The shock of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and the helplessness and disorientation we feel as contemporaries reminds us of Sigmund Freud's commentary on the outbreak of the First World War in Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod (2015), which underlines the experience of disillusionment. But our perplexity is different now, as are our illusions, the collapse of which we must contend with today. We lived in an Automat Empire, behind a Silicon Curtain, and now have to realise that the military aggression against Ukraine has thrown us off the dream of a quasi-automatic civilisational progress. It is brute force that once again wants to rule our social, and increasingly our inner, lives. It is good that we have woken up from this dream. Because if psychoanalysis is right about one thing, it is that we should face reality. The reality that the process of humanisation cannot be ordered at the click of a button but must be done every day.