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

<< Beginning of article End of article >>

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

managing the masses in an age of mass democracy.

People like Bernays were the first architects of that. And the model they used was fundamentally the pessimistic Freudian view that we are just emotional, irrational creatures and nothing more. We live in that tent. We don't think outside it at the moment. That's what we are. We think of ourselves as emotional beings. We talk about our 'selves' all the time, about what and how we feel today, how we feel about someone else … endlessly. It denies another aspect of human nature, which is being able to think outside yourself, to think about others, to think rationally.

Tyrrell: Are you pessimistic about human beings?

Curtis: No. But I am pessimistic about the pessimistic view of human nature and how dominant it has become.

Tyrrell: In your second programme, you showed how Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-war America. You described how politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise — that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. So, to stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind. This is where Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter Anna comes in.

Curtis: Yes. She and Bernays provided the ideas that were used by the US government, big business, and the CIA to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that the psychoanalysts told them lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

Tyrrell: And that idea gained power because of what had happened with the traumatised veterans of the Second World War.

Curtis: Yes. What happened was that, during the war, 49 per cent of all soldiers evacuated from combat were found to be suffering severe mental health problems. In desperation the army turned to psychoanalysts. It was the first time such attention had been given to the feelings and anxieties of such a large number of ordinary people. At the heart of the experiment were some refugee psychoanalysts from central Europe. They worked with American psychiatrists, using techniques developed by Freud to take the men back into their past. They were convinced that the breakdowns were not the direct result of the fighting. They believed that the stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories of violent feelings and desires, which they had repressed because they were too frightening. To the psychoanalysts this mass of traumatised soldiers was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory that, underneath, human beings were driven by primitive and irrational forces.

Victory in the Second World War was celebrated as a triumphant reassertion of democracy. But, in private, many policy makers were worried about the implications of the analysis of the soldiers. It seemed to show that underneath every American was an irrational, potentially very violent creature. Moreover, what had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out. Policy makers believed that the complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war showed just how easily these irrational forces could break through — and overwhelm democracy.

The psychoanalysts were convinced that they not only understood these dangerous forces but that they knew how to control them too. They offered to use their techniques to create democratic individuals, because democracy, left to itself, couldn't be relied on to do this.

Tyrrell: And the source of this idea was not only Sigmund Freud, but also his daughter Anna.

Curtis: Yes. She had fled with her father to London before the outbreak of war and, after he died, became the acknowledged leader of the psychoanalytic movement. She saw it as her job to fulfil her father's dream of getting his ideas widely accepted throughout the world. Freud believed
that civilisation developed to control our animal instincts. People couldn't be allowed to be free. Anna believed it was possible to teach individuals how to control these inner forces. She had come to believe this through analysing children — above all, the children of her close friend, Dorothy Burlingham, an American millionaire who had fled a failed marriage. She brought her children to Anna because they were suffering terrible anxieties and were violent and aggressive. Anna was convinced she could help these children.
From her analysis of them she developed a theory of how to control inner drives. She believed that, if children could be encouraged to adapt to the society around them, then, as they grew up, the conscious part of their mind — termed the ego — would be greatly strengthened in its struggle to control the unconscious forces: the id.

Tyrrell: And she believed that, if a child did not conform, its ego would be weak and prey to the dangerous forces of the unconscious.

Curtis: That's right. And the Burlingham children did settle down and returned to America. The analysis seemed to be a great success. But the remarkable thing was that this one case became the template for a giant social experiment to control the inner mental life of the American population.

In 1946, President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, born directly out of the wartime 'discoveries' by psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered from hidden anxieties and fears. The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society. And so a vast project began in America to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the masses. Psychological guidance centres were set up in hundreds of towns staffed by psychiatrists who believed it was their job to control the hidden forces inside the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.

At the same time, thousands of counsellors were trained to apply psychoanalysis to marriage guidance. And social workers were sent out to visit people's homes and advise on the psychological structure of family life.

Tyrrell: It sounds like a horror story! And you showed that this was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America. Psychoanalysts moved into big business to use their techniques, not just to create model citizens, but model consumers. The Institute of Motivational Research was set up, to explore why people behave as they do, and buy as they do. And then psychoanalyst Ernest Dichter set up the first 'focus group', to discover the hidden motivations of people, in connection with particular products.

