English Workshop: Century of the Self Workshop. Part 2 of 4

The Century of the Self. 2 of 4

The Engineering of the Self 2002

Episode 1 - 0:00
Episode 2 - 0:58:32
Episode 3 - 1:57:14
Episode 4 - 2:55:53

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Let's say a word about dreams.

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We all have thoughts which we never knew we had.

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They are too uncomfortable or too incompatible

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with our adult self to be remembered.

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Yet they are often disturbing, rumbling under the surface like lava in a volcano.

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The dream is the royal road to these thoughts.

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The royal road to the unconscious.

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This is the story about how Sigmund Freud's ideas

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about the unconscious mind were used by those in power

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in post-War America to try and control the masses.

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Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest

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that hidden deep within all human beings

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were dangerous and irrational desires and fears.

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They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts

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that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

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To stop it ever happening again,

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they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

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At the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna

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and his nephew Edward Bernays who had invented the profession of public relations.

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Their ideas were used by the US government, big business and the CIA

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to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people.

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Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work

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and create a stable society

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was to repress the savage barbarism

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that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

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The story begins in the middle of the fierce fighting of the second world war.

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As the fighting intensified the American army was faced by an extraordinary number

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of mental breakdowns among its troops.

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Forty-nine percent of all soldiers evacuated from combat

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were sent back because they suffered from mental problems.

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In desperation the army turned to the new ideas of psychoanalysis.

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They made a film record of the experiment using hidden cameras.

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It says here on your record that you had headaches and that you had crying spells.

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Yes sir, I believe that your profession is calling it nostalgia.

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In other words, homesickness.

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Yes sir.

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It was induced when shortly before the war I received a picture of my sweetheart.

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I'm sorry I can't continue.

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That's all right.

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It was the first time that anyone had paid such attention

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to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people.

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At the heart of the experiment

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were a number of refugee psychoanalysts from central Europe.

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They worked with American psychiatrists to guide and shape the project.

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When I first came to America I worked in the psychiatric service

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with soldiers trying to rehabilitate them.

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And I travelled in the train from the east coast to the west coast

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I was enormously curious

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what goes on in all of those little towns that the train is passing.

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After my years in the army I knew exactly

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what everyone was doing in the little towns.

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Because I saw so many people who came from there

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and I understood their aspirations, their disappointments and so forth.

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So it was as if somebody invited me

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to a privileged tour into the inner soul of America.

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I'm not doing this deliberately, please believe me.

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I do believe you.

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This display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.

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- I hope so, sir. - Sure, it gets it off your chest.

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Well sir, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm very much in love with my sweetheart.

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She has been the one person that gave me a sense of importance

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in that through her cooperation with me

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we were able to surmount so many obstacles.

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The psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud

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to take the men back into their pasts.

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They became convinced that breakdowns were not the direct result of the fighting.

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The stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories.

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These were memories of the men's own violent feelings and desires

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which they had repressed, because they were too frightening.

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To the psychoanalyst it was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory

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that underneath human beings were driven by primitive irrational forces.

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World War II was a major shattering experience

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because I discovered the enormous role of the irrational

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in the life of most people.

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Now that I can say that I learned that

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the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America

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is very much in favor of the irrational.

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That there's much greater unhappiness, much more suffering,

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it's much more...

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a sad a country than one would imagine it

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from the advertisements that you get,

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a much more problematic country.

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Victory in the second world war was celebrated as a triumph of democracy,

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but in private many policy makers were worried about the implications

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of the analysis of the soldiers.

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It seemed to show that underneath every American were irrational violent drives.

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What had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out.

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The complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war

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showed just how easily these forces could break through and overwhelm democracy.

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Planners and policy makers had been convinced

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by their experiences during World War II that human beings could

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act very irrationally because of this sort of teeming

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and raw and unpredictable emotionality.

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The kind of chaos that lived at the base of human personality

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could in fact infect the society, social institutions

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to such a point that the society itself would become sick.

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That's what they believe happened in Germany, in which the irrational,

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the anti-democratic went wild.

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It was a vision of human nature as incredibly destructive

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and they were terrified

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that Americans would in fact behave that way

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or were capable of behaving that way and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.

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So what is needed

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is a human being that can internalize democratic values

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so they are not shaken with the storm

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and psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done.

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It opened up new vistas

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as to how the inner structures of the human being

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can be changed so that he becomes a more...

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vital free supporter and maintainer of democracy.

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Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces

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but they knew how to control them too.

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They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals

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because democracy left to itself failed to do this.

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The source of this idea is not only Sigmund Freud but his youngest daughter Anna.

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She had fled with her father to London before the outbreak of war,

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and after he died Anna Freud became the acknowledged leader

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of the world psychoanalytic movement.

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She saw her job as to fulfill her father's dream

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of making his ideas accepted throughout the world.

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At the center of the Freud movement stood only Anna

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because she managed to work herself into that position.

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She was recognized as that,

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and not just because she was the daughter,

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she worked on that.

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She was rather forbidding and was not to me a warm person,

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not an Aunt that we could kiss and put your arms around;

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not at all;

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and her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis.

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Freud himself had seen the role of psychoanalysis

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as allowing people to understand their unconscious drives.

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But Anna Freud believed it was possible to teach individuals

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how to control these inner forces.

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She had come to believe this through analyzing children,

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above all the children of her close friend, Dorothy Burlingham.

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Dorothy Burlingham was an American millionairess

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who in the 1920s fled a failed marriage

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and brought her children to Anna Freud in Vienna.

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They were suffering terrible anxieties and aggression,

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but Anna Freud was convinced she could free them from this

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by changing the world around them.

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She thought that she could come in

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and enter their environment essentially, because they were children

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you see and didn't have independent lives of their own,

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she could go talk to the parents or the mother,

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she could go to the schools, she could influence their real world,

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the actual external world to change their lives and to help them.

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And to change them as people?

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I think that was part of what her idea was,

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she felt that she could change them.

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From her analysis of the Burlingham children,

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Anna Freud developed a theory of how to help them control their inner drives.

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She believed that if, as well as psychotherapy,

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they were also encouraged to adapt to a good family and social environment,

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then the conscious part of their mind, the ego,

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would be strengthened in its struggle to control the unconscious.

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Anna Freud's aim was simply to help the children.

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But it was always the psychoanalyst who decided what was the right environment

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and the appropriate behavior for the children.

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And often as not, this reflected the social mores of the time.

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In my father's case they were concerned that he would be a homosexual

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and so a lot of their efforts went into preventing

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or trying to stop my father from becoming a homosexual.

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Whether or not he would have or did, is unknown to me.

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Why did they want to stop that?

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Because they felt it was abnormal,

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it wasn't a normal way to develop.

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They wanted to have him develop

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along lines that society recognized to be normal

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because if they didn't

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then he would be under control of forces that you don't understand,

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that you are not even aware of.

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The analysis seemed to be a great success

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and in the thirties the Burlingham children had returned to America.

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They settled down to happy married lives in the suburbs.

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What they didn't realize was that their experience was about to become a template

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for a giant social experiment

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to control the inner mental life of the American population.

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In 1946 President Truman signed The National Mental Health Act.

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It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by psychoanalysts

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that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears.

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The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society.

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Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally unstable

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revealed by the World War II draft figures,

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Congress in 1946 passed The National Mental Health Act,

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which recognized for the first time that mental illness was a national problem.

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Keenly aware of the tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H Felix,

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director of the vast new project.

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A primary objective of The National Mental Health program

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is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge about mental health

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and about mental illness. We're not doing this. Why?

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Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.

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Two of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers Carl and Will.

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Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments

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and now he and his brother begun to train hundreds of new psychiatrists.

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The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna Freud's ideas

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on a wide scale and to adults as well as children.

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The psychiatrist's job

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would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control their unconscious drives.

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Psychoanalysis could be used to make a better society.

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They said psychoanalytic thinking could make for the betterment of society.

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Because you could change the way the mind functioned;

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and you could take the ways

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in which people did hurtful things to themselves and others

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and alter them by enlarging their understanding.

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And this was the vision psychoanalysis brought.

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That you could really change people.

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And you could change them almost in limitless ways.

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In the late forties a vast project began in America

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to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the masses.

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Psychological guidance centers were set up in hundreds of towns.

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They were staffed by psychiatrists who believed it was their job

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to control the hidden forces inside the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.

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At the same time thousands of counselors were trained to apply psychoanalysis

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to marriage guidance,

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and social workers were sent out to visit people's homes

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and advise them on the psychological structure of family life.

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Behind all this was the fundamental idea of Anna Freud's'

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that if people were encouraged to conform

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to the accepted patterns of family and social life

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then their ego would be strengthened.

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They would be able to control the dangerous forces within them.

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When your emotions control your actions it affects not only yourself

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but the people around you.

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And if this sort of flair up is repeated often

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it might lead to a permanently warped personality.

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You can control the fire of your emotions so that your personality becomes more pleasant.

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So we expected someone who had been through that experience to more insightful,

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much more understanding,

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and a much better regulated person.

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And regulation includes being able to let go as it were,

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to enjoy a football game or a soccer game.

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A more understanding, yes rational, but also appropriately emotional person.

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The regulatory aspects of the human mind would really be in charge,

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instead of being overwhelmed by our passions and by our darker impulses.

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That one would be master or mistress over ones own passions.

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They just felt that the road to happiness

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was in adapting to the external world in which they lived.

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That people could be uncrippled from their own neurotic conflicts and impulses;

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that they would not engage in self-destructive behavior,

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that they would in fact adapt to the reality about them.

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They never questioned the reality.

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They never questioned that it might itself be a source of evil

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or something to which you could not adapt

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without compromise or without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way.

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So there was this fit with the politics of the day.

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And a bounce of emotions,

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it's important

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to a well-rounded personality.

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But it was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America.

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Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business

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and use their techniques not just to create model citizens, but model consumers.

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Last week's episode showed how Freud's American nephew Edward Bernays

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had been the first to convince American corporations that they could sell products

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by connecting them with people's unconscious feelings.

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00:18:38,171 --> 00:18:41,977

But now a group of psychoanalysts were going to take what Bernays had begun

257

00:18:42,277 --> 00:18:45,971

and invent a whole range of techniques to get inside and manage

258

00:18:46,271 --> 00:18:48,205

the unconscious mind of the consumer.

259

00:18:49,503 --> 00:18:51,267

They were led by Ernest Dichter.

260

00:18:51,567 --> 00:18:54,102

Dichter had practiced next door to Freud in Vienna,

261

00:18:54,302 --> 00:18:58,524

but he had come to America and set up the Institute for Motivational Research

262

00:18:58,724 --> 00:19:01,141

in an old mansion north of New York.

263

00:19:02,756 --> 00:19:06,198

This is The Institute for Motivational Research,

264

00:19:06,870 --> 00:19:12,360

a place devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave as they do.

265

00:19:12,560 --> 00:19:14,682

Why they buy as they do.

266

00:19:14,982 --> 00:19:18,027

Why they respond to advertising as they do.

267

00:19:18,527 --> 00:19:21,091

And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter.

268

00:19:21,491 --> 00:19:26,501

We don't go out and ask directly why do you buy and why don't you,

269

00:19:26,601 --> 00:19:30,304

what we try to do instead is try to understand the total personality,

270

00:19:30,504 --> 00:19:32,670

the self image of the customer;

271

00:19:32,870 --> 00:19:35,651

we use all the resources of modern social sciences.

272

00:19:35,851 --> 00:19:40,012

It opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any new product.

273

00:19:40,800 --> 00:19:44,851

Like the other psychoanalysts Dichter believed that American citizens

274

00:19:45,051 --> 00:19:46,975

were fundamentally irrational beings;

275

00:19:47,275 --> 00:19:48,436

they could not be trusted.

276

00:19:49,352 --> 00:19:53,543

Their real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires and feelings.

277

00:19:54,486 --> 00:19:57,481

And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he called

278

00:19:57,681 --> 00:20:00,381

the secret self of the American consumer.

279

00:20:03,011 --> 00:20:07,775

He was trying to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations

280

00:20:07,975 --> 00:20:09,411

that they had for purchasing.

281

00:20:10,011 --> 00:20:13,126

These could be sexual, they could be psychological,

282

00:20:13,326 --> 00:20:16,865

they could be sociological, they could be a demand for status,

283

00:20:16,965 --> 00:20:18,296

a demand for recognition.

284

00:20:18,496 --> 00:20:21,823

There were things that people couldn't verbalize or wouldn't verbalize

285

00:20:22,023 --> 00:20:25,890

because they were too secret to them, they were a part of their nature,

286

00:20:26,090 --> 00:20:30,927

and they would be embarrassed if they came out and said things like this.

287

00:20:31,227 --> 00:20:34,453

He would interview people

288

00:20:34,753 --> 00:20:38,489

but not ask them direct questions

289

00:20:38,789 --> 00:20:41,625

but let them talk freely

290

00:20:42,025 --> 00:20:45,788

like you do in psychoanalysis,

291

00:20:46,606 --> 00:20:49,314

and that was his background.

292

00:20:49,670 --> 00:20:53,993

And he said why can't we have a group therapy session about products?

293

00:20:55,829 --> 00:21:00,994

And so Dichter built this room up above his garage

294

00:21:01,294 --> 00:21:03,768

and he said we can have psychoanalysis of products,

295

00:21:03,968 --> 00:21:07,409

they can actually act out and verbalize their wants and needs.

296

00:21:07,710 --> 00:21:12,827

All we're gonna do is try a couple of these salad dressings.

297

00:21:13,028 --> 00:21:15,080

Now, let's see what happens.

298

00:21:15,081 --> 00:21:17,592

That is a typical house laugh.

299

00:21:20,058 --> 00:21:22,378

And they could be observed and watched

300

00:21:22,578 --> 00:21:24,062

and other people could comment

301

00:21:24,362 --> 00:21:27,273

and they could talk about it and everybody could join in.

302

00:21:27,473 --> 00:21:29,031

He was the first to do this,

303

00:21:29,231 --> 00:21:31,469

this was absolutely the first time this was ever done.

304

00:21:31,769 --> 00:21:36,195

And he had a movie projector up there where you could show advertisements

305

00:21:36,395 --> 00:21:38,969

and things like that, and people could react to them

306

00:21:39,069 --> 00:21:42,152

and he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious

307

00:21:42,252 --> 00:21:45,966

about the hidden psychological wants that people had about products.

308

00:21:47,274 --> 00:21:49,052

This became the focus group.

309

00:21:52,472 --> 00:21:56,711

Dichter's breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker foods.

310

00:21:57,804 --> 00:22:00,634

Like many food manufacturers in the early fifties

311

00:22:00,934 --> 00:22:03,778

they had invented a new range of instant convenience foods.

312

00:22:05,078 --> 00:22:08,930

But although consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea

313

00:22:09,230 --> 00:22:11,066

in fact they were refusing to buy them.

314

00:22:11,766 --> 00:22:14,690

The worst problem was the Betty Crocker cake mix.

315

00:22:14,990 --> 00:22:19,266

Dichter did a series of focus groups where housewives free associated

316

00:22:19,466 --> 00:22:20,688

about the cake mix.

317

00:22:22,198 --> 00:22:26,110

He concluded that they felt unconscious guilt about the new image been promoted

318

00:22:26,310 --> 00:22:28,099

of ease and convenience.

319

00:22:29,803 --> 00:22:34,198

In other words he had understood that the barrier to the consumption of the product

320

00:22:34,398 --> 00:22:37,829

was housewives' feeling of guilt about using it.

321

00:22:38,129 --> 00:22:41,306

They basically on one hand wanted to make it easier for themselves

322

00:22:41,406 --> 00:22:43,001

but they felt guilty about it.

323

00:22:43,301 --> 00:22:46,486

So what you've got to do in those circumstances is remove the barrier,

324

00:22:46,786 --> 00:22:48,417

the barrier being guilt.

