Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] To put the matter in Marxist terms: if Freud is 'Althusserian' in his awareness of the chronic miscognitions of everyday life, he also shares something of the Enlightenment view of such false consciousness of the early Marx and Engels. And the exemplary Freudian text for this 'enlightened' critique of ideology is his late enquiry into religion, The Future of an Illusion.

  Religion, in Freud's opinion, fulfils the role of reconciling men and women to the instinctual renunciations which civilization forces upon them. In compensating them for such sacrifices, it imbues an otherwise harsh, purposeless world with meaning. It is thus, one might claim, the very paradigm of ideology, providing an imaginary resolution of real contradictions; and were it not to do so, individuals might well rebel against a form of civilization which exacts so much from them. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud contemplates the possibility that religion is thus a socially necessary myth, an indispensable means of containing political disaffection; but he considers this possibility only to reject it. In the most honourable Enlightenment tradition, and despite all his elitist fear of the insensate masses, Freud cannot bring himself to accept that mystification must be an eternal condition of humanity. The idea that a minority of philosophers like himself may acknowledge the unvarnished truth, while the mass of men and women must continue to be the dupes of illusion, is offensive to his rational humanism. Whatever good historical purpose religion may have served in the 'primitive' evolution of the race, the time has now come to replace this myth with the 'rational operation of the intellect', or with what Freud terms 'education in reality'. Like Gramsci, he holds that the secularized, demythologized world view which has so far been largely the monopoly of the intellectuals must be disseminated as the 'common sense' of humanity as a whole.

  To dismiss this hope as the dream of some dewy-eyed rationalist would be to evade the courage and challenge of Freud's text. For no modern thinker is more bleakly aware of the extreme precariousness of human reason – of the grim truth, as he comments in this work, that 'arguments are of no avail against (human) passions', and that 'even in present-day man purely reasonable motives can effect little against passionate impulsions'.12 For all his wary scepticism of the claims of reason, however, Freud has the imagination to ask himself whether unreason must always inevitably reign. The intellect, he remarks, may be powerless in comparison with the instinctual life; but though its voice is a 'soft' one, it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. 'The primacy of the intellect', he writes, 'lies, it is true, in a distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one' (238). Nothing, he claims, can in the long run withstand reason and experience, and the affront which religion offers to both is all too palpable. In the teeth of his own conservative alarm at the smoulderingly rebellious masses, Freud remains loyal to the democratic kernel of a mystified Enlightenment rationality. There is no doubt, in this work at least, as to whether it is such rationality, or a sceptical view of it, which is on the side of political progressivism.