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(a) German Editions:
1927 Die Zukunft Einer Illusion Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psycho-analytischer Verlag. Pp. 91.
1928 Die Zukunft Einer Illusion 2nd ed. Same publishers. (Unchanged.) Pp. 91.
1928 Die Zukunft Einer Illusion G.S., 11, 411-66.
1948 Die Zukunft Einer Illusion G.W., 14, 325-380.
(b) English Translation:
The Future of an Illusion 1928 London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Pp. 98. (Tr. W. D. Robson-Scott.)
The present translation is based on that published in 1928.
This work was begun in the spring of 1927, it was finished by September and published in November of the same year.
In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study he remarked on ‘a significant change’ that had come about in his writings during the previous decade. ‘My interest’, he explained, ‘after making a long détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking’ (Standard Ed., 20, 72). He had, of course, touched several times on those problems in the intervening years—especially in Totem and Taboo (1912-13);1 but it was with The Future of an Illusion that he entered on the series of studies which were to be his major concern for the remainder of his life. Of these the most important were Civilization and its Discontents (1930a), which is the direct successor to the present work, the discussion of philosophies of life which forms the last of the New Introductory Lectures (1933a), Why War