325

00:22:48,717 --> 00:22:53,184

And the way you do that is you give the housewife a greater sense of participation.

326

00:22:54,018 --> 00:22:55,292

And how do you do that?

327

00:22:55,592 --> 00:22:56,594

By adding an egg.

328

00:22:59,317 --> 00:23:01,306

- As simple as that. - As simple as that.

329

00:23:02,140 --> 00:23:05,097

Dichter told Betty Crocker to put an instruction on the packet

330

00:23:05,297 --> 00:23:06,923

that the housewife should add an egg.

331

00:23:07,523 --> 00:23:09,716

It would be an unconscious symbol he said,

332

00:23:09,916 --> 00:23:13,944

of the housewife mixing in her own eggs as a gift to her husband

333

00:23:14,144 --> 00:23:15,724

and so would lessen the guilt.

334

00:23:16,024 --> 00:23:18,819

Betty Crocker did it, and the sales soared.

335

00:23:19,320 --> 00:23:21,920

My cake is ready.

336

00:23:22,620 --> 00:23:25,369

The consumer may have basic needs

337

00:23:25,669 --> 00:23:28,777

that the consumer himself or herself doesn't fully understand.

338

00:23:28,977 --> 00:23:34,656

You have to know what those needs are in order to fully exploit the consumer.

339

00:23:38,414 --> 00:23:42,955

Is it wrong to give people what they want

340

00:23:43,989 --> 00:23:46,573

by taking away their defenses,

341

00:23:47,573 --> 00:23:51,383

helping remove their defenses?

342

00:23:52,573 --> 00:23:54,663

It seems so much longer than last year!

343

00:23:54,863 --> 00:23:58,034

It is. Nearly four inches longer in some models.

344

00:23:58,500 --> 00:24:01,300

Ooooooooooooooooh!

345

00:24:03,041 --> 00:24:07,292

Dichter's success led to a rush by corporations and advertising agencies

346

00:24:07,592 --> 00:24:08,980

to employ psychoanalysts.

347

00:24:09,380 --> 00:24:13,353

They became known as the depth boys and they promised to show companies

348

00:24:13,553 --> 00:24:17,598

how to make millions by connecting their products with people's hidden desires.

349

00:24:18,198 --> 00:24:20,288

Dichter himself became a millionaire,

350

00:24:20,588 --> 00:24:23,783

famous for inventing slogans like 'A Tiger in Your Tank'.

351

00:24:25,076 --> 00:24:28,671

Even the marketing of the Barbie doll came from a children's focus group.

352

00:24:29,438 --> 00:24:30,409

And so it goes.

353

00:24:31,814 --> 00:24:35,034

But Dichter was convinced this was far more than just selling.

354

00:24:35,848 --> 00:24:37,037

Like Anna Freud,

355

00:24:37,237 --> 00:24:40,832

he believed that the environment could be used to strengthen the human personality,

356

00:24:42,043 --> 00:24:45,395

and products had the power both to sate inner desires

357

00:24:45,795 --> 00:24:48,752

and give people a feeling of common identity with those around them.

358

00:24:49,851 --> 00:24:52,638

It was a strategy for creating a stable society.

359

00:24:53,338 --> 00:24:55,622

Dichter called it the strategy of desire.

360

00:24:58,415 --> 00:25:02,841

To understand a stable citizen you have to know that modern man quite often

361

00:25:03,041 --> 00:25:06,759

tries to work off his frustrations by spending on self-gratification.

362

00:25:06,939 --> 00:25:10,617

Modern man is eternally ready to fill out his self image

363

00:25:10,817 --> 00:25:12,908

by purchasing products which compliment it.

364

00:25:13,208 --> 00:25:17,069

If you identify yourself with a product

365

00:25:17,369 --> 00:25:22,504

it can have a therapeutic value.

366

00:25:23,062 --> 00:25:26,850

It improves your self-image

367

00:25:27,250 --> 00:25:30,398

and you become a more secure person

368

00:25:30,698 --> 00:25:36,606

and you have suddenly this confidence of going out in the world

369

00:25:36,906 --> 00:25:39,578

and doing what you want successfully.

370

00:25:41,472 --> 00:25:44,934

And it's believed that would then improve

371

00:25:45,234 --> 00:25:47,843

the whole of our society

372

00:25:48,143 --> 00:25:53,086

and become the best society on this planet.

373

00:25:59,372 --> 00:26:01,896

By the early fifties the ideas of psychoanalysis

374

00:26:01,996 --> 00:26:04,059

had penetrated deep into American life.

375

00:26:05,721 --> 00:26:08,609

The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful.

376

00:26:09,283 --> 00:26:12,655

Many had consulting rooms overlooking Central Park in New York.

377

00:26:14,495 --> 00:26:18,154

Politicians and famous writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams

378

00:26:18,354 --> 00:26:19,256

became their patients.

379

00:26:21,021 --> 00:26:22,370

They were seeking not just help,

380

00:26:22,670 --> 00:26:25,549

but to understand the hidden roots of human behavior.

381

00:26:26,349 --> 00:26:30,673

We were sought after. Washington was interested in what we think.

382

00:26:32,329 --> 00:26:35,307

The important writers,

383

00:26:35,407 --> 00:26:39,270

important politicians, were undergoing psychoanalysis.

384

00:26:42,033 --> 00:26:47,168

We had waiting lists because there were so many patients that wanted to be analyzed.

385

00:26:48,695 --> 00:26:52,729

So it gave us a little bit of a swelled head.

386

00:26:54,137 --> 00:26:56,780

And as the psychoanalysts ideas took hold in America,

387

00:26:57,180 --> 00:27:02,047

a new elite began to emerge in politics, in social planning, and in business.

388

00:27:02,847 --> 00:27:04,155

What linked this elite

389

00:27:04,255 --> 00:27:07,050

was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational.

390

00:27:08,450 --> 00:27:11,015

To make a free market democracy like America work

391

00:27:11,415 --> 00:27:16,163

one had to use psychological techniques to control mass irrationality.

392

00:27:18,005 --> 00:27:21,778

They actually believed that this elite was necessary because individual citizens

393

00:27:21,878 --> 00:27:24,755

were not capable, if left alone,

394

00:27:25,055 --> 00:27:27,425

of being democratic citizens.

395

00:27:27,625 --> 00:27:30,639

The elite was necessary in order to create the conditions

396

00:27:30,739 --> 00:27:36,516

that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer

397

00:27:36,616 --> 00:27:39,279

and also behaving as a democratic citizen.

398

00:27:39,479 --> 00:27:43,109

They didn't see their activities as anti-democratic;

399

00:27:43,309 --> 00:27:47,098

as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy;

400

00:27:47,298 --> 00:27:49,816

quite the opposite. They understood

401

00:27:50,016 --> 00:27:55,219

that they were creating the conditions for democracy's survival in the future.

402

00:27:56,020 --> 00:27:59,991

Anna Freud had never intended that her idea would be used in such a way.

403

00:28:00,292 --> 00:28:04,711

but she happily accepted the rise of power of psychoanalysis in America.

404

00:28:05,511 --> 00:28:08,446

She remained in England living with Dorothy Burlingham.

405

00:28:08,846 --> 00:28:10,872

On the surface it was an idyllic life.

406

00:28:11,272 --> 00:28:14,372

She and Dorothy had bought a weekend cottage on the Suffolk coast.

407

00:28:14,972 --> 00:28:16,080

But in the summers

408

00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:19,830

Dorothy's children came from America to visit with the grandchildren.

409

00:28:21,365 --> 00:28:23,466

And underneath things were going badly wrong.

410

00:28:24,066 --> 00:28:28,298

Both Bob and Mabbie Burlingham whom Anna Freud had analyzed in the 1930s

411

00:28:28,598 --> 00:28:31,967

had suffered personal breakdowns and their marriages were collapsing.

412

00:28:33,096 --> 00:28:36,689

Bob was drinking heavily and Mabbie suffered terrible anxieties.

413

00:28:37,089 --> 00:28:42,022

The real reasons for the visits to England were yet more analysis with Anna Freud.

414

00:28:45,604 --> 00:28:48,066

The problem was that it didn't look very good, did it?

415

00:28:48,366 --> 00:28:51,090

Because here you somebody who's having nervous breakdowns

416

00:28:52,295 --> 00:28:54,237

and is having alcoholic binges

417

00:28:54,537 --> 00:28:58,485

and this doesn't really sit well.

418

00:29:00,882 --> 00:29:03,946

From a humane standpoint obviously this is not desirable,

419

00:29:04,346 --> 00:29:05,426

you want to help these people,

420

00:29:05,626 --> 00:29:10,488

but it also had the wider ramifications of everybody in analysis,

421

00:29:10,688 --> 00:29:14,221

in analytic circles knew that Bob and Mabbie were guinea pigs,

422

00:29:14,521 --> 00:29:18,207

they were the living proof that this is a wonderful process.

423

00:29:19,666 --> 00:29:22,905

It was very much swept under the rug, it really didn't get out.

424

00:29:23,105 --> 00:29:25,235

I mean these people had such,

425

00:29:27,034 --> 00:29:29,626

their power and influence was such

426

00:29:32,724 --> 00:29:33,796

that you were very careful.

427

00:29:33,896 --> 00:29:35,970

Anna Freud was a very powerful person

428

00:29:36,170 --> 00:29:38,229

and you were the grandchildren

429

00:29:39,034 --> 00:29:44,617

and she knew a great deal more about what went on in your parents' lives

430

00:29:44,789 --> 00:29:47,326

and so forth and it's not something you were going to tangle with,

431

00:29:47,426 --> 00:29:49,358

and you were a product of the whole situation.

432

00:29:50,351 --> 00:29:54,318

But at the same time we knew that something was really out of whack.

433

00:29:59,495 --> 00:30:02,399

As he grew older she became more and more important

434

00:30:03,542 --> 00:30:07,424

politically and scientifically but she didn't know when to stop.

435

00:30:07,824 --> 00:30:09,988

She was a bit too righteous

436

00:30:12,012 --> 00:30:14,967

that what she did was always the thing

437

00:30:16,504 --> 00:30:20,547

and she would never to my knowledge acknowledge

438

00:30:21,801 --> 00:30:24,780

that she could make a mistake or be wrong.

439

00:30:26,198 --> 00:30:27,635

That is my feeling.

440

00:30:29,792 --> 00:30:32,602

But the power and influence of the Freud family in America

441

00:30:32,802 --> 00:30:34,470

was about to grow even more.

442

00:30:36,922 --> 00:30:40,148

Politicians were about to turn to Anna Freud's cousin

443

00:30:40,348 --> 00:30:43,205

Edward Bernays for help in a time of crisis.

444

00:30:44,350 --> 00:30:47,849

He was going to manipulate the inner feelings and fears of the masses

445

00:30:48,249 --> 00:30:50,970

to help America's politicians fight the cold war.

446

00:30:51,728 --> 00:30:55,828

I don't mean to say and no one can say to you that there are no dangers

447

00:30:56,029 --> 00:30:58,585

of course there are risks that we are not vigilant

448

00:30:58,785 --> 00:31:00,767

but we don't have to be hysterical.

449

00:31:01,966 --> 00:31:06,079

In 1953 the Soviet Union exploded it's first hydrogen bomb

450

00:31:06,479 --> 00:31:10,056

and the fear of nuclear war and communism gripped the United States.

451

00:31:11,156 --> 00:31:14,949

Those in power became concerned with how to reassure the population.

452

00:31:15,649 --> 00:31:18,944

Committees were set up and public information films made

453

00:31:19,244 --> 00:31:22,936

appealing for calm in the face of new threats like nuclear fallout.

454

00:31:25,246 --> 00:31:28,972

Is the fallacy of the bolding 85% of the bomb's worrying capacity

455

00:31:29,272 --> 00:31:32,749

to an agent that constitutes only about 15%

456

00:31:32,949 --> 00:31:35,264

of an atomic bomb's destroying potential.

457

00:31:35,695 --> 00:31:38,558

At this point Edward Bernays was living in New York.

458

00:31:39,758 --> 00:31:43,328

In the 1920s he had invented the profession of Public Relations

459

00:31:43,728 --> 00:31:46,707

and was now one of the most powerful PR men in America.

460

00:31:47,507 --> 00:31:51,123

He worked for most of the major corporations and advised politicians,

461

00:31:51,223 --> 00:31:53,294

including President Eisenhower.

462

00:31:55,056 --> 00:31:56,310

Like his uncle Sigmund,

463

00:31:56,510 --> 00:32:00,474

Bernays was convinced that human beings were driven by irrational forces.

464

00:32:01,750 --> 00:32:03,376

The only way to deal with the public

465

00:32:03,676 --> 00:32:06,647

was to connect with their unconscious desires and fears.

466

00:32:08,690 --> 00:32:12,887

Bernays argued that instead of trying to reduce people's fears of communism,

467

00:32:13,187 --> 00:32:16,118

one should actually encourage and manipulate the fear.

468

00:32:17,297 --> 00:32:20,305

And in such a way that it became a weapon in the cold war.

469

00:32:20,905 --> 00:32:23,080

Rational argument was fruitless.

470

00:32:24,037 --> 00:32:26,326

What my father understood about groups

471

00:32:26,526 --> 00:32:29,276

is that they are manipulable.

472

00:32:29,476 --> 00:32:30,408

They're malleable.

473

00:32:31,575 --> 00:32:36,905

And that you can tap into their deepest desires

474

00:32:37,105 --> 00:32:41,458

or their deepest fears and use that to your own purposes.

475

00:32:43,368 --> 00:32:48,057

I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment;

476

00:32:48,257 --> 00:32:51,700

that they may very easily might vote for the wrong man

477

00:32:51,900 --> 00:32:56,797

or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above.

478

00:32:57,497 --> 00:33:00,973

One of Bernays' main clients was the giant United Fruit Company.

479

00:33:01,895 --> 00:33:05,457

They owned vast banana plantations in Guatemala and Central America.

480

00:33:06,469 --> 00:33:10,201

For decades United Fruit had controlled the company through pliable dictators.

481

00:33:10,801 --> 00:33:12,856

It was known as a 'banana republic'.

482

00:33:14,346 --> 00:33:18,360

But in 1950 a young officer, Colonel Arbenz was elected president.

483

00:33:19,160 --> 00:33:22,496

He promised to remove United Fruits' control over the country

484

00:33:23,096 --> 00:33:27,551

and in 1953 he announced the government would take over much of their land.

485

00:33:28,351 --> 00:33:30,145

It was a massively popular move

486

00:33:30,645 --> 00:33:35,727

but a disaster for United Fruit and they turned to Bernays to help get rid of Arbenz.

487

00:33:36,585 --> 00:33:39,116

United Fruit brings in Bernays and he basically understood

488

00:33:39,316 --> 00:33:40,884

that what United Fruit Company had to do

489

00:33:41,084 --> 00:33:43,951

was change this from being a popularly elected government

490

00:33:44,251 --> 00:33:48,179

that was doing some things that were good for the people there, into this being,

491

00:33:48,579 --> 00:33:52,245

very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy.

492

00:33:52,345 --> 00:33:54,488

This being at time in the cold war

493

00:33:54,588 --> 00:33:57,607

when Americans responded to issues of 'the red scare'

494

00:33:57,707 --> 00:33:59,463

and what communism might do,

495

00:33:59,763 --> 00:34:02,523

he was trying to transform this and brilliantly did transform it

496

00:34:02,623 --> 00:34:06,082

into an issue of a communist threat very close to our shores;

497

00:34:06,382 --> 00:34:10,136

taking United Fruit again, as a commercial client, out of the picture

498

00:34:10,436 --> 00:34:13,297

and making it look like a question of American democracy,

499

00:34:13,497 --> 00:34:15,631

American values being threatened.

