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

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

Institute. From being obscure and fringe, it quickly became the centre of a national movement for personal transformation.

Tyrrell: The human potential movement.

Curtis: Yes. And, as the movement grew, the leaders of Esalen decided to try and use their techniques directly to solve social problems such as racism.

Tyrrell: And the film vividly showed what a disaster that was, when they held encounter groups in which blacks and whites confronted each other! Never-
theless, this movement took off in a big way when business realised it could be exploited.

Curtis: By seeking to create new beings — free of the psychological conformity which had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics — they created the 'me' generation. Corporate America was worried at first. For instance, fewer students bought life assurance on leaving university, because of the new concern with today, not tomorrow. Also, how could they provide products which expressed people's difference, when corporate America specialised in making large numbers of same? But they soon realised that the irresistible rise of this expressive self, rather than being a threat, was in fact their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. And once again they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read people's inner desires — focus groups. But of course few individualists were interested in taking part in focus groups!

Tyrrell: You showed, however, that there was one entrepreneur who cleverly found a way of mass producing 'self', which eventually turned the corner for big business: Werner Erhard, who started 'est' — intentionally spelt in the lower case so as to be 'unpretentious'. He — and others who copied what he was doing, like Exegesis in Britain — claimed they could teach 200-odd people at a time to find out how to 'be themselves' on weekend courses. The core idea he promoted was that there was no fixed, innate self — which meant you could be anything you wanted to be.

When you interviewed him, did you get the impression he really believed all that stuff? The way you edited it, it was a bit like he said, "Oh I think it's all just a joke".

Curtis: The remarkable thing about Werner Erhard is that he does think it is a joke, but he would say, that is the point. He is the ultimate relativist. Where those who came before him, the human potential people at Esalen, believed that there was an intrinsic true and good self at the centre of all human beings, Werner Erhard truly believes that we are nothing. He thinks that we are trapped by the idea that we have a self and defusing the notion that you have a true self is empowering. He thinks the self is endlessly fluid and can be reinterpreted again and again. But what I think he didn't realise was that, by doing that to people, he also liberated big business because it meant that business could say, "You can have any identity you want, be whatever you want to be, and we will sell you whatever you need to express your identity". So, ultimately, I think the joke is probably on him.

Tyrrell: I know people who went on his course and came out incredibly greedy and materialist and exploiters of other people. Families were wrecked by it.

Curtis: I think what he was about was producing the most solipsistic, self-centred people you could possibly imagine. Really he was teaching people just to think in terms of their self — like, the world outside is not real — and telling them they could create their own reality by the strength of their own personality. It is extreme narcissism, but a very powerful idea that, arguably, led to the new self expressive consumerism which rose in the 80s and dominated life in the 90s. We have arrived at a point where you are sold one product to express yourself one day, then encouraged to express yourself differently the next day through another product. Many 'est' graduates also went into management consultancy and so the idea that you can make the world you want, and manage it, became part of the ethos of self expression which arose.

So Erhard was one of those who encouraged the puffing up of that selfish aspect of human nature which is irrational and not very nice. But he was also a great salesman and immensely charming.

Tyrrell: Oh yes?

Curtis: So maybe I was charmed!

Tyrrell: [laughs] Yes. Ah well, a lot of highly dangerous people are charming!

You also looked at Maslow's idealistic notion of 'self-actualisation', which became such a mantra in counselling and education circles. This is the idea that people can, if given enough 'space', become completely self directed and free of society. That what is inside us is a kind of seed that just needs enough space to grow fully. It has been called romanticism because it ignores the impact of life experiences on the brain — education, stress, etc — and how that affects who we become.

Curtis: Maslow thought that somehow, by producing people who are free of society, you produce good human beings — the obverse of Freud's view. Maslow believed that human beings' inner core is good, not selfish and irrational. But in essence it is still a Freudian idea — that fundamentally we have this emotional self. I would say that the emotional self is just one aspect of human nature; they both believed that it's the core of it. For Maslow, Carl Rogers and their followers, self actualisation is the process which allows that core to break free from social constraints and obligations, from thinking about other things than itself.

