Particular attention is paid to Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna and nephew Edward Bernays who promoted Freud’s ideas and theories and who (especially in Bernays’s case) were happy to offer their knowledge and services to the US government for dubious ends. Corporations, government agencies and social planners alike employed psychoanalysts to examine human motivation, hidden and unconscious desires and fears, with the aim of manipulating these forces for profit or to control people’s thinking and feeling. Horrified by the apparent irrational behaviours displayed by people across Europe, Asia and North America as a result of the Great Depression and the political instability and war that followed, the US government sought to investigate and mould the psychology of the American people through the use of psychoanalysis. The tale is picked up in the context of World War 2 and the Shoah (Nazi-Jewish Holocaust) and what German popular support for Adolf Hitler’s government implied about human nature to Western governments. This episode continues Curtis’s investigation of the ways in which Freudian psychoanalysis was hijacked by governments and corporations as a tool to control the public and shape society to achieve goals these agencies desired.
Adam Curtis, “The Century of the Self (Episode 2: The Engineering of Consent)” (2002)
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