Sigmund Freud - Die Zukunft einer Illusion - 1927

FREUD (Sigm.). The Future of an Illusion. Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich, International Psychoanalytic Verlag, 1927. Large octavo, 91 pages, [2] p. (catalogue), soft cover, beige printed wrappers, spine split with small loss at the head. Original edition printed on laid paper.

Freud (1856-1939) here presents his most radical book on religion: a collective illusion born from the child’s need for security in the face of natural forces, perpetuated by adult humanity through the desire for a protective father.

Limited print run of five thousand copies (noted “Erstes bis fünftes Tausend” on the verso of the title); the work appeared just as the Paris Psychoanalytic Society had been founded (1926) and Freud’s oeuvre, still little disseminated in France, was already sparking its first controversies within the psychoanalytic movement.

The copy bears on the first front cover and on the title page the autograph signature of its first owner, “Victor Walter,” dated “Paris, May 1928”: the book was acquired in Paris only a few months after its Viennese publication. The flyleaf bears, in the same hand, three bibliographic references in manuscript referring to volume XIV (1928) of Imago, the journal founded by Freud himself: Pfister’s article “Die Illusion einer Zukunft,” a direct response to the Freud text, the “Bemerkungen zu Freuds Zukunft einer Illusion” by Reik, and a third reference partly cut by the bookbinding.

The main text is subsequently annotated from end to end: passages underlined with ink and purple pencil, and especially, in the margin of each page, a translation or gloss followed by a Russian rendering of Freud’s thesis (Wissenschaft und Technik, Selbstgefühl, Gut und Böse, Leben und Tod), accompanied by personal cross-references, including a quotation from the “Ver” of Pushkin transcribed in the margin.

Thus the copy constitutes an exceptional firsthand document on Freud’s reception outside the German-speaking world at the end of the 1920s: Victor Walter, settled in Paris but composing his glosses in Russian, translates the German text word for word, cites in the margins the two critical reviews published in Imago as soon as they appeared, and fills the margins with erudite annotations, pushing the analysis to a rapprochement with Pushkin, a sign of a double culture put to the service of a learned and sustained reading. This translator’s labor and commentary, conducted as closely as possible to the text since 1928, offers a rare testimony to the immediate circulation of Freudian ideas in the Russian émigration in Paris. A unique and remarkable piece in the history of psychoanalysis that would deserve detailed study.

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