500

00:34:17,159 --> 00:34:21,105

In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow,

501

00:34:21,705 --> 00:34:25,728

but Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America.

502

00:34:26,928 --> 00:34:31,180

He organized a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists.

503

00:34:32,080 --> 00:34:35,207

Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics.

504

00:34:37,485 --> 00:34:42,215

Bernays arranged for them to be entertained and to meet selected Guatemalan politicians

505

00:34:42,615 --> 00:34:46,174

who told them Arbenz was a communist controlled by Moscow.

506

00:34:47,944 --> 00:34:52,171

During the trip there was also a violent anti-American demonstration in the capital.

507

00:34:53,474 --> 00:34:55,399

Many of those who worked for United Fruit

508

00:34:55,799 --> 00:34:58,635

were convinced it had been organized by Bernays himself.

509

00:35:01,475 --> 00:35:04,964

He also created a fake independent news agency in America

510

00:35:05,364 --> 00:35:07,679

called the Middle America Information Bureau.

511

00:35:08,479 --> 00:35:11,640

It bombarded the American media with press releases

512

00:35:11,840 --> 00:35:14,171

saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala

513

00:35:14,471 --> 00:35:15,976

as a beachhead to attack America.

514

00:35:16,476 --> 00:35:18,469

All of this had the desired effect.

515

00:35:19,095 --> 00:35:21,785

In Guatemala, the Jacob Arbenz regime

516

00:35:21,885 --> 00:35:25,735

became increasingly communistic after his inauguration in 1951.

517

00:35:26,472 --> 00:35:29,177

Communists in the congress and high governmental positions

518

00:35:29,377 --> 00:35:34,087

controlled major committees, labor and farm groups, and propaganda facilities.

519

00:35:34,487 --> 00:35:36,552

They agitated and led in demonstrations

520

00:35:36,652 --> 00:35:39,232

against neighboring countries and the United States.

521

00:35:41,074 --> 00:35:44,081

What was profoundly new in terms of what Bernays did

522

00:35:44,281 --> 00:35:47,328

is he took this menace to our backyard in Guatemala.

523

00:35:47,428 --> 00:35:50,024

For the first time we saw reds

524

00:35:50,524 --> 00:35:53,497

a couple hundred miles from New Orleans,

525

00:35:53,767 --> 00:35:57,682

who Eddie Bernays had us believing were a true threat to us.

526

00:35:57,782 --> 00:36:00,241

There was going to be a Soviet outpost in our backyard.

527

00:36:01,581 --> 00:36:05,368

But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime,

528

00:36:05,768 --> 00:36:07,369

he was part of a secret plot.

529

00:36:08,169 --> 00:36:12,573

President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government,

530

00:36:12,773 --> 00:36:13,990

but secretly.

531

00:36:14,590 --> 00:36:17,169

The CIA were instructed to organize a coup.

532

00:36:18,643 --> 00:36:20,856

Working with the United Fruit Company

533

00:36:21,156 --> 00:36:23,265

the CIA trained and armed a rebel army

534

00:36:23,665 --> 00:36:26,391

and found a new leader for the country called Colonel Armas.

535

00:36:27,595 --> 00:36:31,996

The CIA agent in charge was Howard Hunt, later one of the Watergate burglars.

536

00:36:32,496 --> 00:36:35,246

What we wanted to do is have a terror campaign;

537

00:36:36,931 --> 00:36:39,185

to terrify Arbenz particularly,

538

00:36:39,485 --> 00:36:41,628

terrify his troops,

539

00:36:41,928 --> 00:36:47,761

much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland,

540

00:36:47,861 --> 00:36:51,041

Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II

541

00:36:51,804 --> 00:36:53,885

and just rendered everybody paralyzed.

542

00:36:55,854 --> 00:36:59,670

As planes flown by CIA pilots dropped bombs on Guatemala City,

543

00:37:00,070 --> 00:37:03,932

Edward Bernays carried on his propaganda campaign in the American press.

544

00:37:04,532 --> 00:37:06,692

He was preparing the American population

545

00:37:06,992 --> 00:37:10,949

to see this as the liberation of Guatemala by freedom fighters for democracy.

546

00:37:14,678 --> 00:37:19,275

He totally understood that the coup would happen when the public and the press

547

00:37:20,198 --> 00:37:21,725

when conditions on the public and the press

548

00:37:21,825 --> 00:37:24,002

allowed for a coup to happen and he created those conditions.

549

00:37:24,102 --> 00:37:28,395

He was totally savvy in terms of just what he was helping create there

550

00:37:28,495 --> 00:37:29,615

in terms of the overthrow.

551

00:37:29,815 --> 00:37:31,742

But ultimately he was reshaping reality,

552

00:37:31,942 --> 00:37:36,736

and reshaping public opinion in a way that's undemocratic and manipulative.

553

00:37:38,825 --> 00:37:42,749

On June 27th 1954 Colonel Arbenz fled the country

554

00:37:43,149 --> 00:37:45,155

and Armas arrived as the new leader.

555

00:37:46,318 --> 00:37:49,341

Within months Vice President Nixon visited Guatemala.

556

00:37:50,452 --> 00:37:53,454

In an event staged by United Fruit's PR department

557

00:37:53,854 --> 00:37:55,818

he was shown piles of Marxist literature

558

00:37:56,118 --> 00:37:59,220

that had been found it was said in the presidential palace.

559

00:38:02,230 --> 00:38:05,535

This is the first time in the history of the world

560

00:38:05,735 --> 00:38:09,394

that the communist government has been overthrown by the people.

561

00:38:09,594 --> 00:38:12,952

And for that we congratulate you and the people of Guatemala

562

00:38:13,152 --> 00:38:14,496

for the support they have given.

563

00:38:14,696 --> 00:38:18,986

And we are sure that under your leadership supported by the people

564

00:38:19,086 --> 00:38:22,369

whom I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala

565

00:38:22,569 --> 00:38:26,320

that Guatemala is going to enter a new era

566

00:38:26,520 --> 00:38:29,918

in which there will be prosperity for the people

567

00:38:30,218 --> 00:38:32,619

together with liberty for the people.

568

00:38:33,119 --> 00:38:34,598

Thank you very much for

569

00:38:35,314 --> 00:38:39,583

allowing us to see this exhibit of communism in Guatemala.

570

00:38:39,784 --> 00:38:41,147

You're welcome.

571

00:38:41,247 --> 00:38:44,005

Time for dinner and see what mother has for dessert.

572

00:38:44,205 --> 00:38:45,671

Banana gingerbread shortcake.

573

00:38:45,971 --> 00:38:50,687

Just another of the many tempting ways in which this nutritious food can be prepared.

574

00:38:51,380 --> 00:38:55,335

To now that you've seen where bananas come from before they reach your table,

575

00:38:55,635 --> 00:38:58,063

our journey to banana land is ended.

576

00:38:58,265 --> 00:39:00,103

We hope you enjoyed the trip.

577

00:39:00,310 --> 00:39:01,955

We know you like bananas.

578

00:39:03,793 --> 00:39:06,503

Bernays had manipulated the American people

579

00:39:06,903 --> 00:39:09,969

but he had done so because he, like many others at the time

580

00:39:10,269 --> 00:39:14,489

believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible.

581

00:39:15,089 --> 00:39:17,311

Especially when faced with the threat of communism.

582

00:39:18,664 --> 00:39:20,070

But Bernays was convinced

583

00:39:20,170 --> 00:39:23,293

that to explain this rationally to the American people was impossible.

584

00:39:24,039 --> 00:39:25,274

Because they were not rational.

585

00:39:26,151 --> 00:39:28,533

Instead one had to touch on their inner fears

586

00:39:28,933 --> 00:39:31,646

and manipulate them in the interest of a higher truth.

587

00:39:32,755 --> 00:39:34,935

He called it the engineering of consent.

588

00:39:36,758 --> 00:39:40,885

He was doing it for the American way of life

589

00:39:41,285 --> 00:39:46,095

to which he was devoted, sincerely devoted.

590

00:39:46,495 --> 00:39:50,260

And yet he felt the people were really pretty stupid.

591

00:39:50,660 --> 00:39:52,291

And that's the paradox.

592

00:39:52,691 --> 00:39:57,061

If you don't leave it up to the people themselves

593

00:39:57,461 --> 00:40:01,571

but force them to choose what you want them to choose,

594

00:40:01,871 --> 00:40:06,096

however subtly, then it's not democracy anymore.

595

00:40:09,707 --> 00:40:12,137

It's something else, it's being told what to do,

596

00:40:14,213 --> 00:40:16,593

it's that old authoritarian thing.

597

00:40:19,523 --> 00:40:21,347

But the idea that it was necessary

598

00:40:21,547 --> 00:40:24,197

to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population

599

00:40:24,597 --> 00:40:26,637

in the interest of fighting the cold war

600

00:40:26,837 --> 00:40:28,615

now began to take root in Washington.

601

00:40:29,315 --> 00:40:33,009

Above all, in the CIA, who were going to take it much further.

602

00:40:35,142 --> 00:40:38,850

They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods

603

00:40:39,050 --> 00:40:41,945

to actually alter the memories and feelings of people.

604

00:40:42,645 --> 00:40:45,403

The aim being to produce more controllable citizens.

605

00:40:46,048 --> 00:40:47,422

It was known as brainwashing.

606

00:40:51,338 --> 00:40:55,197

Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible

607

00:40:55,933 --> 00:40:58,163

and that they should try do it themselves.

608

00:41:01,188 --> 00:41:05,222

The image of the human being that was being built up at that particular time

609

00:41:05,868 --> 00:41:08,308

was that there was a great deal

610

00:41:08,508 --> 00:41:10,872

of vulnerability in every human being

611

00:41:11,873 --> 00:41:15,389

and that that vulnerability could be manipulated

612

00:41:15,589 --> 00:41:20,847

to program somebody to be something that I wanted them to be

613

00:41:21,782 --> 00:41:23,227

and they didn't want to be.

614

00:41:26,072 --> 00:41:29,562

That you could manipulate people in such a way

615

00:41:29,762 --> 00:41:34,778

that they could be automatons, if you will, for whatever your own purposes were.

616

00:41:36,015 --> 00:41:38,383

This is the image that people thought was possible.

617

00:41:39,851 --> 00:41:44,178

In the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments

618

00:41:44,478 --> 00:41:46,337

at universities across America.

619

00:41:47,362 --> 00:41:49,177

They were secretly funding experiments

620

00:41:49,377 --> 00:41:52,937

on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings.

621

00:41:54,305 --> 00:41:55,946

The most notorious of these experiments

622

00:41:56,046 --> 00:41:59,100

was run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association,

623

00:41:59,500 --> 00:42:04,049

Dr. Ewen Cameron. Like many psychiatrists at that time,

624

00:42:04,449 --> 00:42:07,976

Cameron was convinced that inside human beings were dangerous forces

625

00:42:08,276 --> 00:42:09,549

which threatened society.

626

00:42:10,149 --> 00:42:13,794

But he believed that it was possible to not just control these forces

627

00:42:14,094 --> 00:42:15,649

but actually remove them.

628

00:42:16,513 --> 00:42:20,593

He thought that psychiatry should not just concentrate on sick people

629

00:42:20,693 --> 00:42:24,301

and the mentally ill, but should actually go into government,

630

00:42:24,501 --> 00:42:29,149

that politicians should listen to psychiatrists; psychiatrists should be

631

00:42:29,249 --> 00:42:34,531

in every parliament and should direct and monitor political activities

632

00:42:34,731 --> 00:42:36,604

because they knew

633

00:42:37,004 --> 00:42:42,280

in a rational scientific way what was good for people.

634

00:42:43,057 --> 00:42:47,342

Cameron had set up a clinic in a hospital in Montreal called the Allen Memorial.

635

00:42:47,934 --> 00:42:49,606

It is now long since closed down.

636

00:42:50,990 --> 00:42:54,534

Cameron took patients who suffered a wide range of mental problems.

637

00:42:55,334 --> 00:42:59,130

His theory was that these resulted from forgotten or repressed memories.

638

00:42:59,834 --> 00:43:03,733

But he was impatient with the theory of using psychotherapy to uncover them.

639

00:43:04,033 --> 00:43:06,193

Instead, he would simply wipe them.

640

00:43:06,993 --> 00:43:09,242

Cameron used drugs including LSD

641

00:43:09,542 --> 00:43:13,208

and the technique of ECT, electro-convulsive therapy.

642

00:43:14,037 --> 00:43:17,000

It was conventionally used at that time to relieve depression.

643

00:43:17,500 --> 00:43:21,702

But Cameron was going to use it in a new way, to produce new people.

644

00:43:23,815 --> 00:43:26,991

He was really using it to try and

645

00:43:28,592 --> 00:43:32,306

change the fundamental function of the individual.

646

00:43:32,973 --> 00:43:38,754

To alter their past memories,

647

00:43:38,854 --> 00:43:40,893

their past ways of behaving,

648

00:43:42,352 --> 00:43:45,477

and as I think he said at one point,

649

00:43:46,290 --> 00:43:49,893

to just sort of erase everything from their pasts

650

00:43:49,993 --> 00:43:52,443

so that you then had a slate

651

00:43:52,643 --> 00:43:56,089

in which you could record new ways of behavior.

652

00:43:58,403 --> 00:44:02,238

And so he used massive doses of shock,

653

00:44:02,338 --> 00:44:05,653

people receiving several shocks a day

654

00:44:07,850 --> 00:44:12,556

and over a course over time hundreds of ECT treatments

655

00:44:12,756 --> 00:44:18,429

so that they were just reduced to sort of a primitive vegetable state.

656

00:44:21,076 --> 00:44:22,931

I don't remember what happened to me.

657

00:44:23,770 --> 00:44:27,495

I was introduced to Dr. Cameron and I don't remember Dr. Cameron at all.

658

00:44:28,398 --> 00:44:30,005

I don't remember any of that.

659

00:44:30,205 --> 00:44:33,036

They shipped me up to what they call 'the sleep room'

660

00:44:33,896 --> 00:44:38,208

and they gave me all of these electro-convulsive shock treatments

661

00:44:38,308 --> 00:44:44,208

and mega doses of drugs and LSD and all of that and I have no memory of any of that.

662

00:44:44,879 --> 00:44:48,813

Nothing of that time at the Allen Memorial

663

00:44:48,913 --> 00:44:53,519

or any of my life previous to that. All gone. Wiped.

664

00:44:54,771 --> 00:44:58,617

And then having depatterned somebody or brought them down

665

00:44:58,817 --> 00:45:01,728

to where basically nothing

666

00:45:01,928 --> 00:45:05,068

but the essential functions of the body

667

00:45:05,606 --> 00:45:08,466

were going on in terms of breathing and things of this nature,

668

00:45:08,766 --> 00:45:12,392

then he would begin to feed material into these individuals;

669

00:45:12,492 --> 00:45:14,116

positive material

670

00:45:14,316 --> 00:45:19,004

such that the brain would be programmed in a positive way,

671

00:45:19,116 --> 00:45:21,617

so that the individual would be completely altered.

672

00:45:21,717 --> 00:45:25,797

Then he put these tapes under our pillows called psychic driving.

673

00:45:26,567 --> 00:45:31,314

He would then put back into this empty brain a program

674

00:45:32,378 --> 00:45:34,900

of whatever sort he decided upon.

675

00:45:35,942 --> 00:45:38,330

And the people like myself

676

00:45:38,387 --> 00:45:42,006

would wake up another person, I guess.

677

00:45:43,729 --> 00:45:47,131

In fact Cameron's experiments were a complete disaster.

678

00:45:48,312 --> 00:45:51,799

All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss

679

00:45:52,199 --> 00:45:56,924

and the ability to repeat the phrase 'I am at ease with myself'.

680

00:45:58,730 --> 00:46:03,303

And it was not an isolated case, almost all the experiments the CIA funded

681

00:46:03,503 --> 00:46:04,857

were equally unsuccessful.

