4 Fantastic Films - II

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 11.21.07]

1. The Century of the Self (2002) – Pt. 2

In 1929, the stock market crashed and people simply stopped buying anything they didn’t need. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, saw the power and influence he had amassed during the 20s whither as business and government lost control of the people, now rioting against the corporations they blamed for the downturn. As the depression in America deepened, it helped to worsen the economic & social situation in Europe.

The 30s: Freud, Hitler & Roosevelt

Freud in Vienna became convinced humans were full of dangerous impulses and should never be allowed to truly express themselves. Democracy was illogical. He wrote Civilization & Its Discontents wherein he warned that people could easily be manipulated to love their leaders, while being turned against any outsiders.

His writings influenced Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who came to power promoting the concept democracy was too dangerous, chaotic, leading only to unemployment and disaster. Societies must be planned. In 1933, his government started dismantling democracy, first controlling businesses, then more and more aspects of German life.

Elected in 1932, Roosevelt had similar ideas about business but completely different ideas about people and democracy. Yes, business must be regulated and reigned in. People on the other hand were rational and could be relied upon to make wise decisions when well-informed. The Founders concept of democracy was to be preserved and enhanced under his watch.

He worked with Joseph Gallup, who devised the first-ever polls of the people to find out what they wanted and what they were feeling. Armed with their opinions Roosevelt felt it was government’s role to enact the people’s will.

Hitler’s Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, agreed with Roosevelt in regard to business: corporations must be controlled by government so that people had work and could support themselves. But when the Nazis took Austria in 1938, they employed Freud’s warning as their game plan, unleashing the deep frustration of the unemployed masses on the outsiders, the Jews.

Seeing this, Sigmund fled to Britain with daughter Anna, whom he had analyzed and then trained in his psychoanalytic techniques.

When Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide in 1936 by promising even more controls on business, corporate leaders, fearing a dictatorship, decided they had to fight back. Calling on Edward Bernays and others, they began to produce propaganda: films extolling business as the true and only engine of prosperity, news articles that were nothing more than publicity for business giving the impression that they were the movers for good not sole profit in society and thus their motives should not be controlled or questioned.

The ability to insinuate this type of pr into main-stream journalism was clever and has been used in many ways since, but Bernays’ piece de resistance was in the creation of the New York Worlds Fair in 1939. Financed by corporations such as General Electric, the Fair was a truly impressive work effectively propagating the message that only business could bring consumers what they needed offering a vision of people, not as active citizens, but as passive consumers.

Their rational thoughts were not in charge any longer, instead only their desires were, which can be then controlled by business elites.

As WWII began, Sigmund Freud died of cancer and Anna became head of the Psychoanalytic movement. A severe, virginal woman, first analyzed by her father once he discovered she was masturbating, her goal was to push her father’s theories as the only true way. She had a messianic fervor and could never admit any mistake or acknowledge any other possible path.

The 40s: the Triumph of Conformity

Just before the war had begun, a wealthy New York mother of 4 fled her divorce, bringing her children to Anna for treatment. She began an experimental therapy, strictly controlling the environment of her young patients, believing the children could be taught to conform to family and social norms, and then their egos would be strengthened. In this way they would be able to control the dangerous forces within themselves. By adapting to the society around them they would be happy. Society and thus democracy would be secure.

But Anna never questioned if the society itself was causing the irrational behavior in her patients.

After America’s entry into WWII in 1942, the military became alarmed at the large number of soldiers suffering what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder – see my article of February 13^th. A Freudian psychoanalyst, Karl Menninger, was given authority to do a massive study on American soldiers and civilians.

Using Central European refugee psychoanalysts – due to a shortage of trained analysts in the US – they probed hundreds of Americans.

They concluded Freud had been right: just under the surface, human beings were driven by primitive irrational forces – they saw a vision of human nature as incredibly destructive. If allowed to go untreated these forces could infect society, they were a threat to democracy.

They came to believe what had happened in Germany and earlier in Russia during the revolution was the result of uncontrolled drives. The Menninger study convinced political leaders who were reeling from the shocking discoveries of the atrocities committed during the War: something must be done.

In 1946, President Truman signed the Mental Health Act of 1946, which set up hundreds of Guidance Centers in the US to deal with these mental health “problems” revealed in Americans.

