Sigmund Freud - Die Zukunft einer Illusion - 1927

FREUD (Sigm.). The Future of an Illusion. Leipzig, Vienna, Zürich, International Psychoanalytic Verlag, 1927. 8vo, 91 pp., [2] p. (catalogue), stapled, printed beige softcover, spine split with small loss at the head. Original edition printed on laid paper.

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

Print run limited to five thousand copies (note “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 work, still little disseminated in France, was already provoking its first controversies within the psychoanalytic movement.

The copy bears on the first board 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 Vienna publication. The flyleaf bears, in the same hand, three bibliographic references handwritten referring to volume XIV (1928) of the journal Imago, founded by Freud himself: Pfister’s article “Die Illusion einer Zukunft,” a direct reply to Freud’s text, Reik’s “Bemerkungen zu Freuds Zukunft einer Illusion,” and a third reference partially cut by the binding.

The main text is then annotated from cover to cover: passages underlined in ink and violet pencil, and above all, in the margin of every page, a translation or gloss followed by a Russian rendition of the Freudian thesis (Wissenschaft und Technik, Selbstgefühl, Gut und Böse, Leben und Tod), accompanied by personal cross-references, including a quoted line 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 sentence by sentence, cites in the margins the two critical reviews published in Imago as soon as they appeared, fills the margins with erudite annotations, pushes the analysis to a comparison with Pushkin, a sign of a double culture brought to bear on a scholarly and closely followed reading. This translation and commentary work, conducted right at the text from 1928, offers a rare testimony on the immediate circulation of Freudian ideas in the émigré Russian community in Paris. A unique and remarkable piece in the history of psychoanalysis that would deserve deeper study.

Spine slightly faded and split, small scuffs and light marks on the cover, other minor flaws.