682

00:46:05,892 --> 00:46:09,803

Despite their ambitions American psychologists were beginning to find out

683

00:46:10,003 --> 00:46:11,332

how difficult it was

684

00:46:11,432 --> 00:46:15,418

to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind.

685

00:46:17,710 --> 00:46:21,752

We had really been chasing a phantom,

686

00:46:21,952 --> 00:46:23,384

if you will, an illusion,

687

00:46:23,685 --> 00:46:29,101

that the human mind was more capable of manipulation from the outside,

688

00:46:31,770 --> 00:46:34,338

by outside factors than it is.

689

00:46:35,576 --> 00:46:40,406

We found out that the human being is an extremely complex thing.

690

00:46:42,065 --> 00:46:44,060

There were no simple solutions.

691

00:46:47,543 --> 00:46:52,325

But you've just got to bear in mind that these were strange times.

692

00:46:54,609 --> 00:46:57,895

The psychoanalysts had come to power in America because of their theory

693

00:46:58,095 --> 00:47:02,053

that they knew how to control the dangerous forces inside human beings.

694

00:47:03,847 --> 00:47:07,241

But now the psychoanalysts were about to face a high profile failure

695

00:47:07,869 --> 00:47:11,805

that would lead people to begin questioning the very basis of their ideas.

696

00:47:13,890 --> 00:47:15,453

It began in Hollywood.

697

00:47:17,394 --> 00:47:20,271

The film industry had become fascinated with psychoanalysis,

698

00:47:20,771 --> 00:47:24,960

and Anna Freud was a powerful influence on dozens of analysts in Los Angeles.

699

00:47:26,176 --> 00:47:29,602

They treated film stars, directors, and studio bosses.

700

00:47:30,502 --> 00:47:35,258

Anna Freud's closest friend was the most sought after of all, Ralph Greenson.

701

00:47:39,184 --> 00:47:43,446

And in 1960 the most famous star in the world turned to Greenson for help.

702

00:47:44,717 --> 00:47:46,972

Marilyn Monroe was suffering from despair

703

00:47:47,272 --> 00:47:49,742

and had become addicted to alcohol and drugs.

704

00:47:51,530 --> 00:47:53,371

When I walked in to dinner

705

00:47:53,571 --> 00:47:54,655

here was Marilyn Monroe.

706

00:47:54,955 --> 00:47:57,115

And I made a picture with her called All About Eve.

707

00:47:57,215 --> 00:47:58,497

This was dinner at Ralph Greenson's?

708

00:47:58,597 --> 00:48:00,555

Yes. And...

709

00:48:01,155 --> 00:48:02,369

the only thing was...

710

00:48:03,956 --> 00:48:05,755

Ralph was trying to show her...

711

00:48:14,934 --> 00:48:17,482

the way a family life ought really to be.

712

00:48:18,882 --> 00:48:22,071

So we were walking the dog after and I said, what the hell are you doing here?

713

00:48:22,474 --> 00:48:24,018

I said, You never had me to dinner!

714

00:48:25,157 --> 00:48:27,110

And he said, You weren't that sick.

715

00:48:29,358 --> 00:48:30,934

And I said, oh.

716

00:48:31,735 --> 00:48:37,561

He said this child has no, NO frame of reference.

717

00:48:38,610 --> 00:48:41,519

In other words she has no idea what the goal is.

718

00:48:42,259 --> 00:48:44,900

What Greenson did was follow Anna Freud's theory.

719

00:48:45,909 --> 00:48:47,651

If Marilyn Monroe could be thought

720

00:48:47,751 --> 00:48:51,115

to conform to what society considered a normal pattern of life.

721

00:48:51,693 --> 00:48:55,191

That would help her ego control her inner destructive urges.

722

00:48:56,635 --> 00:48:58,557

But Greenson pushed it to an extreme.

723

00:48:58,957 --> 00:49:01,567

He persuaded Monroe to move into a house nearby

724

00:49:01,967 --> 00:49:03,312

that was decorated like his own.

725

00:49:04,012 --> 00:49:08,898

He then took her into his own family life, and he, his wife and his daughter

726

00:49:09,198 --> 00:49:11,379

played at being Monroe's own family.

727

00:49:12,379 --> 00:49:15,520

Greenson himself would become the model of conformity.

728

00:49:16,267 --> 00:49:17,068

And so this...

729

00:49:17,832 --> 00:49:19,778

someone she regarded as important

730

00:49:22,544 --> 00:49:24,145

and she idealized,

731

00:49:24,798 --> 00:49:29,085

if he turned out to be a very gratifying father figure

732

00:49:30,211 --> 00:49:32,574

her ego would benefit from that, that was the theory.

733

00:49:35,055 --> 00:49:37,586

His wife and children, everyone was involved in it.

734

00:49:38,004 --> 00:49:41,282

They were strengthening the person, they were strengthening the mind,

735

00:49:41,682 --> 00:49:44,588

they were strengthening the agent that controls inner life;

736

00:49:44,788 --> 00:49:48,282

against adversity, against insufficiency,

737

00:49:48,483 --> 00:49:51,920

against too much frustration,

738

00:49:53,117 --> 00:49:57,222

so that Marilyn would no longer be a helpless person looking for love,

739

00:49:57,622 --> 00:49:58,663

she'd have enough love.

740

00:50:00,188 --> 00:50:01,591

But despite all his efforts,

741

00:50:01,700 --> 00:50:03,860

Greenson was unable to help Marilyn Monroe.

742

00:50:05,048 --> 00:50:09,171

On August 5th 1962 she committed suicide in her house.

743

00:50:12,544 --> 00:50:16,520

The suicide shocked many in the analytic community, including Anna Freud.

744

00:50:18,041 --> 00:50:19,942

And high profile figures in American life

745

00:50:20,142 --> 00:50:22,847

who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis

746

00:50:23,247 --> 00:50:27,444

now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America.

747

00:50:28,944 --> 00:50:31,217

Was it really because it benefitted individuals

748

00:50:32,219 --> 00:50:36,806

or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order.

749

00:50:37,706 --> 00:50:41,071

The critics included Monroe's ex-husband, Arthur Miller.

750

00:50:41,879 --> 00:50:44,663

My argument with so much if psychoanalysis

751

00:50:44,863 --> 00:50:47,514

is the preconception that suffering is a mistake,

752

00:50:48,583 --> 00:50:49,741

or a sign of weakness,

753

00:50:49,941 --> 00:50:51,377

or a sign even of illness.

754

00:50:51,477 --> 00:50:52,417

When in fact,

755

00:50:53,831 --> 00:50:57,504

possibly the greatest truths we know will have come out of people's suffering.

756

00:50:57,904 --> 00:51:01,033

That the problem is not to undo suffering

757

00:51:01,133 --> 00:51:04,542

or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives,

758

00:51:04,742 --> 00:51:08,931

instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it.

759

00:51:09,588 --> 00:51:14,309

And avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness.

760

00:51:15,242 --> 00:51:19,754

There's too much of an attempt it seems to me at controlling man

761

00:51:19,954 --> 00:51:20,930

rather than freeing him;

762

00:51:21,796 --> 00:51:26,225

of defining him rather than letting him go.

763

00:51:26,935 --> 00:51:31,311

And it's part of the whole ideology of this age which is power mad.

764

00:51:34,486 --> 00:51:37,698

Hey, have you heard about the crazy new way

765

00:51:38,684 --> 00:51:41,187

to send a message today

766

00:51:41,533 --> 00:51:44,471

It's flashed on a screen, too quick to see

767

00:51:44,795 --> 00:51:48,058

But still you get it, subliminally

768

00:51:48,706 --> 00:51:50,768

At the same time an onslaught was launched

769

00:51:50,968 --> 00:51:54,262

on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people.

770

00:51:55,920 --> 00:51:57,603

The first blow came with a bestseller,

771

00:51:57,803 --> 00:52:00,056

The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard.

772

00:52:01,056 --> 00:52:05,426

It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets

773

00:52:05,826 --> 00:52:09,017

whose only function was to keep mass production lines running.

774

00:52:10,424 --> 00:52:13,982

They did this by manipulating people's unconscious desires,

775

00:52:14,182 --> 00:52:16,970

to create longings for ever new brands and models.

776

00:52:17,945 --> 00:52:19,533

They had turned the population

777

00:52:19,733 --> 00:52:23,365

into unwitting participants in the system of planned obsolescence.

778

00:52:25,643 --> 00:52:29,150

The second blow came from an influential philosopher and social critic,

779

00:52:29,350 --> 00:52:32,764

Herbert Marcuse. He had been trained in psychoanalysis.

780

00:52:35,830 --> 00:52:39,932

This is a childish application of psychoanalysis

781

00:52:40,232 --> 00:52:45,150

which does not take at all into consideration the very real

782

00:52:46,080 --> 00:52:49,123

political systematic waste of resources

783

00:52:49,423 --> 00:52:52,610

of technology and of the productive process.

784

00:52:53,165 --> 00:52:55,385

For example this planned obsolescence;

785

00:52:55,805 --> 00:53:00,212

for example the production of innumerable brands and gadgets

786

00:53:00,512 --> 00:53:03,958

who are in the last analysis always the same;

787

00:53:04,458 --> 00:53:08,657

the production of innumerable different

788

00:53:09,401 --> 00:53:11,126

models of automobiles;

789

00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:14,503

and this prosperity at the same time,

790

00:53:14,803 --> 00:53:16,952

consciously or unconsciously

791

00:53:17,352 --> 00:53:21,058

leads to a kind of schizophrenic existence.

792

00:53:23,038 --> 00:53:27,906

I believe that in this society an incredible quantity of aggressiveness

793

00:53:28,006 --> 00:53:30,365

and destructiveness is accumulated

794

00:53:30,565 --> 00:53:35,965

precisely because of the empty prosperity which then...

795

00:53:38,787 --> 00:53:40,104

simply erupts.

796

00:53:48,097 --> 00:53:49,126

Marcuse's argument

797

00:53:49,326 --> 00:53:52,627

is not simply that psychoanalysis had been used for corrupt purposes,

798

00:53:53,310 --> 00:53:54,579

it was more fundamental.

799

00:53:55,925 --> 00:53:59,985

Marcuse said that the very idea that you needed to control people was wrong.

800

00:54:01,205 --> 00:54:03,838

Human beings did have inner emotional drives,

801

00:54:04,116 --> 00:54:06,479

but they were not inherently violent or evil.

802

00:54:07,283 --> 00:54:11,765

It was society that made these drives dangerous by repressing and distorting them.

803

00:54:13,154 --> 00:54:15,998

Anna Freud and her followers had increased that repression

804

00:54:16,298 --> 00:54:18,752

by trying to make people conform to society.

805

00:54:19,552 --> 00:54:23,357

In so doing, they made people more dangerous, not less.

806

00:54:24,744 --> 00:54:27,176

Marcuse challenged that social world

807

00:54:27,376 --> 00:54:29,726

and he said that's a world that should not be adapted to.

808

00:54:30,305 --> 00:54:33,993

And in fact what the individual was adapting to

809

00:54:34,393 --> 00:54:38,746

was corrupt and evil and corrupting.

810

00:54:39,346 --> 00:54:42,478

In other words he switched the source of evil

811

00:54:43,520 --> 00:54:47,749

from inward conflict to the society itself.

812

00:54:48,598 --> 00:54:51,322

That the sickness in society lies at the society level,

813

00:54:51,522 --> 00:54:54,071

not at the sickness of human beings in it.

814

00:54:54,371 --> 00:54:56,144

And if people did not challenge that,

815

00:54:56,444 --> 00:55:01,517

then they were in fact submitting to evil.

816

00:55:03,105 --> 00:55:04,948

Modern psychology has a word

817

00:55:05,048 --> 00:55:08,599

that is probably used more than any other word in psychology,

818

00:55:09,335 --> 00:55:11,514

it is the word maladjusted.

819

00:55:12,937 --> 00:55:18,743

It is the ringing cry of modern child psychology, maladjusted.

820

00:55:18,943 --> 00:55:21,895

Now of course we all want to live the well adjusted life

821

00:55:21,995 --> 00:55:25,952

in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

822

00:55:26,985 --> 00:55:31,732

But as I move toward my conclusion I would like to say to you today,

823

00:55:32,562 --> 00:55:34,204

in a very honest manner,

824

00:55:34,711 --> 00:55:39,255

that there are some things in our society and some things in our world

825

00:55:40,177 --> 00:55:42,919

to which I am proud to be maladjusted

826

00:55:43,748 --> 00:55:47,476

and I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted

827

00:55:47,576 --> 00:55:50,847

to these things until the good society is realized.

828

00:55:51,592 --> 00:55:55,294

I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself

829

00:55:56,457 --> 00:55:59,690

to racial segregation and discrimination.

830

00:56:00,544 --> 00:56:05,614

I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry.

831

00:56:06,587 --> 00:56:09,868

I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions

832

00:56:10,168 --> 00:56:14,940

that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few,

833

00:56:14,952 --> 00:56:20,079

leave millions of God's children smothering in an airtight cage of poverty

834

00:56:20,379 --> 00:56:22,608

in the midst of an affluent society.

835

00:56:25,945 --> 00:56:29,365

The political influence of the Freudian psychoanalysts was over.

836

00:56:30,408 --> 00:56:32,017

Instead they were now accused

837

00:56:32,317 --> 00:56:35,881

of having helped to create a repressive form of social control.

838

00:56:39,180 --> 00:56:41,026

Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham

839

00:56:41,426 --> 00:56:43,990

lived on in Sigmund Freud's old house in London.

840

00:56:44,941 --> 00:56:48,528

In 1970 Dorothy's son Bob died of alcoholism,

841

00:56:49,633 --> 00:56:55,524

and in 1973 his sister Mabbie returned for yet more analysis with Anna Freud.

842

00:56:56,666 --> 00:56:58,262

She went back for more analysis;

843

00:56:58,362 --> 00:57:02,411

she was living at 20 Maresfield Gardens in the Freud house,

844

00:57:03,102 --> 00:57:05,280

as I guess she did when she wasn't with her husband,

845

00:57:05,480 --> 00:57:08,905

and she committed suicide.

846

00:57:09,205 --> 00:57:10,747

She took an overdose of sleeping pills.

847

00:57:12,845 --> 00:57:14,009

In Freud's own house?

848

00:57:14,109 --> 00:57:15,504

In Freud's own house, right.

849

00:57:21,021 --> 00:57:25,057

So obviously there are a lot of implications

850

00:57:25,157 --> 00:57:26,880

that one can draw from that and I just think

851

00:57:26,980 --> 00:57:29,530

she happened to reach the end of the rope there.

852

00:57:30,427 --> 00:57:35,305

Although it would seem to be a very pointed act.

853

00:57:35,505 --> 00:57:38,399

Obviously suicide is a very politicized act

854

00:57:38,499 --> 00:57:41,044

and to do it in Sigmund Freud's own house

855

00:57:42,238 --> 00:57:47,031

is certainly different from doing it in Riverdale back in New York.

856

00:57:52,122 --> 00:57:53,910

Nest Week's episode will tell the story

857

00:57:54,010 --> 00:57:56,530

of the rise to power of the enemies of the Freud family.

858

00:57:57,790 --> 00:58:01,316

They believed that the way to build a better society was to let the self free.

859

00:58:03,223 --> 00:58:06,264

But what they didn't realize was that this idea of liberation

860

00:58:06,664 --> 00:58:10,865

would provide business and politics with yet another way to control the self,

861

00:58:11,565 --> 00:58:13,914

by feeding its infinite desires.

