This book includes Freud's two famous studies, "Civilization and Its Discontents" and "The Future of an Illusion," two studies where Freud, without abandoning the field of psychoanalysis, ventures into anthropology and sociology to tackle two fundamental problems: the progress of civilization at the expense of human happiness and the acquisition of an illusory happiness through religion.

In an exceptionally pedagogical, instructive, and comprehensible manner, as he had previously demonstrated in "Totem and Taboo" and "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," which belong to this cycle of books dealing with problems of worldview and civilization, Freud literally takes us by the hand and shows us the world. And he does this with the manner and confidence of the great teachers and enlighteners: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Darwin, but also Spinoza, Voltaire, and Diderot. Few books, and among them is generally acknowledged "Civilization and Its Discontents," give the reader the conviction that they have truly become wiser after reading them.