Mass Psychology 9780141182414

　　Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as thestandard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-centuryintellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of hiscontemporaries. In "Mass Psychology and Analysis of the 'I'" heexplores the notion of 'mass-psychology' - his findings would proveall too prophetic in the years that followed. Writings such as "AReligious Experience" and "The Future of an Illusion" continueearlier work on the essential savagery of the civilized mind, and"Moses the Man" and "Monotheistic Religion" excavates the roots ofreligion and racism, which he concludes are inextricablyintertwined. This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only athis most radically pessimistic, but also at his most personallycourageous - engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents,his own identity.