862

00:58:14,500 --> 00:58:22,500

Time synch (-8.83s), spellcheck, and (some) edits by coyote 30December2011

863

00:58:23,000 --> 00:58:31,000

from previous version found on AllSubs.org, which gave thanks for the script to

864

00:58:31,500 --> 00:58:39,500

http://hareloco.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E7089CD7CF32AA20!243.entry

The Century of the Self. 2 of 4

The Engineering of the Self 2002

00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,725

Let's say a word about dreams.

00:00:06,785 --> 00:00:09,628

We all have thoughts which we never knew we had.

00:00:09,828 --> 00:00:12,010

They are too uncomfortable or too incompatible

00:00:12,110 --> 00:00:14,684

with our adult self to be remembered.

00:00:14,884 --> 00:00:20,405

Yet they are often disturbing, rumbling under the surface like lava in a volcano.

00:00:21,418 --> 00:00:24,819

The dream is the royal road to these thoughts.

00:00:25,988 --> 00:00:28,477

The royal road to the unconscious.

00:00:29,211 --> 00:00:31,806

This is the story about how Sigmund Freud's ideas

00:00:31,906 --> 00:00:34,911

about the unconscious mind were used by those in power

00:00:35,011 --> 00:00:38,163

in post-War America to try and control the masses.

00:00:39,872 --> 00:00:43,640

Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest

00:00:43,740 --> 00:00:45,512

that hidden deep within all human beings

00:00:45,812 --> 00:00:48,946

were dangerous and irrational desires and fears.

00:00:52,812 --> 00:00:55,578

They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts

00:00:55,778 --> 00:00:58,208

that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

00:01:00,840 --> 00:01:02,625

To stop it ever happening again,

00:01:02,825 --> 00:01:07,496

they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

00:01:13,311 --> 00:01:16,788

At the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna

00:01:17,770 --> 00:01:22,663

and his nephew Edward Bernays who had invented the profession of public relations.

00:01:23,673 --> 00:01:28,735

Their ideas were used by the US government, big business and the CIA

00:01:29,235 --> 00:01:33,198

to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people.

00:01:34,883 --> 00:01:38,386

Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work

00:01:38,586 --> 00:01:40,292

and create a stable society

00:01:40,692 --> 00:01:43,088

was to repress the savage barbarism

00:01:43,288 --> 00:01:46,606

that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

00:02:01,128 --> 00:02:04,542

The story begins in the middle of the fierce fighting of the second world war.

00:02:06,416 --> 00:02:10,537

As the fighting intensified the American army was faced by an extraordinary number

00:02:10,737 --> 00:02:12,659

of mental breakdowns among its troops.

00:02:13,910 --> 00:02:17,197

Forty-nine percent of all soldiers evacuated from combat

00:02:17,397 --> 00:02:19,980

were sent back because they suffered from mental problems.

00:02:21,431 --> 00:02:24,940

In desperation the army turned to the new ideas of psychoanalysis.

00:02:26,062 --> 00:02:29,150

They made a film record of the experiment using hidden cameras.

00:02:30,692 --> 00:02:34,379

It says here on your record that you had headaches and that you had crying spells.

00:02:34,479 --> 00:02:38,194

Yes sir, I believe that your profession is calling it nostalgia.

00:02:39,115 --> 00:02:40,550

In other words, homesickness.

00:02:40,650 --> 00:02:41,370

Yes sir.

00:02:42,063 --> 00:02:48,063

It was induced when shortly before the war I received a picture of my sweetheart.

00:03:00,531 --> 00:03:02,067

I'm sorry I can't continue.

00:03:02,168 --> 00:03:03,333

That's all right.

00:03:03,933 --> 00:03:07,144

It was the first time that anyone had paid such attention

00:03:07,344 --> 00:03:10,036

to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people.

00:03:11,229 --> 00:03:12,587

At the heart of the experiment

00:03:12,787 --> 00:03:15,615

were a number of refugee psychoanalysts from central Europe.

00:03:16,315 --> 00:03:20,051

They worked with American psychiatrists to guide and shape the project.

00:03:21,196 --> 00:03:25,388

When I first came to America I worked in the psychiatric service

00:03:25,588 --> 00:03:28,983

with soldiers trying to rehabilitate them.

00:03:29,508 --> 00:03:34,533

And I travelled in the train from the east coast to the west coast

00:03:34,733 --> 00:03:37,454

I was enormously curious

00:03:37,754 --> 00:03:43,635

what goes on in all of those little towns that the train is passing.

00:03:43,835 --> 00:03:47,065

After my years in the army I knew exactly

00:03:47,165 --> 00:03:49,728

what everyone was doing in the little towns.

00:03:50,837 --> 00:03:55,329

Because I saw so many people who came from there

00:03:55,529 --> 00:04:01,297

and I understood their aspirations, their disappointments and so forth.

00:04:01,497 --> 00:04:05,577

So it was as if somebody invited me

00:04:05,677 --> 00:04:11,461

to a privileged tour into the inner soul of America.

00:04:11,661 --> 00:04:14,442

I'm not doing this deliberately, please believe me.

00:04:14,542 --> 00:04:15,520

I do believe you.

00:04:17,746 --> 00:04:20,408

This display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.

00:04:21,036 --> 00:04:23,495

- I hope so, sir. - Sure, it gets it off your chest.

00:04:24,173 --> 00:04:29,200

Well sir, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm very much in love with my sweetheart.

00:04:30,123 --> 00:04:35,707

She has been the one person that gave me a sense of importance

00:04:37,254 --> 00:04:40,914

in that through her cooperation with me

00:04:41,672 --> 00:04:45,035

we were able to surmount so many obstacles.

00:04:48,175 --> 00:04:50,868

The psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud

00:04:51,068 --> 00:04:52,778

to take the men back into their pasts.

00:04:54,339 --> 00:04:57,855

They became convinced that breakdowns were not the direct result of the fighting.

00:04:59,132 --> 00:05:02,316

The stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories.

00:05:03,059 --> 00:05:07,295

These were memories of the men's own violent feelings and desires

00:05:07,395 --> 00:05:10,065

which they had repressed, because they were too frightening.

00:05:12,308 --> 00:05:15,955

To the psychoanalyst it was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory

00:05:16,155 --> 00:05:20,263

that underneath human beings were driven by primitive irrational forces.

00:05:23,609 --> 00:05:27,680

World War II was a major shattering experience

00:05:27,880 --> 00:05:32,505

because I discovered the enormous role of the irrational

00:05:33,517 --> 00:05:35,489

in the life of most people.

00:05:36,713 --> 00:05:39,271

Now that I can say that I learned that

00:05:41,480 --> 00:05:46,759

the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America

00:05:47,168 --> 00:05:50,023

is very much in favor of the irrational.

00:05:51,024 --> 00:05:54,565

That there's much greater unhappiness, much more suffering,

00:05:54,665 --> 00:05:56,009

it's much more...

00:05:59,096 --> 00:06:02,510

a sad a country than one would imagine it

00:06:04,455 --> 00:06:06,506

from the advertisements that you get,

00:06:06,675 --> 00:06:09,157

a much more problematic country.

00:06:11,826 --> 00:06:15,738

Victory in the second world war was celebrated as a triumph of democracy,

00:06:16,839 --> 00:06:20,400

but in private many policy makers were worried about the implications

00:06:20,500 --> 00:06:21,963

of the analysis of the soldiers.

00:06:23,090 --> 00:06:27,571

It seemed to show that underneath every American were irrational violent drives.

00:06:29,951 --> 00:06:32,436

What had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out.

00:06:33,136 --> 00:06:37,024

The complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war

00:06:37,224 --> 00:06:42,011

showed just how easily these forces could break through and overwhelm democracy.

00:06:47,539 --> 00:06:50,230

Planners and policy makers had been convinced

00:06:50,330 --> 00:06:54,155

by their experiences during World War II that human beings could

00:06:54,255 --> 00:06:57,902

act very irrationally because of this sort of teeming

00:06:58,002 --> 00:07:01,058

and raw and unpredictable emotionality.

00:07:01,986 --> 00:07:07,398

The kind of chaos that lived at the base of human personality

00:07:07,598 --> 00:07:13,107

could in fact infect the society, social institutions

00:07:13,207 --> 00:07:16,007

to such a point that the society itself would become sick.

00:07:16,851 --> 00:07:20,789

That's what they believe happened in Germany, in which the irrational,

00:07:20,889 --> 00:07:23,013

the anti-democratic went wild.

00:07:25,011 --> 00:07:28,928

It was a vision of human nature as incredibly destructive

100

00:07:29,128 --> 00:07:30,650

and they were terrified

101

00:07:30,850 --> 00:07:35,767

that Americans would in fact behave that way

102

00:07:35,941 --> 00:07:40,642

or were capable of behaving that way and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.

103

00:07:40,842 --> 00:07:42,705

So what is needed

104

00:07:43,205 --> 00:07:48,885

is a human being that can internalize democratic values

105

00:07:48,969 --> 00:07:51,470

so they are not shaken with the storm

106

00:07:54,629 --> 00:07:58,880

and psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done.

107

00:07:59,280 --> 00:08:01,579

It opened up new vistas

108

00:08:01,779 --> 00:08:05,702

as to how the inner structures of the human being

109

00:08:05,894 --> 00:08:09,787

can be changed so that he becomes a more...

110

00:08:10,768 --> 00:08:16,768

vital free supporter and maintainer of democracy.

111

00:08:18,081 --> 00:08:21,716

Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces

112

00:08:21,916 --> 00:08:24,127

but they knew how to control them too.

113

00:08:25,003 --> 00:08:28,275

They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals

114

00:08:28,575 --> 00:08:31,696

because democracy left to itself failed to do this.

115

00:08:37,341 --> 00:08:41,526

The source of this idea is not only Sigmund Freud but his youngest daughter Anna.

116

00:08:42,645 --> 00:08:45,603

She had fled with her father to London before the outbreak of war,

117

00:08:46,213 --> 00:08:49,449

and after he died Anna Freud became the acknowledged leader

118

00:08:49,549 --> 00:08:51,190

of the world psychoanalytic movement.

119

00:08:52,297 --> 00:08:55,064

She saw her job as to fulfill her father's dream

120

00:08:55,164 --> 00:08:58,188

of making his ideas accepted throughout the world.

121

00:09:00,434 --> 00:09:03,905

At the center of the Freud movement stood only Anna

122

00:09:04,105 --> 00:09:09,246

because she managed to work herself into that position.

123

00:09:09,746 --> 00:09:12,019

She was recognized as that,

124

00:09:12,319 --> 00:09:14,395

and not just because she was the daughter,

125

00:09:17,528 --> 00:09:18,537

she worked on that.

126

00:09:19,844 --> 00:09:25,527

She was rather forbidding and was not to me a warm person,

127

00:09:25,727 --> 00:09:30,938

not an Aunt that we could kiss and put your arms around;

128

00:09:32,688 --> 00:09:33,912

not at all;

129

00:09:34,312 --> 00:09:39,788

and her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis.

130

00:09:42,026 --> 00:09:44,386

Freud himself had seen the role of psychoanalysis

131

00:09:44,586 --> 00:09:47,341

as allowing people to understand their unconscious drives.

132

00:09:48,698 --> 00:09:51,590

But Anna Freud believed it was possible to teach individuals

133

00:09:51,690 --> 00:09:53,623

how to control these inner forces.

134

00:09:54,223 --> 00:09:56,993

She had come to believe this through analyzing children,

135

00:09:57,093 --> 00:10:00,591

above all the children of her close friend, Dorothy Burlingham.

136

00:10:02,488 --> 00:10:04,965

Dorothy Burlingham was an American millionairess

137

00:10:05,165 --> 00:10:07,593

who in the 1920s fled a failed marriage

138

00:10:07,893 --> 00:10:10,419

and brought her children to Anna Freud in Vienna.

139

00:10:11,774 --> 00:10:14,356

They were suffering terrible anxieties and aggression,

140

00:10:14,956 --> 00:10:18,168

but Anna Freud was convinced she could free them from this

141

00:10:18,368 --> 00:10:20,047

by changing the world around them.

142

00:10:20,147 --> 00:10:23,240

She thought that she could come in

143

00:10:24,756 --> 00:10:27,287

and enter their environment essentially, because they were children

144

00:10:27,487 --> 00:10:29,437

you see and didn't have independent lives of their own,

145

00:10:29,537 --> 00:10:31,673

she could go talk to the parents or the mother,

146

00:10:32,473 --> 00:10:35,981

she could go to the schools, she could influence their real world,

147

00:10:36,081 --> 00:10:40,993

the actual external world to change their lives and to help them.

148

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And to change them as people?

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I think that was part of what her idea was,

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she felt that she could change them.

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From her analysis of the Burlingham children,

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Anna Freud developed a theory of how to help them control their inner drives.

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She believed that if, as well as psychotherapy,

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they were also encouraged to adapt to a good family and social environment,

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then the conscious part of their mind, the ego,

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would be strengthened in its struggle to control the unconscious.

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Anna Freud's aim was simply to help the children.

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But it was always the psychoanalyst who decided what was the right environment

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and the appropriate behavior for the children.

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And often as not, this reflected the social mores of the time.

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In my father's case they were concerned that he would be a homosexual

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and so a lot of their efforts went into preventing

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or trying to stop my father from becoming a homosexual.

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Whether or not he would have or did, is unknown to me.

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Why did they want to stop that?

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Because they felt it was abnormal,

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it wasn't a normal way to develop.

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They wanted to have him develop

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along lines that society recognized to be normal

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because if they didn't

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then he would be under control of forces that you don't understand,

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that you are not even aware of.

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The analysis seemed to be a great success

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and in the thirties the Burlingham children had returned to America.

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They settled down to happy married lives in the suburbs.

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What they didn't realize was that their experience was about to become a template

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for a giant social experiment

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to control the inner mental life of the American population.

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In 1946 President Truman signed The National Mental Health Act.

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It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by psychoanalysts

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that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears.

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The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society.

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Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally unstable

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revealed by the World War II draft figures,

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Congress in 1946 passed The National Mental Health Act,

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which recognized for the first time that mental illness was a national problem.

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Keenly aware of the tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H Felix,

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director of the vast new project.

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A primary objective of The National Mental Health program

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is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge about mental health

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and about mental illness. We're not doing this. Why?

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Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.

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Two of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers Carl and Will.

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Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments

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and now he and his brother begun to train hundreds of new psychiatrists.

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The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna Freud's ideas

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on a wide scale and to adults as well as children.

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The psychiatrist's job

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would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control their unconscious drives.

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Psychoanalysis could be used to make a better society.

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They said psychoanalytic thinking could make for the betterment of society.

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Because you could change the way the mind functioned;

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and you could take the ways

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in which people did hurtful things to themselves and others

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and alter them by enlarging their understanding.

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And this was the vision psychoanalysis brought.

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That you could really change people.

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And you could change them almost in limitless ways.

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In the late forties a vast project began in America

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to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the masses.

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Psychological guidance centers were set up in hundreds of towns.

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They were staffed by psychiatrists who believed it was their job

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to control the hidden forces inside the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.

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At the same time thousands of counselors were trained to apply psychoanalysis

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to marriage guidance,

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and social workers were sent out to visit people's homes

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and advise them on the psychological structure of family life.

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Behind all this was the fundamental idea of Anna Freud's'

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that if people were encouraged to conform

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to the accepted patterns of family and social life

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then their ego would be strengthened.

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They would be able to control the dangerous forces within them.

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When your emotions control your actions it affects not only yourself

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but the people around you.

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And if this sort of flair up is repeated often

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it might lead to a permanently warped personality.

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You can control the fire of your emotions so that your personality becomes more pleasant.

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So we expected someone who had been through that experience to more insightful,

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much more understanding,

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and a much better regulated person.

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And regulation includes being able to let go as it were,

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to enjoy a football game or a soccer game.

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A more understanding, yes rational, but also appropriately emotional person.

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The regulatory aspects of the human mind would really be in charge,

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instead of being overwhelmed by our passions and by our darker impulses.

