BBC's Century of the Self

In the Spring of 2002 BBC2 broadcast a remarkable four part series called Century of the Self, the subject of which was the influence of Sigmund Freud's ideas on the capitalist societies of the West. The first programme outlined the career of Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew. Bernays was a press officer for Woodrow Wilson at the peace conferences in Europe following World War I, his job being to present Wilson in the most favourable light possible in order to boost his popularity with the American public. By this time the word propaganda was already gaining a sinister implication in the West due to its association with communism, and Bernays coined the term Public Relations as a positive alternative. Back in America Bernays set to work for major corporations, with one of his most spectacular successes being to help break the taboo against women smoking. He paraded a group of attractive young ladies through New York smoking and bearing the slogan 'March for Freedom'. Anyone criticising the idea of women smoking would now appear to be against freedom, and the numbers of women taking up the habit shot through the roof.

After this success Lehman Brothers and other big New York banks financed the development of department stores, confident that they could use the techniques pioneered by Bernays to persuade people to purchase a range of products that left to themselves they may very well not have bothered with. This period also saw the introduction of the techniques of product placement and psuedo-scientific product endorsement so familiar to us today. All of this dubious activity in the capitalist economy was one of the main factors leading to the bubble which ended in the Wall Street crash of 1929, which was in turn followed by the statist New Deal. But how does this relate to Freud's ideas? Bernays was familiar with his uncles theories regarding the unconscious, believing that people were motivated more by irrational sexual and violent urges than by rational thoughts, and therefore democracy was not a matter of allowing people to choose for themselves between a range of different policies, rather they had to be guided towards the 'correct' choice by an elite composed of people in command of the theory. People just like Edward Bernays. According to Century of the Self Joseph Goebbels, an admirer of Roosevelt's New Deal, had read Bernays' book on Public Relations and agreed with its principles.

The Western elites saw the rise of the totalitarian ideologies as evidence of the breaking through of the barbarism which lay beneath the surface of the masses. More evidence of this was thought to come from the American troops returned from Europe and the Far East, amongst whom was detected a very high rate of mental illness. These factors, along with a determined promotional effort by Sigmund's daughter Anna, led to a renewed interest in the political and social and economic application of Freudian ideas, leading to the establishment of the Institute for Motivational Research founded by Ernest Dichter to provide Big Business with data regarding the motives and desires of consumers. It was here that the focus group was first used as a means of eliciting 'deeper' levels of information by getting people to discuss their personal feelings and desires rather than their rational thoughts. The resulting information was then fed into the marketing campaigns organised by the corporations, and similar campaigns organised by political organisations. Bernays himself took part in the propaganda aspect of the Cold War, particularly in the case of Guatamala, where the CIA and the US power elites in general had taken offence to a government that wanted to put the interests of its own people before those of the American corporations. Bernays manipulated the press in order to smear the Guatamalan government as communist and to build up an initially non-existent opposition. In due course the government was replaced by one more amenable to US interests. The parallels with the fate of Allende's government in Chile in the late 60s (and perhaps with recent events in Venezuala) are obvious. It is also a mark of how highly regarded these techniques were that the CIA funded various projects in the Psychology departments of US Universities. Psychoanalysis was however begining to be seriously challenged. Vance Packard's famous book The Hidden Persuaders was first published in the 1950s, and the Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse developed his own distinctive criticism of psychoanalysis, arguing that whilst it was predicated on the view that a persons problems were the result of maladjustment to external social reality, it may in fact be the case that the root of the problem lies in the nature of a corrupt and alienating society.

The psychoanalytical theories of Wilhelm Reich also fed into this stream, despite his being a convicted fraudster with some very strange beliefs. Reich argued that the release of orgasmic sexual energy was neccessary for the mental health of the individual and society. After the defeat of the New Left in the political conflicts of the late 1960s and early 70s, Reich's theories gained a mass influence as many former activists turned in on themselves. The thinking now was that perhaps you didn't need to go on demos., hand out leaflets etc., what was required was to change oneself, though not neccessarily in the traditional, transcendental sense. A myriad groups emerged, all promising that they had the correct technique for the re-discovery and re-moulding of the Self. Groups such as the Esalen Institute attempted to change peoples perception of themselves and others through the use of encounter groups. The example used in the series was of an encounter between a group of white liberals and a group of black militants. It didn't quite go to plan, the whites being harangued and abused by the angry and alienated blacks. Market researchers quickly picked up on the new individualism, with former leftists like the Yippie Jerry Rubin adopting the new cult of the Self. In the UK Matthew Freud, another descendant of Sigmund, took the use of Public Relations to a new level of ruthlessness in the service of the corporations, and in the promotion of the new religion of celebrity. Political researchers further discovered that many similar types, people who had been on the left in the 60s and early 70s, were by this time likely to support a style of politics which appealed to their sense of individual identity and promised to get the state/government off their backs and to redirect subsidies towards the genuinely needy alone. Politicians like Thatcher and Reagan adapted their message to appeal to this group with spectacular success. The Democratic and Labour parties later adopted the focus group , encouraging the participants to discuss their feelings about various issues, but not to say whay they thought about spacific policies. This approach gave birth to an emphasis on the wants of swing voters, many of whom were believed to belong to the strata of new individualists. This is the consumer democracy where voters are treated like potential customers for a new soap powder; the business manipulates peoples desires for profit, the politician for votes.

The overwhelming preponderance of Jews in the psychoanalytical movement was not explicitly referred to, but was nevertheless clear enough to all but the least observent viewer. The conclusion to be drawn from this series is clearly that Freud's ideas have been used as a weapon of psychological, political and social control by the Big Business and political elites that rule the West. This can only intensify as Western societies continue to disintegrate. The only answer is eternal vigilance and the constant exposure of the means, methods and personnel of manipulation.