In 1859, when Darwin published ‘On the Origin of Species’, Freud was three years old and Mirza Gholam Reza Isfahani was just becoming 30. On the 22nd of January the same year, Brahms’ first concerto piano was performed in Hanover. On January 16th, the French government passed a law which fixed the note A on 435Hz. On February 10th, the English General Horsford suppressed the rebellion of Begum Hazrat Mahal, the wife of the ruler of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah, who had become the ruler of Awadh after her husband was exiled to Calcutta. She had rebelled against the British East India Company. One month later the first man in history was declared innocent based on legal insanity. On August 9th, elevator was patented. On October 29th, Spain attacked Morocco. On Dec. 15th, Kirchhoff, explained the chemical composition of the Sun. On 24th of November, Darwin published his book.
His fame in Europe made Darwin so dear to Freud that he became one of his two role-models, the other being Hannibal, who once had, thanks to his elephants, come close to bringing Roman lineage to a halt. Darwin, in his own turn, had proven that such a lineage did not lead to a noble origin anyway. In 1925, the year that Reza Shah ascended to throne, in his ‘An Autobiographical Study’ Freud wrote, ‘In my childhood, Darwin’s theories appeared extremely attractive. They were pushing forward the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.’ In his text, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,’ Freud described the three wounds inflicted on humanity's pride: when Copernicus established that the earth was not the center of the universe, when Darwin proved that mankind developed in an unbroken line from other animal species, and when he, Freud, showed that man did not have control over the most important aspects of his own mental processes. As such, Freud placed himself next to Hannibal and Darwin in the same pantheon.
On 28 January 2013, Iran sent a monkey called ‘Aftab’ to space for 20 minutes. The monkey travelled a height of 120 kilometers and was claimed to have returned in one piece. This was the first time Iran was launching a monkey into space. The launch happened 54 years after Miss Baker, the first monkey, was launched into space and 154 years after the publication of Darwin’s book or the year when Mirza Gholam Reza turned 30 and Begum Hazrat Mahal’s rebellion was suppressed and 80 years after Freud’s death. As such, Human becomes the only species who throws his relatives to the nowhere and takes them back; the same way parents throw their children in the air and catch them again so that the children like it; the same way they have thrown them in the first place to a no man’s land--their fatherland or motherland--so that they themselves like it; all holding hands and smiling while watching the Sun rise, with three Freudian wounds on their body, ‘constructing their motherland’ as the song goes. (The name of the author as homework)