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That one would be master or mistress over ones own passions.

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They just felt that the road to happiness

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was in adapting to the external world in which they lived.

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That people could be uncrippled from their own neurotic conflicts and impulses;

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that they would not engage in self-destructive behavior,

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that they would in fact adapt to the reality about them.

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They never questioned the reality.

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They never questioned that it might itself be a source of evil

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or something to which you could not adapt

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without compromise or without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way.

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So there was this fit with the politics of the day.

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And a bounce of emotions,

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it's important

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to a well-rounded personality.

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But it was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America.

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Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business

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and use their techniques not just to create model citizens, but model consumers.

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Last week's episode showed how Freud's American nephew Edward Bernays

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had been the first to convince American corporations that they could sell products

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by connecting them with people's unconscious feelings.

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But now a group of psychoanalysts were going to take what Bernays had begun

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and invent a whole range of techniques to get inside and manage

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the unconscious mind of the consumer.

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They were led by Ernest Dichter.

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Dichter had practiced next door to Freud in Vienna,

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but he had come to America and set up the Institute for Motivational Research

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in an old mansion north of New York.

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This is The Institute for Motivational Research,

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a place devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave as they do.

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Why they buy as they do.

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Why they respond to advertising as they do.

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And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter.

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We don't go out and ask directly why do you buy and why don't you,

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what we try to do instead is try to understand the total personality,

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the self image of the customer;

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we use all the resources of modern social sciences.

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It opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any new product.

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Like the other psychoanalysts Dichter believed that American citizens

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were fundamentally irrational beings;

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they could not be trusted.

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Their real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires and feelings.

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And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he called

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the secret self of the American consumer.

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He was trying to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations

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that they had for purchasing.

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These could be sexual, they could be psychological,

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they could be sociological, they could be a demand for status,

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a demand for recognition.

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There were things that people couldn't verbalize or wouldn't verbalize

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because they were too secret to them, they were a part of their nature,

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and they would be embarrassed if they came out and said things like this.

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He would interview people

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but not ask them direct questions

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but let them talk freely

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like you do in psychoanalysis,

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and that was his background.

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And he said why can't we have a group therapy session about products?

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And so Dichter built this room up above his garage

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and he said we can have psychoanalysis of products,

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they can actually act out and verbalize their wants and needs.

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All we're gonna do is try a couple of these salad dressings.

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Now, let's see what happens.

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That is a typical house laugh.

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And they could be observed and watched

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and other people could comment

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and they could talk about it and everybody could join in.

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He was the first to do this,

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this was absolutely the first time this was ever done.

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And he had a movie projector up there where you could show advertisements

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and things like that, and people could react to them

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and he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious

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about the hidden psychological wants that people had about products.

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This became the focus group.

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Dichter's breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker foods.

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Like many food manufacturers in the early fifties

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they had invented a new range of instant convenience foods.

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But although consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea

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in fact they were refusing to buy them.

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The worst problem was the Betty Crocker cake mix.

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Dichter did a series of focus groups where housewives free associated

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about the cake mix.

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He concluded that they felt unconscious guilt about the new image been promoted

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of ease and convenience.

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In other words he had understood that the barrier to the consumption of the product

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was housewives' feeling of guilt about using it.

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They basically on one hand wanted to make it easier for themselves

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but they felt guilty about it.

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So what you've got to do in those circumstances is remove the barrier,

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the barrier being guilt.

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And the way you do that is you give the housewife a greater sense of participation.

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And how do you do that?

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By adding an egg.

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- As simple as that. - As simple as that.

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Dichter told Betty Crocker to put an instruction on the packet

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that the housewife should add an egg.

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It would be an unconscious symbol he said,

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of the housewife mixing in her own eggs as a gift to her husband

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and so would lessen the guilt.

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Betty Crocker did it, and the sales soared.

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My cake is ready.

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The consumer may have basic needs

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that the consumer himself or herself doesn't fully understand.

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You have to know what those needs are in order to fully exploit the consumer.

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Is it wrong to give people what they want

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by taking away their defenses,

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helping remove their defenses?

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It seems so much longer than last year!

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It is. Nearly four inches longer in some models.

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Ooooooooooooooooh!

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Dichter's success led to a rush by corporations and advertising agencies

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to employ psychoanalysts.

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They became known as the depth boys and they promised to show companies

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how to make millions by connecting their products with people's hidden desires.

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Dichter himself became a millionaire,

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famous for inventing slogans like 'A Tiger in Your Tank'.

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Even the marketing of the Barbie doll came from a children's focus group.

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And so it goes.

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But Dichter was convinced this was far more than just selling.

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Like Anna Freud,

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he believed that the environment could be used to strengthen the human personality,

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and products had the power both to sate inner desires

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and give people a feeling of common identity with those around them.

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It was a strategy for creating a stable society.

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Dichter called it the strategy of desire.

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To understand a stable citizen you have to know that modern man quite often

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tries to work off his frustrations by spending on self-gratification.

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Modern man is eternally ready to fill out his self image

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by purchasing products which compliment it.

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If you identify yourself with a product

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it can have a therapeutic value.

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It improves your self-image

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and you become a more secure person

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and you have suddenly this confidence of going out in the world

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and doing what you want successfully.

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And it's believed that would then improve

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the whole of our society

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and become the best society on this planet.

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By the early fifties the ideas of psychoanalysis

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had penetrated deep into American life.

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The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful.

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Many had consulting rooms overlooking Central Park in New York.

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Politicians and famous writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams

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became their patients.

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They were seeking not just help,

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but to understand the hidden roots of human behavior.

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We were sought after. Washington was interested in what we think.

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The important writers,

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important politicians, were undergoing psychoanalysis.

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We had waiting lists because there were so many patients that wanted to be analyzed.

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So it gave us a little bit of a swelled head.

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And as the psychoanalysts ideas took hold in America,

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a new elite began to emerge in politics, in social planning, and in business.

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What linked this elite

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was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational.

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To make a free market democracy like America work

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one had to use psychological techniques to control mass irrationality.

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They actually believed that this elite was necessary because individual citizens

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were not capable, if left alone,

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of being democratic citizens.

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The elite was necessary in order to create the conditions

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that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer

397

00:27:36,616 --> 00:27:39,279

and also behaving as a democratic citizen.

398

00:27:39,479 --> 00:27:43,109

They didn't see their activities as anti-democratic;

399

00:27:43,309 --> 00:27:47,098

as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy;

400

00:27:47,298 --> 00:27:49,816

quite the opposite. They understood

401

00:27:50,016 --> 00:27:55,219

that they were creating the conditions for democracy's survival in the future.

402

00:27:56,020 --> 00:27:59,991

Anna Freud had never intended that her idea would be used in such a way.

403

00:28:00,292 --> 00:28:04,711

but she happily accepted the rise of power of psychoanalysis in America.

404

00:28:05,511 --> 00:28:08,446

She remained in England living with Dorothy Burlingham.

405

00:28:08,846 --> 00:28:10,872

On the surface it was an idyllic life.

406

00:28:11,272 --> 00:28:14,372

She and Dorothy had bought a weekend cottage on the Suffolk coast.

407

00:28:14,972 --> 00:28:16,080

But in the summers

408

00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:19,830

Dorothy's children came from America to visit with the grandchildren.

409

00:28:21,365 --> 00:28:23,466

And underneath things were going badly wrong.

410

00:28:24,066 --> 00:28:28,298

Both Bob and Mabbie Burlingham whom Anna Freud had analyzed in the 1930s

411

00:28:28,598 --> 00:28:31,967

had suffered personal breakdowns and their marriages were collapsing.

412

00:28:33,096 --> 00:28:36,689

Bob was drinking heavily and Mabbie suffered terrible anxieties.

413

00:28:37,089 --> 00:28:42,022

The real reasons for the visits to England were yet more analysis with Anna Freud.

414

00:28:45,604 --> 00:28:48,066

The problem was that it didn't look very good, did it?

415

00:28:48,366 --> 00:28:51,090

Because here you somebody who's having nervous breakdowns

416

00:28:52,295 --> 00:28:54,237

and is having alcoholic binges

417

00:28:54,537 --> 00:28:58,485

and this doesn't really sit well.

418

00:29:00,882 --> 00:29:03,946

From a humane standpoint obviously this is not desirable,

419

00:29:04,346 --> 00:29:05,426

you want to help these people,

420

00:29:05,626 --> 00:29:10,488

but it also had the wider ramifications of everybody in analysis,

421

00:29:10,688 --> 00:29:14,221

in analytic circles knew that Bob and Mabbie were guinea pigs,

422

00:29:14,521 --> 00:29:18,207

they were the living proof that this is a wonderful process.

423

00:29:19,666 --> 00:29:22,905

It was very much swept under the rug, it really didn't get out.

424

00:29:23,105 --> 00:29:25,235

I mean these people had such,

425

00:29:27,034 --> 00:29:29,626

their power and influence was such

426

00:29:32,724 --> 00:29:33,796

that you were very careful.

427

00:29:33,896 --> 00:29:35,970

Anna Freud was a very powerful person

428

00:29:36,170 --> 00:29:38,229

and you were the grandchildren

429

00:29:39,034 --> 00:29:44,617

and she knew a great deal more about what went on in your parents' lives

430

00:29:44,789 --> 00:29:47,326

and so forth and it's not something you were going to tangle with,

431

00:29:47,426 --> 00:29:49,358

and you were a product of the whole situation.

432

00:29:50,351 --> 00:29:54,318

But at the same time we knew that something was really out of whack.

433

00:29:59,495 --> 00:30:02,399

As he grew older she became more and more important

434

00:30:03,542 --> 00:30:07,424

politically and scientifically but she didn't know when to stop.

435

00:30:07,824 --> 00:30:09,988

She was a bit too righteous

436

00:30:12,012 --> 00:30:14,967

that what she did was always the thing

437

00:30:16,504 --> 00:30:20,547

and she would never to my knowledge acknowledge

438

00:30:21,801 --> 00:30:24,780

that she could make a mistake or be wrong.

439

00:30:26,198 --> 00:30:27,635

That is my feeling.

440

00:30:29,792 --> 00:30:32,602

But the power and influence of the Freud family in America

441

00:30:32,802 --> 00:30:34,470

was about to grow even more.

442

00:30:36,922 --> 00:30:40,148

Politicians were about to turn to Anna Freud's cousin

443

00:30:40,348 --> 00:30:43,205

Edward Bernays for help in a time of crisis.

444

00:30:44,350 --> 00:30:47,849

He was going to manipulate the inner feelings and fears of the masses

445

00:30:48,249 --> 00:30:50,970

to help America's politicians fight the cold war.

446

00:30:51,728 --> 00:30:55,828

I don't mean to say and no one can say to you that there are no dangers

447

00:30:56,029 --> 00:30:58,585

of course there are risks that we are not vigilant

448

00:30:58,785 --> 00:31:00,767

but we don't have to be hysterical.

449

00:31:01,966 --> 00:31:06,079

In 1953 the Soviet Union exploded it's first hydrogen bomb

450

00:31:06,479 --> 00:31:10,056

and the fear of nuclear war and communism gripped the United States.

451

00:31:11,156 --> 00:31:14,949

Those in power became concerned with how to reassure the population.

452

00:31:15,649 --> 00:31:18,944

Committees were set up and public information films made

453

00:31:19,244 --> 00:31:22,936

appealing for calm in the face of new threats like nuclear fallout.

454

00:31:25,246 --> 00:31:28,972

Is the fallacy of the bolding 85% of the bomb's worrying capacity

455

00:31:29,272 --> 00:31:32,749

to an agent that constitutes only about 15%

456

00:31:32,949 --> 00:31:35,264

of an atomic bomb's destroying potential.

457

00:31:35,695 --> 00:31:38,558

At this point Edward Bernays was living in New York.

458

00:31:39,758 --> 00:31:43,328

In the 1920s he had invented the profession of Public Relations

459

00:31:43,728 --> 00:31:46,707

and was now one of the most powerful PR men in America.

460

00:31:47,507 --> 00:31:51,123

He worked for most of the major corporations and advised politicians,

461

00:31:51,223 --> 00:31:53,294

including President Eisenhower.

462

00:31:55,056 --> 00:31:56,310

Like his uncle Sigmund,

463

00:31:56,510 --> 00:32:00,474

Bernays was convinced that human beings were driven by irrational forces.

464

00:32:01,750 --> 00:32:03,376

The only way to deal with the public

465

00:32:03,676 --> 00:32:06,647

was to connect with their unconscious desires and fears.

466

00:32:08,690 --> 00:32:12,887

Bernays argued that instead of trying to reduce people's fears of communism,

467

00:32:13,187 --> 00:32:16,118

one should actually encourage and manipulate the fear.

468

00:32:17,297 --> 00:32:20,305

And in such a way that it became a weapon in the cold war.

469

00:32:20,905 --> 00:32:23,080

Rational argument was fruitless.

470

00:32:24,037 --> 00:32:26,326

What my father understood about groups

471

00:32:26,526 --> 00:32:29,276

is that they are manipulable.

472

00:32:29,476 --> 00:32:30,408

They're malleable.

473

00:32:31,575 --> 00:32:36,905

And that you can tap into their deepest desires

474

00:32:37,105 --> 00:32:41,458

or their deepest fears and use that to your own purposes.

475

00:32:43,368 --> 00:32:48,057

I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment;

476

00:32:48,257 --> 00:32:51,700

that they may very easily might vote for the wrong man

477

00:32:51,900 --> 00:32:56,797

or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above.

478

00:32:57,497 --> 00:33:00,973

One of Bernays' main clients was the giant United Fruit Company.

479

00:33:01,895 --> 00:33:05,457

They owned vast banana plantations in Guatemala and Central America.

480

00:33:06,469 --> 00:33:10,201

For decades United Fruit had controlled the company through pliable dictators.

481

00:33:10,801 --> 00:33:12,856

It was known as a 'banana republic'.

482

00:33:14,346 --> 00:33:18,360

But in 1950 a young officer, Colonel Arbenz was elected president.

483

00:33:19,160 --> 00:33:22,496

He promised to remove United Fruits' control over the country

484

00:33:23,096 --> 00:33:27,551

and in 1953 he announced the government would take over much of their land.

485

00:33:28,351 --> 00:33:30,145

It was a massively popular move

486

00:33:30,645 --> 00:33:35,727

but a disaster for United Fruit and they turned to Bernays to help get rid of Arbenz.

487

00:33:36,585 --> 00:33:39,116

United Fruit brings in Bernays and he basically understood

488

00:33:39,316 --> 00:33:40,884

that what United Fruit Company had to do

489

00:33:41,084 --> 00:33:43,951

was change this from being a popularly elected government

490

00:33:44,251 --> 00:33:48,179

that was doing some things that were good for the people there, into this being,

491

00:33:48,579 --> 00:33:52,245

very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy.

492

00:33:52,345 --> 00:33:54,488

This being at time in the cold war

493

00:33:54,588 --> 00:33:57,607

when Americans responded to issues of 'the red scare'

494

00:33:57,707 --> 00:33:59,463

and what communism might do,

495

00:33:59,763 --> 00:34:02,523

he was trying to transform this and brilliantly did transform it

496

00:34:02,623 --> 00:34:06,082

into an issue of a communist threat very close to our shores;

497

00:34:06,382 --> 00:34:10,136

taking United Fruit again, as a commercial client, out of the picture

498

00:34:10,436 --> 00:34:13,297

and making it look like a question of American democracy,

499

00:34:13,497 --> 00:34:15,631

American values being threatened.

500

00:34:17,159 --> 00:34:21,105

In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow,

501

00:34:21,705 --> 00:34:25,728

but Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America.

502

00:34:26,928 --> 00:34:31,180

He organized a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists.

503

00:34:32,080 --> 00:34:35,207

Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics.

