THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL LIBRARY EDITED BY ERNEST JONES No. 15 THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION SIGMUND FREUD, M.D., LL.D. TRANSLATED BY W. D. ROBSON-SCOTT PUBLISHED BY HORACE LIVERIGHT AND THE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS MCMXXVIII _Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_ TRANSLATOR’S NOTE I wish to express my thanks to the Editor and to Mr. James Strachey for reading through this translation and making many helpful suggestions. W. D. R.-S. CHAPTER I 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 turn one’s attention in the other direction and to ask what further fate awaits this culture and what transformations it is destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several considerations. Above all, by the fact that there are only a few people who can survey human activity in all its ramifications. Most people have been compelled to restrict themselves to a single, or to a few, spheres of interest; but the less a man knows of the past and the present the more unreliable must his judgement of the future prove. And further it is precisely in the matter of this judgement that the subjective expectations of the individual play a part that is difficult to assess; for these prove to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own experience, on his more or less hopeful attitude to life, according as temperament, success or failure has prescribed for him. And finally one must take into account the remarkable fact that in general men experience the present naïvely, so to speak, without being able to estimate its content; they must first place it at a distance, _i.e._ the present must have become the past before one can win from it points of vantage from which to gauge the future. Footnote 1: The German word _Kultur_ has been translated sometimes as ‘culture’ and sometimes as ‘civilization’, denoting as it does a concept intermediate between these and at times inclusive of both.—ED.