No subject

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

by Tim Adams

Observer (March 10 2002)


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, first in 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

For more on The Century of the Self, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self#cite_note-0

EducationGuardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/medicalscience/story/0,,665552,00.html


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