Memory became a weapon in a confrontation between Russia and America. ibid.
Cameron had begun a series of experiments to try and brainwash the memories in his patients. He called it psychic driving. ibid.
He [Cameron] had published a paper about his work called Brainwashing Canadian Style. ibid.
The CIA decided to fund Cameron’s experiments. They wanted to find a way of controlling human beings by reprogramming their memories. ibid.
Cameron’s experiments weren’t working out quite as he expected … He couldn’t find a way of replacing them with new memories. His patients were completely free of their past and of all the emotions that went with it. ibid.
The CIA were terrified that the Russians might also be working to produce a programmed assassin. They decided to continue funding Dr Cameron; whether he was creating healthy human beings or not was now irrelevant. The prefect assassin would be programmed for one simple task, and the fewer memories and emotions involved the better. ibid.
A hundred years ago a new theory of human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered he said primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces which if not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today. ibid.
Freud’s idea that hidden inside all humans were dangerous instinctual drives. ibid.
‘If you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.’ ibid. Bernays, 1991 interview
Bernays returned to New York and set up as a public relations counsel in a small office off Broadway. It was the first time the term had been used. ibid.
He wondered if he could make money by manipulating the unconscious. ibid.
Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking. And one of his early clients, George Hill, the president of the American tobacco corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. ibid.
What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made here more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists today. It made him [Bernays] realise that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you linked products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational but it made them feel more independent. ibid.
For the first time politics became involved in public relations. ibid.
What was beginning to emerge in the 1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy. At its heart was the consuming self which not only made the economy work but was happy and docile, so created a stable society. ibid.
He [Bernays] was about to help create a vision of the Utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if it was unleashed. ibid.
This is the story of how Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-War America to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self II: The Engineering of Consent
An extraordinary number of mental breakdowns amongst its troops: 49% of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems. It was the first time anyone had paid attention to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces but they knew how to control them too. They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals because democracy left to itself failed to do this. ibid.
In 1946 President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act. It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries of psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears. The aim of the Act was to deal with this invisible threat to society. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business and use their techniques not just to create model citizens but model consumers. ibid.
By the early ’50s the ideas of psychoanalysis penetrated deep into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful. ibid.
And as the psychoanalysts’ ideas took hold in America a new elite began to emerge: in politics, social planning and in business. What linked this elite was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational. ibid.
Bernays had manipulated the American people but he had done so because he like many others at the time believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible … He called it the Engineering of Consent. ibid.
But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population in the interests of fighting the Cold War now began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the memories and feelings of people. The aim being to produce more controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible and that they should try to do it themselves. In the late ’50s the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments of universities across America. They were secretly funding experiments on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings. The most notorious of these experiments was run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr Ewen Cameron. ibid.
In fact Cameron’s experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss, and the ability to repeat the phrase, I am at ease with myself. And it was not an isolated case. Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind. ibid.
High profile figures in American life who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America. Was it really because it benefited individuals? Or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order? ibid.
At the same time [as the CIA’s mind-control experiments], an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people. The first blow came with the best seller The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard. It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets whose only function was to keep the mass-production lines running. ibid.
But the Freuds were about to be toppled from power by opponents who said they were wrong about human nature. The inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled, it should be encouraged to express itself. Out of this would come a new type of strong human being and a better society. But what in fact emerged from this revolution was the very opposite: an isolated, vulnerable and above all greedy self, far more open to manipulation by both business and politics than anything that had gone before. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self III: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads
In the 1950s a small group of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of psychotherapy. They worked in small rooms in New York City and encouraged their patients to express their feelings openly. It was a direct attack on the ideas of the Freudian psychoanalysts who had become rich and powerful teaching Americans how to control their feelings. ibid.
Freud argued that at heart human beings were still driven by primitive animal instincts. The job of society was to repress and control these dangerous forces. ibid.
By the late ’50s psychoanalysis had become deeply involved in driving consumerism in America. Most advertising companies employed psychoanalysts … They had created new ways to understand consumers’ motives above all with the focus group. ibid.
But in the early ’60s a new generation emerged who attacked this. They accused American business of using psychological techniques to manipulate people’s feelings and turn them into ideal consumers. ibid.
Consumerism was not just a way of making money, it had become the means of keeping the masses docile, which allowed the government to pursue a violent and illegal war in Vietnam. ibid.
But the American state fought back violently … a phase of ruthless oppression of the new left. ibid.
And to produce the new self they turned to the ideas and techniques of Wilhelm Reich. ibid.
By the late ’60s the idea of self-exploration was spreading radically in America. ibid.