504

00:34:37,485 --> 00:34:42,215

Bernays arranged for them to be entertained and to meet selected Guatemalan politicians

505

00:34:42,615 --> 00:34:46,174

who told them Arbenz was a communist controlled by Moscow.

506

00:34:47,944 --> 00:34:52,171

During the trip there was also a violent anti-American demonstration in the capital.

507

00:34:53,474 --> 00:34:55,399

Many of those who worked for United Fruit

508

00:34:55,799 --> 00:34:58,635

were convinced it had been organized by Bernays himself.

509

00:35:01,475 --> 00:35:04,964

He also created a fake independent news agency in America

510

00:35:05,364 --> 00:35:07,679

called the Middle America Information Bureau.

511

00:35:08,479 --> 00:35:11,640

It bombarded the American media with press releases

512

00:35:11,840 --> 00:35:14,171

saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala

513

00:35:14,471 --> 00:35:15,976

as a beachhead to attack America.

514

00:35:16,476 --> 00:35:18,469

All of this had the desired effect.

515

00:35:19,095 --> 00:35:21,785

In Guatemala, the Jacob Arbenz regime

516

00:35:21,885 --> 00:35:25,735

became increasingly communistic after his inauguration in 1951.

517

00:35:26,472 --> 00:35:29,177

Communists in the congress and high governmental positions

518

00:35:29,377 --> 00:35:34,087

controlled major committees, labor and farm groups, and propaganda facilities.

519

00:35:34,487 --> 00:35:36,552

They agitated and led in demonstrations

520

00:35:36,652 --> 00:35:39,232

against neighboring countries and the United States.

521

00:35:41,074 --> 00:35:44,081

What was profoundly new in terms of what Bernays did

522

00:35:44,281 --> 00:35:47,328

is he took this menace to our backyard in Guatemala.

523

00:35:47,428 --> 00:35:50,024

For the first time we saw reds

524

00:35:50,524 --> 00:35:53,497

a couple hundred miles from New Orleans,

525

00:35:53,767 --> 00:35:57,682

who Eddie Bernays had us believing were a true threat to us.

526

00:35:57,782 --> 00:36:00,241

There was going to be a Soviet outpost in our backyard.

527

00:36:01,581 --> 00:36:05,368

But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime,

528

00:36:05,768 --> 00:36:07,369

he was part of a secret plot.

529

00:36:08,169 --> 00:36:12,573

President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government,

530

00:36:12,773 --> 00:36:13,990

but secretly.

531

00:36:14,590 --> 00:36:17,169

The CIA were instructed to organize a coup.

532

00:36:18,643 --> 00:36:20,856

Working with the United Fruit Company

533

00:36:21,156 --> 00:36:23,265

the CIA trained and armed a rebel army

534

00:36:23,665 --> 00:36:26,391

and found a new leader for the country called Colonel Armas.

535

00:36:27,595 --> 00:36:31,996

The CIA agent in charge was Howard Hunt, later one of the Watergate burglars.

536

00:36:32,496 --> 00:36:35,246

What we wanted to do is have a terror campaign;

537

00:36:36,931 --> 00:36:39,185

to terrify Arbenz particularly,

538

00:36:39,485 --> 00:36:41,628

terrify his troops,

539

00:36:41,928 --> 00:36:47,761

much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland,

540

00:36:47,861 --> 00:36:51,041

Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II

541

00:36:51,804 --> 00:36:53,885

and just rendered everybody paralyzed.

542

00:36:55,854 --> 00:36:59,670

As planes flown by CIA pilots dropped bombs on Guatemala City,

543

00:37:00,070 --> 00:37:03,932

Edward Bernays carried on his propaganda campaign in the American press.

544

00:37:04,532 --> 00:37:06,692

He was preparing the American population

545

00:37:06,992 --> 00:37:10,949

to see this as the liberation of Guatemala by freedom fighters for democracy.

546

00:37:14,678 --> 00:37:19,275

He totally understood that the coup would happen when the public and the press

547

00:37:20,198 --> 00:37:21,725

when conditions on the public and the press

548

00:37:21,825 --> 00:37:24,002

allowed for a coup to happen and he created those conditions.

549

00:37:24,102 --> 00:37:28,395

He was totally savvy in terms of just what he was helping create there

550

00:37:28,495 --> 00:37:29,615

in terms of the overthrow.

551

00:37:29,815 --> 00:37:31,742

But ultimately he was reshaping reality,

552

00:37:31,942 --> 00:37:36,736

and reshaping public opinion in a way that's undemocratic and manipulative.

553

00:37:38,825 --> 00:37:42,749

On June 27th 1954 Colonel Arbenz fled the country

554

00:37:43,149 --> 00:37:45,155

and Armas arrived as the new leader.

555

00:37:46,318 --> 00:37:49,341

Within months Vice President Nixon visited Guatemala.

556

00:37:50,452 --> 00:37:53,454

In an event staged by United Fruit's PR department

557

00:37:53,854 --> 00:37:55,818

he was shown piles of Marxist literature

558

00:37:56,118 --> 00:37:59,220

that had been found it was said in the presidential palace.

559

00:38:02,230 --> 00:38:05,535

This is the first time in the history of the world

560

00:38:05,735 --> 00:38:09,394

that the communist government has been overthrown by the people.

561

00:38:09,594 --> 00:38:12,952

And for that we congratulate you and the people of Guatemala

562

00:38:13,152 --> 00:38:14,496

for the support they have given.

563

00:38:14,696 --> 00:38:18,986

And we are sure that under your leadership supported by the people

564

00:38:19,086 --> 00:38:22,369

whom I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala

565

00:38:22,569 --> 00:38:26,320

that Guatemala is going to enter a new era

566

00:38:26,520 --> 00:38:29,918

in which there will be prosperity for the people

567

00:38:30,218 --> 00:38:32,619

together with liberty for the people.

568

00:38:33,119 --> 00:38:34,598

Thank you very much for

569

00:38:35,314 --> 00:38:39,583

allowing us to see this exhibit of communism in Guatemala.

570

00:38:39,784 --> 00:38:41,147

You're welcome.

571

00:38:41,247 --> 00:38:44,005

Time for dinner and see what mother has for dessert.

572

00:38:44,205 --> 00:38:45,671

Banana gingerbread shortcake.

573

00:38:45,971 --> 00:38:50,687

Just another of the many tempting ways in which this nutritious food can be prepared.

574

00:38:51,380 --> 00:38:55,335

To now that you've seen where bananas come from before they reach your table,

575

00:38:55,635 --> 00:38:58,063

our journey to banana land is ended.

576

00:38:58,265 --> 00:39:00,103

We hope you enjoyed the trip.

577

00:39:00,310 --> 00:39:01,955

We know you like bananas.

578

00:39:03,793 --> 00:39:06,503

Bernays had manipulated the American people

579

00:39:06,903 --> 00:39:09,969

but he had done so because he, like many others at the time

580

00:39:10,269 --> 00:39:14,489

believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible.

581

00:39:15,089 --> 00:39:17,311

Especially when faced with the threat of communism.

582

00:39:18,664 --> 00:39:20,070

But Bernays was convinced

583

00:39:20,170 --> 00:39:23,293

that to explain this rationally to the American people was impossible.

584

00:39:24,039 --> 00:39:25,274

Because they were not rational.

585

00:39:26,151 --> 00:39:28,533

Instead one had to touch on their inner fears

586

00:39:28,933 --> 00:39:31,646

and manipulate them in the interest of a higher truth.

587

00:39:32,755 --> 00:39:34,935

He called it the engineering of consent.

588

00:39:36,758 --> 00:39:40,885

He was doing it for the American way of life

589

00:39:41,285 --> 00:39:46,095

to which he was devoted, sincerely devoted.

590

00:39:46,495 --> 00:39:50,260

And yet he felt the people were really pretty stupid.

591

00:39:50,660 --> 00:39:52,291

And that's the paradox.

592

00:39:52,691 --> 00:39:57,061

If you don't leave it up to the people themselves

593

00:39:57,461 --> 00:40:01,571

but force them to choose what you want them to choose,

594

00:40:01,871 --> 00:40:06,096

however subtly, then it's not democracy anymore.

595

00:40:09,707 --> 00:40:12,137

It's something else, it's being told what to do,

596

00:40:14,213 --> 00:40:16,593

it's that old authoritarian thing.

597

00:40:19,523 --> 00:40:21,347

But the idea that it was necessary

598

00:40:21,547 --> 00:40:24,197

to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population

599

00:40:24,597 --> 00:40:26,637

in the interest of fighting the cold war

600

00:40:26,837 --> 00:40:28,615

now began to take root in Washington.

601

00:40:29,315 --> 00:40:33,009

Above all, in the CIA, who were going to take it much further.

602

00:40:35,142 --> 00:40:38,850

They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods

603

00:40:39,050 --> 00:40:41,945

to actually alter the memories and feelings of people.

604

00:40:42,645 --> 00:40:45,403

The aim being to produce more controllable citizens.

605

00:40:46,048 --> 00:40:47,422

It was known as brainwashing.

606

00:40:51,338 --> 00:40:55,197

Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible

607

00:40:55,933 --> 00:40:58,163

and that they should try do it themselves.

608

00:41:01,188 --> 00:41:05,222

The image of the human being that was being built up at that particular time

609

00:41:05,868 --> 00:41:08,308

was that there was a great deal

610

00:41:08,508 --> 00:41:10,872

of vulnerability in every human being

611

00:41:11,873 --> 00:41:15,389

and that that vulnerability could be manipulated

612

00:41:15,589 --> 00:41:20,847

to program somebody to be something that I wanted them to be

613

00:41:21,782 --> 00:41:23,227

and they didn't want to be.

614

00:41:26,072 --> 00:41:29,562

That you could manipulate people in such a way

615

00:41:29,762 --> 00:41:34,778

that they could be automatons, if you will, for whatever your own purposes were.

616

00:41:36,015 --> 00:41:38,383

This is the image that people thought was possible.

617

00:41:39,851 --> 00:41:44,178

In the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments

618

00:41:44,478 --> 00:41:46,337

at universities across America.

619

00:41:47,362 --> 00:41:49,177

They were secretly funding experiments

620

00:41:49,377 --> 00:41:52,937

on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings.

621

00:41:54,305 --> 00:41:55,946

The most notorious of these experiments

622

00:41:56,046 --> 00:41:59,100

was run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association,

623

00:41:59,500 --> 00:42:04,049

Dr. Ewen Cameron. Like many psychiatrists at that time,

624

00:42:04,449 --> 00:42:07,976

Cameron was convinced that inside human beings were dangerous forces

625

00:42:08,276 --> 00:42:09,549

which threatened society.

626

00:42:10,149 --> 00:42:13,794

But he believed that it was possible to not just control these forces

627

00:42:14,094 --> 00:42:15,649

but actually remove them.

628

00:42:16,513 --> 00:42:20,593

He thought that psychiatry should not just concentrate on sick people

629

00:42:20,693 --> 00:42:24,301

and the mentally ill, but should actually go into government,

630

00:42:24,501 --> 00:42:29,149

that politicians should listen to psychiatrists; psychiatrists should be

631

00:42:29,249 --> 00:42:34,531

in every parliament and should direct and monitor political activities

632

00:42:34,731 --> 00:42:36,604

because they knew

633

00:42:37,004 --> 00:42:42,280

in a rational scientific way what was good for people.

634

00:42:43,057 --> 00:42:47,342

Cameron had set up a clinic in a hospital in Montreal called the Allen Memorial.

635

00:42:47,934 --> 00:42:49,606

It is now long since closed down.

636

00:42:50,990 --> 00:42:54,534

Cameron took patients who suffered a wide range of mental problems.

637

00:42:55,334 --> 00:42:59,130

His theory was that these resulted from forgotten or repressed memories.

638

00:42:59,834 --> 00:43:03,733

But he was impatient with the theory of using psychotherapy to uncover them.

639

00:43:04,033 --> 00:43:06,193

Instead, he would simply wipe them.

640

00:43:06,993 --> 00:43:09,242

Cameron used drugs including LSD

641

00:43:09,542 --> 00:43:13,208

and the technique of ECT, electro-convulsive therapy.

642

00:43:14,037 --> 00:43:17,000

It was conventionally used at that time to relieve depression.

643

00:43:17,500 --> 00:43:21,702

But Cameron was going to use it in a new way, to produce new people.

644

00:43:23,815 --> 00:43:26,991

He was really using it to try and

645

00:43:28,592 --> 00:43:32,306

change the fundamental function of the individual.

646

00:43:32,973 --> 00:43:38,754

To alter their past memories,

647

00:43:38,854 --> 00:43:40,893

their past ways of behaving,

648

00:43:42,352 --> 00:43:45,477

and as I think he said at one point,

649

00:43:46,290 --> 00:43:49,893

to just sort of erase everything from their pasts

650

00:43:49,993 --> 00:43:52,443

so that you then had a slate

651

00:43:52,643 --> 00:43:56,089

in which you could record new ways of behavior.

652

00:43:58,403 --> 00:44:02,238

And so he used massive doses of shock,

653

00:44:02,338 --> 00:44:05,653

people receiving several shocks a day

654

00:44:07,850 --> 00:44:12,556

and over a course over time hundreds of ECT treatments

655

00:44:12,756 --> 00:44:18,429

so that they were just reduced to sort of a primitive vegetable state.

656

00:44:21,076 --> 00:44:22,931

I don't remember what happened to me.

657

00:44:23,770 --> 00:44:27,495

I was introduced to Dr. Cameron and I don't remember Dr. Cameron at all.

658

00:44:28,398 --> 00:44:30,005

I don't remember any of that.

659

00:44:30,205 --> 00:44:33,036

They shipped me up to what they call 'the sleep room'

660

00:44:33,896 --> 00:44:38,208

and they gave me all of these electro-convulsive shock treatments

661

00:44:38,308 --> 00:44:44,208

and mega doses of drugs and LSD and all of that and I have no memory of any of that.

662

00:44:44,879 --> 00:44:48,813

Nothing of that time at the Allen Memorial

663

00:44:48,913 --> 00:44:53,519

or any of my life previous to that. All gone. Wiped.

664

00:44:54,771 --> 00:44:58,617

And then having depatterned somebody or brought them down

665

00:44:58,817 --> 00:45:01,728

to where basically nothing

666

00:45:01,928 --> 00:45:05,068

but the essential functions of the body

667

00:45:05,606 --> 00:45:08,466

were going on in terms of breathing and things of this nature,

668

00:45:08,766 --> 00:45:12,392

then he would begin to feed material into these individuals;

669

00:45:12,492 --> 00:45:14,116

positive material

670

00:45:14,316 --> 00:45:19,004

such that the brain would be programmed in a positive way,

671

00:45:19,116 --> 00:45:21,617

so that the individual would be completely altered.

672

00:45:21,717 --> 00:45:25,797

Then he put these tapes under our pillows called psychic driving.

673

00:45:26,567 --> 00:45:31,314

He would then put back into this empty brain a program

674

00:45:32,378 --> 00:45:34,900

of whatever sort he decided upon.

675

00:45:35,942 --> 00:45:38,330

And the people like myself

676

00:45:38,387 --> 00:45:42,006

would wake up another person, I guess.

677

00:45:43,729 --> 00:45:47,131

In fact Cameron's experiments were a complete disaster.

678

00:45:48,312 --> 00:45:51,799

All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss

679

00:45:52,199 --> 00:45:56,924

and the ability to repeat the phrase 'I am at ease with myself'.

680

00:45:58,730 --> 00:46:03,303

And it was not an isolated case, almost all the experiments the CIA funded

681

00:46:03,503 --> 00:46:04,857

were equally unsuccessful.

682

00:46:05,892 --> 00:46:09,803

Despite their ambitions American psychologists were beginning to find out

683

00:46:10,003 --> 00:46:11,332

how difficult it was

684

00:46:11,432 --> 00:46:15,418

to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind.

