is any worst book! It isn't even a book of Freud. It's the book of an old man. Besides Freud is dead now, and believe me, the genuine Freud was really a great man. I am particularly sorry that you didn't know him better. Freud criticizes Me Future of an Illusion IN THE SPRING OF 1927 FREUD BEGAN WORK on the Future The Future of an Illusion, finished it in September, and published it in November. It is by all accounts a slight book, unoriginal in its condemnation of religion and not very well strung together conceptually. It is also considered one of the least Freudian of all of Freud's works, for in it Freud mounts an uncharacteristically optimistic defence of Logos, Greek god of Reason, against the forces that make religion possible, namely biological instinct, infantilism, and anxiety about the external world. This is certainly not the grumpy, pessimistic, tragic Freud we find almost everywhere else in his work, including three years later in Civilization and Its Discontents. This is Freud as Enlightenment philosopher, uncompromising defender of rationality and scientific progress. Consequently, Freud's own harsh assessment of the book comes as no surprise. In October Of 1927, referring to the advance proofs of his manuscript, Freud admitted to Sandor Ferenczi that The Future already strikes me as childish, I basically think differently, consider this work analytically frail and insufficient as a confession (Correspondence 326). This is quite a litany of complaints, even fatal complaints--so much so that we might ask why Freud wrote the book and then, more curiously, bothered to publish it. After all, Freud had in the recent past set aside works that failed to meet his standards. In what follows I examine this work in light of Freud's self-critical remarks and make an unusual claim. While The Future is indeed a disappointment, Freud's self-critical remarks of October 1927 are entirely caught within its logic; indeed, they faithfully repeat its tone and rhetoric. Hence the paradox: if Freud's self-critical remarks of The Future are indeed a feature of The Future, then that self-criticism implicates and invalidates itself. It therefore follows that we shouldn't be satisfied with Freud's complaint that the work is simply childish, unFreudian, analytically weak, and insufficient as a confession. I will argue just the opposite, namely that the work is in some ways fully mature, quintessentially Freudian, and analytically unimpeachable. Moreover, The Future is abundantly confessional and, in that mode, requires that readers attend not only to its ideas but to the self-presentation of those ideas. In fact, I will attempt to demonstrate that Freud's self-presentational, self-referential, and performative gestures provide the best window on both the internal and external stakes of this work--from its hermeneutic inside to that outside called institutional politics. What it reveals is a work less concerned with religion than with a handful of seemingly tangential concerns: identity, reason, conscience, cruelty, guilt, and authority. 1. The Structure of The Future With one exception, and perhaps not even then, Freud's late work on culture and society is made possible by a brooding theoretical work of 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The one exception may be The Future of an Illusion, which is at least superficially more closely aligned in theory and spirit with The Ego and the Id of 1923. This is certainly interesting, since The Future was the very first of Freud's late cultural works. As such, it is an inaugural work that seems aberrant. Of course, it was only when The Future was relegated to the past that commentators, including Freud himself, could appreciate the shift in emphasis it announced. The best reckoning can be found in Freud's 1935 Postscript to an older work of 1925, An Autobiographical Study:' In it Freud acknowledges that a significant change occurred in the early to mid 1920s. …