The experimental techniques Anna had used on the New York family were used by the Menninger brothers to re-shape the psyches of their patients, not just children as Anna had, but adults also.

The goal: to teach people to control themselves and conform by using the new “science” of psychoanalysis thus making for a better society . The Menninger clinic was founded and psychoanalytic workers were trained to use these methods at Centers situated in hundreds of towns across the nation.

The 50s: the Strategy of Desire

Business also was interested in the secret self of the American consumer. Betty Crocker Foods was marketing a new product — instant cake mixes — but it wasn’t selling well. They employed, Ernest Dichter, one of Anna’s peers and Dichter devised the first focus groups, finding there was unconscious guilt about how easy the powdered product was to use.

Using Bernays’ old-school techniques of manipulation, Betty Crocker reduced guilt by changing the instructions on the box, telling consumers they must add a totally unnecessary egg to the mix. Guilt assuaged, consumers bought Betty Croker by the millions.

Dichter’s success led business to rush to employ psychoanalysts using the new concept of focus groups to probe American’s underlying secret traits, the sexual and social secrets too embarrassing or unconscious for people to verbalize. Products now were being marketed as having a therapeutic value: using products made you more secure, and thus more successful – to your benefit and for the betterment of society.

Meanwhile, when Soviet Russia tested its first nuclear bomb, politicians turned to Edward Bernays to quell public fear. But Bernays had always felt the only way to deal with the public was by manipulating their subconscious desires and fears. At heart, he believed people were stupid and they could not be told the actual reasons they had to be fooled and tricked. He successfully argued that the public’s fears should be amplified and then used as a tool in the Cold War.

Now, American affairs began to take a turn. Forces in President Eisenhower’s Administration became convinced that American businesses must be protected at all costs, seeing business and democracy as one and the same. In 1950, a mildly socialist president had been elected in the miniscule country of Guatemala.

Up until his election, the giant US corporation United Fruit owned much of the land and had been controlling that nation’s government while running their plantations there. President Arbenz was promising a land reform and the end to the domination of this American business. United Fruit turned to Bernays who ran a propaganda campaign using falsehoods and dirty tricks to imply Arbenz was a communist puppet of Soviet Russia, while CIA operatives trained an army, hand-picked a new leader, then sent in bomber planes to paralyze the country.

After Arbenz was toppled, Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s VP, flew to Guatemala City and, in front of stacks of Communist booklets planted in the Presidential palace by Bernays, gave a speech supporting the “overthrow of the communists by the people.”

The Corrosion of Conformity

By the mid-50s, Freud’s ideas had penetrated American business, political, entertainment and journalistic spheres. Psychoanalysts were rich and influential, sought after. Once again as in the 20s, the masses could be controlled by feeding their underlying desires, but now it was the future of a stable democracy that was at stake.

People needed to conform to societal mores for the good of the whole. Their animal natures needed to be subjugated.

The foundation of our democracy is that change can and should be brought about by an informed and free citizenry, but Freud had challenged this, seeing people as incapable of deciding anything rationally. His theory was authoritarian: society would remain static unchangeable, instead the individual must adapt to it. The idea that an elite could control the masses via conditioning for their own good had triumphed. Aside from a few beatniks there was not much challenge to this brave new world.

With the success of the Guatemala coup, the CIA began to take these ideas much further. Hearing that the Soviets were possibly able to program people in any way they wished, they set out to find if they could do it, too. They poured millions into universities across the country in an effort to determine if mind control could be done.

One of the beneficiaries of the CIA’s funding, Dr. Cameron, became impatient with psychotherapy: it was taking just too long. He began experimenting with psychedelic drugs and electroshock, putting tapes under patient’s pillows attempting to change them subliminally to quickly alter human behavior. Instead, he reduced his patients to a vegetative state. In the end, all his experiments ended in complete failure.

And though Anna Freud had triumphed, her methods were not holding up. The family upon which she had formulated her theories weren’t responding correctly. Now in mid adulthood, they had become alcoholics, suffered divorces, were having nervous breakdowns. One had committed suicide.

Something was really out of whack.

[More Friday – Happy Thanksgiving]