A seething mass of desires: Freud's hold over history

Ivan Tyrrell explores with Adam Curtis how Freudian ideas are flourishing in business and politics today and insidiously influence all of our lives.

Tyrrell: The Century of the Self was for me and many others I've spoken to, by far the best TV series for a long time. In four 60 minute programmes on BBC2, you showed how the ideas behind psychoanalysis were responsible for the development of mass consumerism and self absorption in western society. You also explored the link between consumerism and politics in ways that were terrifying to contemplate. How did you come to piece this amazing history together?

Curtis: I'm a journalist who stumbled over a story, not a historian. For me it began when I came across the intriguing information that Freud's nephew Edward Bernays had invented public relations, specifically using his uncle's ideas about human beings and human nature. From there came the idea that I should look at how Freud's ideas have been used generally in social and political ways, not telling the history of psychoanalysis but the history of how psychoanalytical ideas have been applied. When I started to research this I found lots of different stories about the application of psychoanalytical theories which had been missed out in the history of it, largely because psychoanalysis, as I am sure you know, is a very hermetic world …

Tyrrell: … a closed system of thought.

Curtis: Yes, both in the way it treats patients and also in the way psychoanalysts think of themselves. So what I did was to pull together various stories about how psychoanalysis was applied in different ways by some powerful 20th century figures in both business and politics.

As that started to come together, I began to make connections with another idea I was working on — about how today we all talk about our 'selves'. A hundred years ago, people didn't do that — a few rich people did, and you read about it in novels, but most people didn't. The question lurking at the back of my brain was "Why do we now always have this obsession with the self?" This is so dominant at the moment in society, whereas the sense of doing your public duty, or fighting in a war or being involved in a political revolution, where your self is absorbed into a grander project, has all but disappeared. Now the self is put on a pedestal and psychodynamic therapists are the 'cheerleaders' for this process in many ways. But they don't realise it and are very touchy about it, as I am sure you have found out.

Tyrrell: Yes, we certainly have.

Curtis: So I fitted the two together and I put forward an argument that one of the agencies of the rise of the self, and the use of the self both commercially and politically, was, and still is, Freud's ideas about human beings. His ideas still define our time politically and socially. So that is how The Century of the Self came about.

Tyrrell: Yes, most people think that Freudian ideas are dead in the water now. Scientists, certainly by the 1960s, stopped taking him seriously. But you show his influence is still very much alive.

Curtis: I think it is very important to say that the Freudian thing did not die out. Many say that psychoanalysis itself is pretty much on its knees: it’s over because it doesn't work as therapy. But the Freudian concept of human beings is still dominant in our society. In essence, Freud said that we are all driven by our inner emotions and by irrational feelings within us — that is his model of what we are. What I traced in the series was how that view of human beings suited certain groups in society — above all, people who made a living by selling products to the masses and in whose interest it was to develop consumerism. Following on from that was the rise of a form of politics which modelled itself on consumerism.

At the end of the last film I argued that Freud's view of human beings was fallacious. I am not saying that we are not emotional and irrational, but that that is just one aspect of our human nature. We have other sides to us which can be rational and more objective. We can think about things outside ourselves, not purely in terms of our self. And we can be inspired by things outside ourselves. That capacity, it seems to me, is all but lost. I am not sure it has been lost forever but it doesn't serve the purposes of the current power structures to encourage it at the moment —

Tyrrell: — which want us to meekly earn, spend, and endlessly shop for stuff we mostly don't need.

Curtis: Yes. So what I tried to do in the series was to trace how that side of human nature was discovered, worked on, agitated as it were, puffed up, given life — so that it became possible to appeal to it emotionally. The crucial person in this was Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who lived in New York. He began his career as a press agent for visiting show-business celebrities on Broadway. In 1915 he organised Diaghilev's Russian Ballet tour of America. He had many famous clients like Caruso, Ziegfeld and Nijinsky. He was so good at his job that he was asked to join the War Department's Committee on Public Information, the propaganda arm of the US war effort and, following the armistice, he participated in a controversial press mission to the Peace Conference in Europe. He went on to conduct a highly successful campaign to promote re-employment of returning veterans. Indeed, his effective use of publicity and the enlistment of civic groups earned high praise and the thanks of countless American ex-servicemen.

It was about this time, just after the First World War, that Bernays sent his uncle Sigmund some cigars, which were hard to come by in Vienna at that time. To thank him, Freud sent back a copy of his book, The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and Bernays read it. He took out of the book the idea that humans were fundamentally emotional and irrational creatures. He immediately recognised that the corollary, of significance for anyone involved in public life, was that it was pointless to appeal to the masses rationally if you wanted to get them to support something.

Tyrrell: Didn't the profession of public relations begin as a direct result of Bernays' reading Freud's book and realising that it offered a way to manipu-
late the masses?

