Hi All
Just a little bit more..
How Freud got under our skin
>From advertisers to politicians, everyone wants to appeal to our sense of
Self. And, as a new TV series shows, it was Sigmund Freud's nephew who
turned the analysis of our subconscious into a boom industry: PR
Tim Adams
Sunday March 10, 2002
The Observer
Sigmund Freud may have invented the Self, full of unspoken dreams and
desires, in 1900, but it was his American nephew, Edward Bernays, who
packaged it and put it on to the market. Suddenly, everyone wanted one. And,
of course, no one wanted one that was quite the same as anyone else's.
Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891, had worked at the end of the First World
War as a propagandist for America, and after 1918 he decided to carry on in
this role. But he invented a brand new name for for his profession: public
relations. He later turns up throughout the century - he lived to be 103 -
as a kind of Zelig, shaping the American mind, with clients including
Presidents Coolidge, Wilson, Hoover and Eisenhower, as well as Thomas
Edison, Caruso, Nijinsky, scores of the largest corporations and many
foreign governments. But his great genius was to first sell Uncle Siggy's
ideas of the unruly subconscious to the American public and to American
business.
Bernays brought his uncle's books to America, found a publisher for them and
discovered ingenious ways to advance the significance of their ideas in the
mainstream press. He believed, like his uncle, that man was controlled by
his irrational desires; he also saw that by applying the principles of
psychoanalysis, these desires might be controlled and manipulated on a vast
scale, for power and profit.
Bernays was among the first to understand that one of the implications of
the subconscious mind was that it could be appealed to in order to sell
products and ideas. You no longer had to offer people what they needed; by
linking your brand with their deeper hopes and fears, you could persuade
them to buy what they dreamt of. Equipped with our subconscious wish-lists,
we could go shopping for the life we had seen portrayed in the adverts.
Happily, as Bernays realised, Uncle Siggy's creation - the great lasting
invention of the twentieth century - arrived at a time when business, and
American business in particular, through the techniques of mass production,
and planned obsolescence, was suddenly able to satisfy those shifting
desires. Like those little Japanese dolls that get bought at Christmas, and
need feeding and nurturing, he knew that the Self, once owned, would prove
very expensive of attention.
It required all sorts of therapies and counselling, but most of all it
needed to express itself - and one day it might want to express itself in
one way, and the next it might want to do it in another. It was fickle, the
Self, a follower of whim and fashion, and its only constant seemed to be
that urgent aggressive fact of wanting.
So, in Bernays's future, you didn't buy a new car because the old one had
burnt out; you bought a more modern one to increase your Self-esteem, or a
more low slung one to enhance your sense of your sex-appeal. You didn't
choose a pair of running shoes for comfort or practicality; you did so
because somewhere deep inside you, you felt they might liberate you to 'Just
Do It'. And you didn't vote for a political party out of duty, or because
you believed it had the best policies to advance the common good; you did so
because of a secret feeling that it offered you the most likely opportunity
to promote and express your Self. 'Our people,' said Herbert Hoover, 'have
been transformed into constantly moving happiness machines.'
All of this - the way in which Western society has made sacred the feelings
and desires of the individual, and how several generations of the Freud
family has been at the heart of that crusade - is the subject of a
remarkable BBC series which begins next Sunday. The Century of the Self is
written and produced by Adam Curtis, the inspired and curious documentary
essayist, whose previous work includes Pandora's Box , the wonderful series
about the science of the Cold War, and, most recently, The Mayfair Set, his
astonishing account of the reckless casino capitalism of James Goldsmith and
his cronies, which fuelled and dictated Thatcherism.
The idea for this series was originally suggested to Curtis, appropriately
enough, by a PR, Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of Eric, another great shaper of
centuries. Hobsbawm mentioned to Curtis in passing Bernays's own
distinguished ancestry and it set his mind working. At the time, he was
plotting out a history of spin in the twentieth century; the Freud
connection seemed the perfect link, and so it proved.
By following in detail the story of Bernays - and subsequently the
blood-related stories of Anna Freud, who did so much to propagate her
father's ideas, and to a certain extent, Matthew Freud, the Blairite PR guru
- Curtis examines the ways in which an idea, the modern idea that our
feelings and desires are the most important thing about us, has taken on the
status of a religion and changed the nature of our democracies.
Bernays himself emerges as a remarkable character. He not only was able to
sell the American people anything - he made it cool for women to smoke and
for children to love soap and for eggs to accompany bacon - his skills also
could win elections and change the course of foreign policy. In one
extraordinary sequence, Curtis shows how Bernays single-handedly toppled the
popular Guatemalan government with one or two publicity stunts, playing on
Cold War fears, and acting on behalf of a banana corporation.
He shows, too, how the principles of Freudianism, initially through Bernays,
had a profound effect on corporations and governments, and led directly to
the new all-pervasive ideas of market research and focus groups -
psychoanalysis of products and ideas. He then examines how those forces have
shaped the way we live and think and vote today.
'What I set out with,' says Curtis, 'was a clear journalistic aim: to
challenge the idea that our feelings are what we are. I wanted to show how
they are merely an aspect of what we are and that they had been purposefully
exaggerated by vested interests, both corporate and political, to make them
seem like our whole humanity.'
