book review Read a review on the last days of Sigmund Freud, its sideline goes like: danger surrounded Freud in Nazi-occupied Austria, why did it take him so long to see it? The book by Andrew Nagorski, Saving Freud: the rescuers who brough him to freedom, offered to tackle this question in 1938. Whatever controversy brought by psychoanalysis, Freud knew the dark undercurrent of human behavior and he was critical of the false security offered by our wishful illusions....
Freud already answered this question, of course, when he said that whereas Darwin decentered the human animal from the apex of creation, Copernicus decentered the earth from the center of the universe, Freud had decentered humanity in itself. No longer was the human immanent. Lacan’s answer is perhaps even better: “That is why the unconscious was invented—so that we would realize that man’s desire is the Other’s desire, and that love, while it is a passion that involves ignorance of desire, nevertheless leaves desire its whole import”...