One example of its naivety is how easily and quickly it was exploited and used. Maslow's idea of the 'hierarchy of needs', for example, became the basis of what is now called ‘lifestyle marketing’, which is so powerful throughout the western world and underpins modern consumerism. A team at the Stanford Research Institute, which worked for corporations and governments, thought his hierarchy could be used to categorise society not by class but by inner drives.

Tyrrell: Oh, yes! They sent out huge numbers of questionnaires with penetrating personal questions about people's personal motivations — and received an astounding 86 per cent return rate because people just loved filling it out! The results allowed business to predict particular individuals' lifestyles — type of house, type of car, etc. If a new product expressed their personal values, they would buy it.

Curtis: Although Maslow and his followers were very keen to be seen as anti-Freudians, they are just offering another version of the same thing — that at our core we are just emotional, irrational beings.

Tyrrell: It certainly seems naive in the light of what has, in the last 10 or 15 years, been discovered about how the brain works — the relationship between emotion and thought. But what I hadn't fully appreciated until your programmes was just how much these ideas influenced big business and politics. We knew how they had affected, and in many ways held back the development of, psychotherapy and counselling, but didn't appreciate the wider implications you revealed. Do you think that the huge rise in depression and anxiety disorders in the last 50 years is linked to the rise of the self? Or is that just a coincidence?

Curtis: I think that, if you are arguing that there has been a rise in the increasingly isolated self in society, there is a parallel with the rise in rates of anxiety and depression.

But there is another way of looking at it which is that, as the self rose up in importance in society, it only revealed what had previously not been noticed because private feelings about the self were subsumed by much more complicated social structures; kinship networks and extended families and so on. What people suffered from had just been hidden away. Because of the breakdown of families and social structures, these feelings are more noticeable. Perhaps human beings, as someone once said, have always lived lives of quiet desperation. It is just that that quiet desperation is a little more obvious these days because people are isolated. We must be careful not to think there was a golden age when people lived in nice communities. Mostly, life was repressive and horrible. People probably repressed and held down those feelings of anxiety, depression and desperation.

Tyrrell: Mmm … That sounds Freudian to me! In your last film, you showed how the belief that the satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is
our highest priority was seized upon by left wing politicians to regain power. How did that happen?

Curtis: I think what is interesting is how late it happened. Conservative politicians, especially those who believed in the free market, have a very pessimistic view of human beings anyway, so they picked up on it easily. Ronald Reagan was elected on the slogan of 'let the people rule'. He wanted to "let people loose". Margaret Thatcher flourished on the idea of giving people what they wanted through the free market. Both Reagan and Thatcher encouraged business to take over the role of fulfilling people's desires. But those politicians who grew up in the postwar era with the belief that the state could and should be run by a paternalistic elite who knew what was good for people — could rationally imagine what people needed, inspire them and take them there — were very late in getting it.

I think two things happened. Firstly, the economic crisis of the 1970s showed the paternalistic way had failed. By the early 90s, the left were faced with the problem that their electorate, as Clinton's advisors said to him, thought of themselves as consumers.

Tyrrell: You show very clearly the big part that strategy adviser Philip Gould played in modernising the Labour party. He commissioned focus groups to find out the electorate's underlying feelings and, on the basis of his findings, tried to persuade Labour to make concessions to the aspirational classes. John Smith, at the time Shadow Chancellor, refused to have anything to do with such ideas and insisted Labour, if elected, would put up taxes to fund
public services. He continued to reject Gould's ideas when Kinnock resigned and he himself took over leadership of the party, so Gould took himself off to join Clinton's campaign in America. Clinton bought the idea that people didn't want to pay raised taxes to fund benefits for wider society but couldn't honour promises not to raise taxes because the financial implications turned out to be too huge. He started losing support and, in desperation, took the advice that he would have to turn politics into a form of consumer business — identifying and meeting inner desires.

Curtis: That's right. So all the traditional policies were dropped and he concentrated on meeting the concerns of swinging voters — one of which was finding ways to stop children watching pornography on TV!

