Reviews and Comments

A very dear professor hyped this book for years. When I finally managed to put my hands on it, it was worthy of all that hype.

There's nothing groundbreaking about it—neither this is its intent. Paulo Beer simply wishes to reopen a constructive, horizontal exchange with science that Lacanian psychoanalysis slowly elided during its history.

I get it. It must've been quite interesting and influential during its time.

But it isn't anymore. If anything, this serves as an archetypal example of the worst ways of deriving theoretical conclusions from psychoanalysis (or importing conclusions from other fields into it).

Despite its unending theoretical and technical flaws and mistakes (sometimes because of them), Freud's work still manages to be serviceable to this day. To me, this sets him apart from other early psychoanalysts such as Jung and Ferenczi.

Freud's Eurocentrism and his love for speculation get the best of him here. Religion can't be subsumed to the repression of Hilflosigkeit⁠⁠—it is too culturally and historically diverse for that. But Die Zukunft einer Illusion serves well as a symptomatic text of European modernity itself, almost analogic to it in its structure.

Like most essay collections, it oscillates between brilliant portions and pure filler.

Thankfully, a few outstanding sections here and there eclipse the very frequent moments of its characters just being utterly boring and pretentious.