Curtis: Yes. Bernays was in the propaganda business and he wanted to sum up this notion of Freud's and promote it, but he didn't want to use the
word 'propaganda', which had bad connotations — especially since the war, when people realised that propaganda was used to present selected information or promote a doctrine and that it was basically misleading, dishonest and exploitative. So he coined a new term, 'public relations', for the same thing.

He began to argue that the future of marketing, advertising and politics was to find ways of appealing to the emotional side of people through symbols, through the language of metaphor, in order to get people to react in the way that you wanted, quickly. He was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous attention-grabbing PR stunts, to the eroticising of the motorcar. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Tyrrell: But why did the big corporations pay him so much attention?

Curtis: They believed they had a huge problem. Mass production had become so efficient and was becoming bigger and bigger, and those running the corporations were worried about overproduction — that people might actually stop buying things once they had what they needed. So when Bernays started saying, "I can connect with people emotionally and manipulate how they feel about themselves so they will buy whatever I make them unconsciously desire," they listened. Up until that time, the working classes only bought things that they needed. But, with Bernays' input, people started to be sold something not because they needed it but because they would feel better if they had it. The new creed was: you buy things to express your inner sense of self.

Tyrrell: And it was also Bernays who launched Freud on the world in a big way?

Curtis: Yes. He arranged for Freud's work to be published in America in the 1920s and promoted his uncle's books, using all the new tricks of PR. Without Bernays, Freud would have been an insignificant figure and would never have had the influence he did — or have become well known to the public. It was public relations that made him famous, not academic credibility.

Tyrrell: You talk in the films a lot about 'needs' and 'desires'. What distinction do you make between them?

Curtis: I think that, from the 1920s onwards, people have become confused, by people like Edward Bernays, about the difference between needs and wants. For example, one of his most notorious 'successes' was to make it socially acceptable for women to smoke. He believed that you can persuade people to act irrationally if you link products to their desires and feelings, so he linked smoking to the women's suffrage movement, calling cigarettes 'torches of freedom'.

Tyrrell: Yes, that was absolutely fascinating, and horrifying, when you think of the massive rise in cancer among millions of women, as a result. Can you elaborate?

Curtis: By the mid-1920s, smoking had become commonplace in the United States but tobacco companies realised that cigarette sales would soar even higher if they could entice women to smoke in public. At the time, women had just won the right to vote, widows were succeeding their husbands as governors of such states as Texas and Wyoming, and more were attending college and entering the workforce than ever before. While women seemed to be making great strides in certain areas, socially they were still not achieving equality with their male counterparts. As far as smoking was concerned, women were only permitted to smoke in the privacy of their own homes. Public opinion, and certain legislation at the time, did not permit women to smoke in public. In 1922 a woman from New York City was arrested for lighting a cigarette on the street!

It was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, who recognised that an important part of his market was not being tapped into, and he hired Bernays to expand the sales of his Lucky Strike cigarettes to women. Bernays applied his talent to the problem. Recognising that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Bernays used this as the basis for his campaign. He consulted Dr A A Brill, a leading New York psychoanalyst, to find out the psychological basis for women's smoking. Brill said that cigarettes were equated subconsciously with penises, which women were envious of. He gave Bernays the idea that, if he could connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, smoking in public could be sold to women, who would then have their own penises. So he came up with an idea for presenting cigarettes as 'torches of freedom'.

Bernays proceeded to stage an event at the annual Easter Day Parade, held in New York and attracting thousands, to introduce this totally irrational notion to American womanhood and it caused a national stir. He got a group of rich debutantes to agree to hide cigarettes in their clothing and, at a given signal, light up together. He then informed the press this would happen and of course photographers were present in droves and stories appeared in newspapers throughout America.

Bernays' efforts had a lasting effect. He persuaded female film stars to smoke ostentatiously on screen, thus endorsing smoking cigarettes as respectable and desirable. Thereafter, women began to smoke in millions because he had linked smoking to feelings of independence, power and freedom. It may have made some of them feel like that but, of course, they were just being exploited and made poorer and unhealthy by becoming addicts to a powerful drug.

Tyrrell: The force of Freud's ideas, and the way they were taken up and reacted to, also seemed to give people permission to be selfish. In the 1920s, they were being told, "Look, this is how you can express yourself. By buying such and such, you can be yourself." That allowed personal desires to override what was of common benefit in appalling ways.

Curtis: Yes. I don't say there was a conspiracy but that consumerism had an ideology just as much as fascism or communism did. It was another way of

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This article first appeared in Volume 9, No, 3 (2002) of the Human Givens journal.

ADAM CURTIS has made a number of political-historical documentary series for the BBC. Besides The Century of the Self, these include Pandora's Box — six fables from the age of science, The Mayfair Set, and The Living Dead. He has won three BAFTA awards, twice for Best Documentary Series and once for Most Original Programme.

IVAN TYRRELL is a psychotherapist, lecturer and editorial director of
Human Givens.