paradigm that ontogenesis reproduces phylogenesis .