Tyrrell: And that ploy was a great success! Short term policies with no vision. And it started happening in Britain too. When Blair became leader of New Labour in 1994, Gould was his strategy adviser. He ran almost nightly focus groups, again concentrating on the swinging voters and the issues that mattered to them. When Blair was first in office, he didn't pay much attention to the railways because focus groups hadn't identified them as a high priority. But as soon as the rail crashes started happening, everyone blamed New Labour for not putting more money into the railways. They couldn't have, of course, because they had no long term strategy — just what mattered in the short term, to win the voters.

Curtis: Politicians had a complete failure of imagination and of nerve, particularly in Britain and America. They had nothing to offer and they still haven't. So they turned to focus groups and consumer techniques, I suspect, with a sense of blessed relief. In effect, they said, "We haven't got any
ideas so let's ask people what they want and give it to them."

Tyrrell: And now they are trapped with no room for manoeuvre. Their 'policies' are increasingly dictated by short-termism and selfishness — consumerism.

Curtis: Policies are decided in committees that are inhibited by reports from focus groups —

Tyrrell: — And are always biased by urges to gain political advantage and please the people, which means no government can ever be in tune with reality. It has always seemed to me that democracy can never really work well, for the running of a complex country, because most people aren’t interested in or informed about the big issues, and are simply guided by slogans. It is the nature of democracy that the view of someone who is highly knowledgeable about the healthcare system, for instance, carries no more weight — in terms of votes and the future of the NHS — than someone who knows, or cares, nothing about it. But it is better to have a democracy with its limited ideas than a terrible tyranny, of course; yet perhaps there are other ways it could be done.

Curtis: Individuals who do have ideas are in business. Businessmen say, "We are much better at gratifying people's irrational desires because our profits depend on it. So, why don't we supply those services of government that government now seems so bad at delivering?" I think that is the next thing to happen.

Tyrrell: What, that business will take over government?

Curtis: Well, that's increasingly what this government wants business to do with the schools, prisons and hospitals. You see, once politicians adopted a consumerist model of people, they realised they were not experienced in operating it. So business people, those to whom it comes naturally to treat people as consumers, come to the fore and gain more power.

Tyrrell: One thing that strikes me about the type of society that we have now is how difficult it has become to think of other ways of being human or developing. Students today, for example, are sort of pulled into consumerism because they are lumbered with huge debts from the day they enter university. It used to be thought that young people need a period of time in their life to look at other ideas and philosophies and thoughts, and meet with people from other backgrounds and with different interests and that they should be allowed to change direction if inspired to do so, changing a degree subject in midstream, perhaps. And this was considered OK. But now being consumers of education and the pressure of having to pay off those debts is actually making it harder for students.

Curtis: It seems to me that consumerism is a way of managing human beings as much as it is a way of selling them things. The roots of it lie very explicitly back in the 1920s. We have forgotten this but it grew out of an ideological idea about managing the masses at a time when democracy was emerging. Back then they argued about controlling in a totalitarian way, fascist or communist. But another way to control people was found — through consumerism. So consumerism is an ideological response to the need government has to control the masses, and it is a very successful way of managing people, and your students are a very good example of that.
I think some historical crisis, like a war, will come along and change everything. I certainly wouldn't trust those in charge of focus groups to run a war. When Philip Gould was asked whether he would use focus groups to run a war, he said, "Yes". You see, these people believe — and this is crucial — that consumerism fed by focus groups is a new and much better form of democracy. What I was arguing in the films was that this is a very limited idea of democracy. I am torn because I don't believe in the old paternalistic elite either, which is why I left the series open ended.

New Labour are faced with a dilemma. The system of consumer democracy that they embraced in order to get elected has trapped them into a series of short-term and often contradictory policies. As more and more things go wrong, there are increasing demands that they fulfil a grander vision. People expect them to use the power of government to deal with problems of growing inequality and the decaying social fabric of the country. But, to do this, they will have to appeal to the electorate to think outside their individual self interest. We have forgotten that we can be more than that — that there are other sides to human nature. And now, although we feel we are free, in reality we, like the politicians, have become the slaves of our own desires.

Tyrrell: Perhaps some slaves are escaping …

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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.