685

00:46:17,710 --> 00:46:21,752

We had really been chasing a phantom,

686

00:46:21,952 --> 00:46:23,384

if you will, an illusion,

687

00:46:23,685 --> 00:46:29,101

that the human mind was more capable of manipulation from the outside,

688

00:46:31,770 --> 00:46:34,338

by outside factors than it is.

689

00:46:35,576 --> 00:46:40,406

We found out that the human being is an extremely complex thing.

690

00:46:42,065 --> 00:46:44,060

There were no simple solutions.

691

00:46:47,543 --> 00:46:52,325

But you've just got to bear in mind that these were strange times.

692

00:46:54,609 --> 00:46:57,895

The psychoanalysts had come to power in America because of their theory

693

00:46:58,095 --> 00:47:02,053

that they knew how to control the dangerous forces inside human beings.

694

00:47:03,847 --> 00:47:07,241

But now the psychoanalysts were about to face a high profile failure

695

00:47:07,869 --> 00:47:11,805

that would lead people to begin questioning the very basis of their ideas.

696

00:47:13,890 --> 00:47:15,453

It began in Hollywood.

697

00:47:17,394 --> 00:47:20,271

The film industry had become fascinated with psychoanalysis,

698

00:47:20,771 --> 00:47:24,960

and Anna Freud was a powerful influence on dozens of analysts in Los Angeles.

699

00:47:26,176 --> 00:47:29,602

They treated film stars, directors, and studio bosses.

700

00:47:30,502 --> 00:47:35,258

Anna Freud's closest friend was the most sought after of all, Ralph Greenson.

701

00:47:39,184 --> 00:47:43,446

And in 1960 the most famous star in the world turned to Greenson for help.

702

00:47:44,717 --> 00:47:46,972

Marilyn Monroe was suffering from despair

703

00:47:47,272 --> 00:47:49,742

and had become addicted to alcohol and drugs.

704

00:47:51,530 --> 00:47:53,371

When I walked in to dinner

705

00:47:53,571 --> 00:47:54,655

here was Marilyn Monroe.

706

00:47:54,955 --> 00:47:57,115

And I made a picture with her called All About Eve.

707

00:47:57,215 --> 00:47:58,497

This was dinner at Ralph Greenson's?

708

00:47:58,597 --> 00:48:00,555

Yes. And...

709

00:48:01,155 --> 00:48:02,369

the only thing was...

710

00:48:03,956 --> 00:48:05,755

Ralph was trying to show her...

711

00:48:14,934 --> 00:48:17,482

the way a family life ought really to be.

712

00:48:18,882 --> 00:48:22,071

So we were walking the dog after and I said, what the hell are you doing here?

713

00:48:22,474 --> 00:48:24,018

I said, You never had me to dinner!

714

00:48:25,157 --> 00:48:27,110

And he said, You weren't that sick.

715

00:48:29,358 --> 00:48:30,934

And I said, oh.

716

00:48:31,735 --> 00:48:37,561

He said this child has no, NO frame of reference.

717

00:48:38,610 --> 00:48:41,519

In other words she has no idea what the goal is.

718

00:48:42,259 --> 00:48:44,900

What Greenson did was follow Anna Freud's theory.

719

00:48:45,909 --> 00:48:47,651

If Marilyn Monroe could be thought

720

00:48:47,751 --> 00:48:51,115

to conform to what society considered a normal pattern of life.

721

00:48:51,693 --> 00:48:55,191

That would help her ego control her inner destructive urges.

722

00:48:56,635 --> 00:48:58,557

But Greenson pushed it to an extreme.

723

00:48:58,957 --> 00:49:01,567

He persuaded Monroe to move into a house nearby

724

00:49:01,967 --> 00:49:03,312

that was decorated like his own.

725

00:49:04,012 --> 00:49:08,898

He then took her into his own family life, and he, his wife and his daughter

726

00:49:09,198 --> 00:49:11,379

played at being Monroe's own family.

727

00:49:12,379 --> 00:49:15,520

Greenson himself would become the model of conformity.

728

00:49:16,267 --> 00:49:17,068

And so this...

729

00:49:17,832 --> 00:49:19,778

someone she regarded as important

730

00:49:22,544 --> 00:49:24,145

and she idealized,

731

00:49:24,798 --> 00:49:29,085

if he turned out to be a very gratifying father figure

732

00:49:30,211 --> 00:49:32,574

her ego would benefit from that, that was the theory.

733

00:49:35,055 --> 00:49:37,586

His wife and children, everyone was involved in it.

734

00:49:38,004 --> 00:49:41,282

They were strengthening the person, they were strengthening the mind,

735

00:49:41,682 --> 00:49:44,588

they were strengthening the agent that controls inner life;

736

00:49:44,788 --> 00:49:48,282

against adversity, against insufficiency,

737

00:49:48,483 --> 00:49:51,920

against too much frustration,

738

00:49:53,117 --> 00:49:57,222

so that Marilyn would no longer be a helpless person looking for love,

739

00:49:57,622 --> 00:49:58,663

she'd have enough love.

740

00:50:00,188 --> 00:50:01,591

But despite all his efforts,

741

00:50:01,700 --> 00:50:03,860

Greenson was unable to help Marilyn Monroe.

742

00:50:05,048 --> 00:50:09,171

On August 5th 1962 she committed suicide in her house.

743

00:50:12,544 --> 00:50:16,520

The suicide shocked many in the analytic community, including Anna Freud.

744

00:50:18,041 --> 00:50:19,942

And high profile figures in American life

745

00:50:20,142 --> 00:50:22,847

who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis

746

00:50:23,247 --> 00:50:27,444

now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America.

747

00:50:28,944 --> 00:50:31,217

Was it really because it benefitted individuals

748

00:50:32,219 --> 00:50:36,806

or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order.

749

00:50:37,706 --> 00:50:41,071

The critics included Monroe's ex-husband, Arthur Miller.

750

00:50:41,879 --> 00:50:44,663

My argument with so much if psychoanalysis

751

00:50:44,863 --> 00:50:47,514

is the preconception that suffering is a mistake,

752

00:50:48,583 --> 00:50:49,741

or a sign of weakness,

753

00:50:49,941 --> 00:50:51,377

or a sign even of illness.

754

00:50:51,477 --> 00:50:52,417

When in fact,

755

00:50:53,831 --> 00:50:57,504

possibly the greatest truths we know will have come out of people's suffering.

756

00:50:57,904 --> 00:51:01,033

That the problem is not to undo suffering

757

00:51:01,133 --> 00:51:04,542

or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives,

758

00:51:04,742 --> 00:51:08,931

instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it.

759

00:51:09,588 --> 00:51:14,309

And avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness.

760

00:51:15,242 --> 00:51:19,754

There's too much of an attempt it seems to me at controlling man

761

00:51:19,954 --> 00:51:20,930

rather than freeing him;

762

00:51:21,796 --> 00:51:26,225

of defining him rather than letting him go.

763

00:51:26,935 --> 00:51:31,311

And it's part of the whole ideology of this age which is power mad.

764

00:51:34,486 --> 00:51:37,698

Hey, have you heard about the crazy new way

765

00:51:38,684 --> 00:51:41,187

to send a message today

766

00:51:41,533 --> 00:51:44,471

It's flashed on a screen, too quick to see

767

00:51:44,795 --> 00:51:48,058

But still you get it, subliminally

768

00:51:48,706 --> 00:51:50,768

At the same time an onslaught was launched

769

00:51:50,968 --> 00:51:54,262

on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people.

770

00:51:55,920 --> 00:51:57,603

The first blow came with a bestseller,

771

00:51:57,803 --> 00:52:00,056

The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard.

772

00:52:01,056 --> 00:52:05,426

It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets

773

00:52:05,826 --> 00:52:09,017

whose only function was to keep mass production lines running.

774

00:52:10,424 --> 00:52:13,982

They did this by manipulating people's unconscious desires,

775

00:52:14,182 --> 00:52:16,970

to create longings for ever new brands and models.

776

00:52:17,945 --> 00:52:19,533

They had turned the population

777

00:52:19,733 --> 00:52:23,365

into unwitting participants in the system of planned obsolescence.

778

00:52:25,643 --> 00:52:29,150

The second blow came from an influential philosopher and social critic,

779

00:52:29,350 --> 00:52:32,764

Herbert Marcuse. He had been trained in psychoanalysis.

780

00:52:35,830 --> 00:52:39,932

This is a childish application of psychoanalysis

781

00:52:40,232 --> 00:52:45,150

which does not take at all into consideration the very real

782

00:52:46,080 --> 00:52:49,123

political systematic waste of resources

783

00:52:49,423 --> 00:52:52,610

of technology and of the productive process.

784

00:52:53,165 --> 00:52:55,385

For example this planned obsolescence;

785

00:52:55,805 --> 00:53:00,212

for example the production of innumerable brands and gadgets

786

00:53:00,512 --> 00:53:03,958

who are in the last analysis always the same;

787

00:53:04,458 --> 00:53:08,657

the production of innumerable different

788

00:53:09,401 --> 00:53:11,126

models of automobiles;

789

00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:14,503

and this prosperity at the same time,

790

00:53:14,803 --> 00:53:16,952

consciously or unconsciously

791

00:53:17,352 --> 00:53:21,058

leads to a kind of schizophrenic existence.

792

00:53:23,038 --> 00:53:27,906

I believe that in this society an incredible quantity of aggressiveness

793

00:53:28,006 --> 00:53:30,365

and destructiveness is accumulated

794

00:53:30,565 --> 00:53:35,965

precisely because of the empty prosperity which then...

795

00:53:38,787 --> 00:53:40,104

simply erupts.

796

00:53:48,097 --> 00:53:49,126

Marcuse's argument

797

00:53:49,326 --> 00:53:52,627

is not simply that psychoanalysis had been used for corrupt purposes,

798

00:53:53,310 --> 00:53:54,579

it was more fundamental.

799

00:53:55,925 --> 00:53:59,985

Marcuse said that the very idea that you needed to control people was wrong.

800

00:54:01,205 --> 00:54:03,838

Human beings did have inner emotional drives,

801

00:54:04,116 --> 00:54:06,479

but they were not inherently violent or evil.

802

00:54:07,283 --> 00:54:11,765

It was society that made these drives dangerous by repressing and distorting them.

803

00:54:13,154 --> 00:54:15,998

Anna Freud and her followers had increased that repression

804

00:54:16,298 --> 00:54:18,752

by trying to make people conform to society.

805

00:54:19,552 --> 00:54:23,357

In so doing, they made people more dangerous, not less.

806

00:54:24,744 --> 00:54:27,176

Marcuse challenged that social world

807

00:54:27,376 --> 00:54:29,726

and he said that's a world that should not be adapted to.

808

00:54:30,305 --> 00:54:33,993

And in fact what the individual was adapting to

809

00:54:34,393 --> 00:54:38,746

was corrupt and evil and corrupting.

810

00:54:39,346 --> 00:54:42,478

In other words he switched the source of evil

811

00:54:43,520 --> 00:54:47,749

from inward conflict to the society itself.

812

00:54:48,598 --> 00:54:51,322

That the sickness in society lies at the society level,

813

00:54:51,522 --> 00:54:54,071

not at the sickness of human beings in it.

814

00:54:54,371 --> 00:54:56,144

And if people did not challenge that,

815

00:54:56,444 --> 00:55:01,517

then they were in fact submitting to evil.

816

00:55:03,105 --> 00:55:04,948

Modern psychology has a word

817

00:55:05,048 --> 00:55:08,599

that is probably used more than any other word in psychology,

818

00:55:09,335 --> 00:55:11,514

it is the word maladjusted.

819

00:55:12,937 --> 00:55:18,743

It is the ringing cry of modern child psychology, maladjusted.

820

00:55:18,943 --> 00:55:21,895

Now of course we all want to live the well adjusted life

821

00:55:21,995 --> 00:55:25,952

in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

822

00:55:26,985 --> 00:55:31,732

But as I move toward my conclusion I would like to say to you today,

823

00:55:32,562 --> 00:55:34,204

in a very honest manner,

824

00:55:34,711 --> 00:55:39,255

that there are some things in our society and some things in our world

825

00:55:40,177 --> 00:55:42,919

to which I am proud to be maladjusted

826

00:55:43,748 --> 00:55:47,476

and I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted

827

00:55:47,576 --> 00:55:50,847

to these things until the good society is realized.

828

00:55:51,592 --> 00:55:55,294

I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself

829

00:55:56,457 --> 00:55:59,690

to racial segregation and discrimination.

830

00:56:00,544 --> 00:56:05,614

I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry.

831

00:56:06,587 --> 00:56:09,868

I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions

832

00:56:10,168 --> 00:56:14,940

that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few,

833

00:56:14,952 --> 00:56:20,079

leave millions of God's children smothering in an airtight cage of poverty

834

00:56:20,379 --> 00:56:22,608

in the midst of an affluent society.

835

00:56:25,945 --> 00:56:29,365

The political influence of the Freudian psychoanalysts was over.

836

00:56:30,408 --> 00:56:32,017

Instead they were now accused

837

00:56:32,317 --> 00:56:35,881

of having helped to create a repressive form of social control.

838

00:56:39,180 --> 00:56:41,026

Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham

839

00:56:41,426 --> 00:56:43,990

lived on in Sigmund Freud's old house in London.

840

00:56:44,941 --> 00:56:48,528

In 1970 Dorothy's son Bob died of alcoholism,

841

00:56:49,633 --> 00:56:55,524

and in 1973 his sister Mabbie returned for yet more analysis with Anna Freud.

842

00:56:56,666 --> 00:56:58,262

She went back for more analysis;

843

00:56:58,362 --> 00:57:02,411

she was living at 20 Maresfield Gardens in the Freud house,

844

00:57:03,102 --> 00:57:05,280

as I guess she did when she wasn't with her husband,

845

00:57:05,480 --> 00:57:08,905

and she committed suicide.

846

00:57:09,205 --> 00:57:10,747

She took an overdose of sleeping pills.

847

00:57:12,845 --> 00:57:14,009

In Freud's own house?

848

00:57:14,109 --> 00:57:15,504

In Freud's own house, right.

849

00:57:21,021 --> 00:57:25,057

So obviously there are a lot of implications

850

00:57:25,157 --> 00:57:26,880

that one can draw from that and I just think

851

00:57:26,980 --> 00:57:29,530

she happened to reach the end of the rope there.

852

00:57:30,427 --> 00:57:35,305

Although it would seem to be a very pointed act.

853

00:57:35,505 --> 00:57:38,399

Obviously suicide is a very politicized act

854

00:57:38,499 --> 00:57:41,044

and to do it in Sigmund Freud's own house

855

00:57:42,238 --> 00:57:47,031

is certainly different from doing it in Riverdale back in New York.

856

00:57:52,122 --> 00:57:53,910

Nest Week's episode will tell the story

857

00:57:54,010 --> 00:57:56,530

of the rise to power of the enemies of the Freud family.

858

00:57:57,790 --> 00:58:01,316

They believed that the way to build a better society was to let the self free.

859

00:58:03,223 --> 00:58:06,264

But what they didn't realize was that this idea of liberation

860

00:58:06,664 --> 00:58:10,865

would provide business and politics with yet another way to control the self,

861

00:58:11,565 --> 00:58:13,914

by feeding its infinite desires.

862

00:58:14,500 --> 00:58:22,500

Time synch (-8.83s), spellcheck, and (some) edits by coyote 30December2011

863

00:58:23,000 --> 00:58:31,000

from previous version found on AllSubs.org, which gave thanks for the script to

864

00:58:31,500 --> 00:58:39,500

http://hareloco.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E7089CD7CF32AA20!243.entry

English Workshop

Century of the Self Workshop. Part 2 of 4

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