There is that marvellous story you tell about the Betty Crocker cake mix. Dichter got American housewives to free associate, and concluded that they had unconscious guilt about the ease and convenience angle, which was to be the selling point of the mixes. The solution was to give them a greater sense of participation. So, the cake mix required that the user had to add an egg. And that made sales soar, because the egg served as an unconscious symbol of a gift, added by the housewife for her husband, and therefore lessened the guilt about using the shortcut of a cake mix!

Curtis: That's right. Corporations and advertising agencies all started rushing, then, to employ psychoanalysts. They called them 'the depth boys'. What happened was that a group of psychoanalysts took what Bernays had begun and invented a whole range of techniques to get inside and manage the unconscious mind of the consumer. By the early 50s the ideas of psychoanalysis had penetrated deep into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful and had many famous politicians, writers and show business celebrities as patients. And, as their ideas took hold, a new elite began to emerge — in politics, social planning, and the business world. What linked them was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational. The way to manage a free market democracy, like America, was to use their psychological understanding to control this irrationality in the interests of everyone.

Then, after the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, fear of nuclear war and communism gripped the United States. The American government again turned to Edward Bernays for help, and he advised President Eisenhower that appeals to reason in the face of the communist threat were pointless. Instead, to win the Cold War, these mass fears should actually be encouraged and manipulated — but in such a way that they could be used as a weapon in the battle against communism. Rational argument was fruitless.

Tyrrell: I was brought up in those Cold War years, and your films explained a lot about why America acted the way it did in those decades. You tell, for instance, of how the United Fruit Company, which owned vast banana plantations in Guatemala and in effect controlled the country through pliable dictators, turned in desperation to Bernays for help when a new democratically elected socialist was elected president and refused to play ball. PR was used to paint him as a dangerous communist recruited by Moscow, and news media were bombarded with 'information' that Moscow intended to use Guatemala as a base to attack America — "a Soviet outpost in our backyard!" In the end, Eisenhower agreed to the Guatemalan leader's secretly being toppled, and it was seen by American people as a great triumph when he was forced to flee the country. Chilling stuff.

Then, in the third film, you went on to show how, in the 1960s, the influence of Freudian ideas in America was challenged by a group of psychotherapists who believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. Rather it should be encouraged to express itself. Could you sketch in what happened?

Curtis: Well, firstly, psychoanalysis fell out of favour. It became impossible to hide the fact that it just didn't work. Some famous patients, like Marilyn Monroe, committed suicide. Anna Freud was discredited too. One of the Burlingham children, whose analysis had apparently been so successful, actually came back from America as an adult and committed suicide in Freud's London house, where Anna still lived.

Tyrrell: A very symbolic act.

Curtis: There was also a very famous experiment, funded by the CIA, in which the head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr Ewan Cameron, tried to remove the dangerous inner forces from mentally ill people by bombarding them with drugs and ECT to erase their memories of the past, and then replacing them with positive material, played to them on tape. All he ended up with was dozens of people with memory loss, and the realisation that it was harder to manipulate the human mind than he’d thought.

Such events marked the end of the political influence of psychoanalysis. At the same time, people on the political left in America became fed up with having, as they saw it, ideas implanted in their minds by big business and the state, a process directly stemming from Freudian ideas, particularly from Anna Freud and Bernays. The Hidden Persuaders, a powerful book by Vance Packard, accused psychoanalysts of reducing people to puppets by manipulating their desires. Students in the mid-60s started accusing corporate America of brainwashing people to keep them docile, while pursuing the Vietnam War.

Tyrrell: The authorities stamped on those protests viciously. I remember the dreadful scenes at the Democratic Convention in Chicago —

Curtis: Yes, where police turned on demonstrating students, and then the killing of four students at Kent State University, 18 months later. In the face of such implacable opposition the left fell apart as a political force. Individuals began to look for new ways to bring about change, thinking that, if enough people could change themselves, then the state too would change. They turned to the ideas of renegade psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Fritz Perls.

Tyrrell: But Reich was dead by this time.

Curtis: Yes, but one of his students, Fritz Perls, had set himself up as a psychotherapist guru in a little rundown motel called Esalen on a remote part of the Californian coast — Big Sur. Perls developed a form of encounter group in which he pushed individuals to publicly express the feelings that society had told them were dangerous and should be repressed.

What Perls and others working at Esalen believed was that they were creating ways that allowed individuals to free their minds of social constraints. Out of this, they thought, would come new autonomous beings independent of society, and this proved to be an enormously attractive idea to millions. In the late 60s and early 70s, thousands flocked to the Esalen

READ ON >>

<< PREVIOUS PAGE

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.