Book description
Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard
scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he
scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In Mass
Psychology and Analysis of the 'I' he explores the notion of
'mass-psychology' - his findings would prove all too prophetic in the
years that followed. Writings such as A Religious Experience and The
Future of an Illusion continue earlier work on the essential savagery
of the civilized mind, and Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion
excavates the roots of religion and racism, which he concludes are
inextricably intertwined.
This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only at his most
radically pessimistic, but also at his most personally courageous -
engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents, his own identity.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939.
As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the
twentieth century.
