FREUD, Sigmund.
Die Zukunft einer Illusion.
Leipzig/Vienna/Zürich, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927.
8vo, pp. 91, [1] blank, [3] advertisements, [1] blank; occasional pencil markings, and paper uniformly very slightly yellowed, but otherwise clean and fresh throughout; in the original buff cloth, title in blue on spine and upper cover; light marking to covers, and spine wearing with slight loss to cloth at head and foot.
First edition, in the first issue of 5000 copies, of Freud’s work on the origins and future development of religion (the ‘illusion’ of the title), centred on the notion of religion as, in one form or another, wish-fulfilment and the longing for a paternal figure as a response to a realisation of helplessness. In some ways a condensation of many of the themes found throughout Freud’s work, its reputation is mixed: Harold Bloom, in The American Religion, called it ‘one of the great failures of religious criticism’.
