Freud discovered that man does not even command his own mind. Lacan showed that not even desire fully belongs to us. Decades later, Edward Bernays - Freud's own nephew - used that very discovery to manufacture the consent of entire nations, and changed the course of the twentieth century.
In The Last Man, psychoanalyst and philosopher William Marcos weaves together, with clinical and historical rigor, a journey through Freud's three narcissistic wounds, the psychology of the masses, the two world wars, Freud's lost battle against medical corporatism, Lacan's erudition, Bernays's engineering of consent, and the silent convergence between cultural hegemony and economic liberalism - arriving at an unsettling conclusion: the contemporary subject is, with near-clinical precision, exactly what Nietzsche prophesied in 1883.
Written with the cynical honesty that only the most rigorous psychoanalysis allows, this is not a comforting book. It names the mechanism that turns freedom into fatigue, and invites the reader to pay, at least once, the price of remaining vertical.
For anyone who already suspected that contemporary freedom was smaller than promised - and finally wants to understand exactly why.