In proving this, and in showing, as Bernays predicted and helped to
engineer, how American and British democracy has evolved from supporting a
liberal elite which told you what was good for you, to supporting another,
market oriented elite, which keeps you in check by constantly giving you the
things you feel you want, Curtis, however, found himself presented with a
problem.
'It's much too easy really just to claim the old democratic patrician
culture was better,' he says. 'People in a consumer society probably have
more fun, certainly have more things, and we find those things comforting,
enjoyable, and who is to say there is anything wrong with that? But we have
also, perhaps, become trapped by an idea, and it has got into every corner
of our lives.'
If you look around you, it is hard not to agree with this observation. The
sovereignty of the Self is reflected back on us from every angle. Apart from
the fact that the purchase of every canned drink or deodorant requires us to
locate the hero inside ourself, our television, for example, is increasingly
dedicated - from Trisha to Changing Rooms to Pop Idol - to Self-help and
Self-improvement and Self-creation. We find collective comfort in celebrity;
we like to colonise another Self, and treat it like our own. Our bestseller
lists, from Harry Potter to Bridget Jones to A Boy Called It, reflect
different kinds of wish-fulfilment.
Business culture, which expects more and more of its employees' time, also
spends more and more money on making those employees feel self-empowered and
self-motivated. The internet, solipsism incarnate, is our fastest growing
leisure pursuit, and the fastest growing sector of it is pornography: your
wish is its command key. In the near future (by 2010), it seems, the Self
will enjoy its own unencumbered space. If you run a society based on the
satisfaction of desire, then, of course, there should be no surprise when
conventions based in part on duty, such as marriage, begin to collapse.
Forty per cent of British households will be home to single adults. Our news
does not often ask us to think; it requires us to emote, and our
politicians, on the advice of their research and PR men, do likewise.
In Bernays's terms, this is all pretty much as it should be. Fearing the
unleashed subconscious, Freudians believed that psychoanalysis could
normalise people for democracy. Bernays, particularly after the rise and
fall of the Third Reich (Goebbels was an assiduous student of his methods),
thought that the safest way of maintaining democracy was to distract people
from dangerous political thought by letting them think that their real
choices were as consumers. He believed, and argued to Eisenhower, that fear
of communists should be induced and encouraged, because by unleashing
irrational fears, it would make Americans loyal to the state and to
capitalism.
In the wake of the Soviet atomic tests in 1958, Eisenhower for the first
time made conspicuous consumption the first duty of the free: 'You Auto
Buy,' he sloganed. This was, of course, the very same exhortation made by
politicians on both sides of the Atlantic after 11 September. Your
democratic duty in the light of global terror was to indulge your Self: go
shopping, save the world. The interests of the free market and the pursuit
of personal freedom were indistinguishable.
Curtis's series shows how these ideas were imported to British political
circles, firstin the wave of individualism that attended Thatcher's
economics, and subsequently how the Left, in both Britain and America, was
made aware that it could never be elected without appealing to these forces.
In one mesmerising piece of television, Dick Morris, special adviser to Bill
Clinton, explains how he talked the President into shifting his second
election campaign away from big issues - tax and health and welfare - in
order to listen to the comparatively tiny concerns of key marginal focus
groups. Clinton subsequently ran the entire campaign on the findings of that
research - devoting himself, for example, to legislation for a digital
device that would screen pornography from family televisions - and won an
election he had looked certain to lose.
Having found that these methods could win them power, the Blair and Clinton
administrations also believed that the sophisticated application of focus
groups might prove a way to govern: they hoped that they could tap directly
into the wishes of the people, that it would be a new form of very direct
democracy, and one where all your wishes came true.
'In fact,' Curtis suggests, 'what we are seeing is a kind of pseudo
democracy, which listens all too carefully to the population, but not really
to its rational thought, and allows itself to be shaped by that. New Labour
increasingly keeps on being trapped in the focus groups. They are listening
to feelings, whims and desires of the Self and, of course, these desires
change. Their early focus groups showed railways, for example, to be a very
low priority, so perhaps for that reason they did not invest. But the real
question remains - whether they could have ever come to power without
tapping into this desire for self-interest.'
In this respect, the genie of the Self has already escaped the bottle. One
logical conclusion of Curtis's argument is that business will eventually
take over the functions of government, since it is much better, more
effective, at simply satisfying people's desires than any politician ever
was. This is something that Bernays predicted. In an interview when he was
100, the father of public relations allowed that he may have created
something of a monster.
'Everyone has a press agent now,' he said, 'or a media consultant or
communications director or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes,' he
suggested, 'it seems sort of like having discovered a medicine to cure a
disease, and then finding out that so much of it is being administered that
people are getting sick from the overdoses.'
The BBC series The Century of the Self will be screened in the spring
on 17/3/02 10:44 pm, Platt Holden at pholden@sc.rr.com wrote:
> Hi Rod:
>
> Seems to me you might have been manipulated by a Giant-sponsored
> TV program. Isn't that possible? If not, why not?
>
> Platt
>
>
>
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