- 7 weeks ago
Documentary, The Century of The Self Part 2 -The Engineering of Consent
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00:00Let's say a word about dreams. We all have thoughts which we never knew we had. They are
00:09too uncomfortable, too incompatible with our adult self to be remembered. Yet they are often
00:15disturbing, rumbling under the surface like lava in a volcano. The dream is the royal road to these
00:24thoughts. The royal road to the unconscious. This is the story of how Sigmund Freud's ideas
00:31about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-war America to try and control
00:37the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that
00:43hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears.
00:48They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism
00:57of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to control
01:05this hidden enemy within the human mind. At the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's
01:15daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, who had invented the profession of public relations.
01:23Their ideas were used by the US government, big business, and the CIA to develop techniques
01:30to manage and control the minds of the American people. Those in power believed that the only
01:36way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that
01:43lurk just under the surface of normal American life.
01:50The story begins in the middle of the fierce fighting of the Second World War. As the fighting intensified,
02:07the American army was faced by an extraordinary number of mental breakdowns among its troops.
02:1449% of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems.
02:20In desperation, the army turned to the new ideas of psychoanalysis. They made a film record of the experiment,
02:27using hidden cameras. It says here on your record that you had headaches and that you had crying spells.
02:34Yes, sir. I believe that your profession is called nostalgia.
02:38In other words, I won't say this, sir. Yes, sir. No, no.
02:41It was induced when shortly before the war. I received a picture of my sweetheart.
02:47Yes.
02:49No, sir, I can't continue. That's all right.
03:04It was the first time that anyone had paid such attention to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people.
03:10At the heart of the experiment were a number of refugee psychoanalysts from Central Europe.
03:15They worked with American psychiatrists to guide and shape the project.
03:20When I first came to America, I worked in the psychiatric service with soldiers trying to rehabilitate them.
03:28And I travelled in the train from the East Coast to the West Coast.
03:34I was enormously curious what goes on in all of those little towns that the train is passing.
03:43After my years in the army, I knew exactly what everybody was doing in the little towns.
03:49Because I saw so many people who came from there.
03:55And I understood their aspirations, their disappointments, and so forth.
04:00So it was as if somebody invited me to a privileged tour into the inner soul of America.
04:11I'm not doing this deliberately, sir. Please believe me.
04:13Of course you are not. I do believe you.
04:15A display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.
04:20I hope so, sir. Sure, it gets it off your chest.
04:23Well, sir, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm very much in love with my sweetheart.
04:29She has been the one person that gave me a sense of importance.
04:36In that, through her cooperation with me, we were able to surmount so many obstacles.
04:45Take it easy now. Just hop in.
04:47The psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud to take the men back into their past.
04:52They became convinced that the breakdowns were not the direct result of fighting.
04:57The stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories.
05:02These were memories of the men's own violent feelings and desires,
05:06which they had repressed because they were too frightening.
05:09Think deeply. Let's go back. When was it you...
05:11To the psychoanalysts, it was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory
05:15that underneath, human beings were driven by primitive, irrational forces.
05:19You want that?
05:22World War II was a major shattering experience because I discovered the enormous role of the irrational
05:32in the lives of most people.
05:35That I can say. That I learned. That the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America
05:46is very much in favor of the irrational. That there is much greater unhappiness.
05:52Much more suffering. Much more suffering. Much more.
05:58A sad country than one would imagine it from the advertisements that you get.
06:06A much more problematic country.
06:11Victory in the Second World War was celebrated as a triumph of democracy.
06:16But in private, many policy makers were worried about the implications of the analysis of the soldiers.
06:22It seemed to show that underneath every American were irrational, violent drives.
06:29What had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out.
06:32The complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war
06:36showed just how easily these forces could break through and overwhelm democracy.
06:42Planners and policy makers had been convinced by their experiences during World War II
06:52that human beings could act very irrationally because of this sort of teeming and raw and unpredictable emotionality.
07:01The kind of chaos that lived at the base of human personality could in fact infect the society,
07:11social institutions to such a point that the society itself would become sick.
07:16That's what they believe happened in Germany in which the irrational, the anti-democratic went wild.
07:24It was a vision of human nature as incredibly destructive.
07:29And they were terrified that Americans would in fact behave that way
07:35or were capable of behaving that way and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.
07:40So what is needed is a human being that can internalize democratic values so that they are not shaken with the storm.
07:54And psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done.
07:58It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital free supporter and maintainer of democracy.
08:16Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces but they knew how to control them too.
08:23They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals because democracy left to itself failed to do this.
08:31The source of this idea was not only Sigmund Freud but his youngest daughter Anna.
08:41She had fled with her father to London before the outbreak of war.
08:45And after he died, Anna Freud became the acknowledged leader of the world psychoanalytic movement.
08:50She saw her job as to fulfill her father's dream of making his ideas accepted throughout the world.
08:59At the center of the Freud movement stood Tante Anna because she managed to work herself into that position.
09:09She was recognized as that and not just because she was a daughter.
09:15She worked. She worked on that.
09:19She was rather forbidding.
09:22She was not, to me, a warm person.
09:25Not an aunt you could kiss or put your arms around.
09:32Not at all.
09:34And her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis.
09:41Freud himself had seen the role of psychoanalysis as allowing people to understand their unconscious drives.
09:48But Anna Freud believed it was possible to teach individuals how to control these inner forces.
09:54She had come to believe this through analyzing children, above all the children of her close friend Dorothy Berlingham.
10:00Dorothy Berlingham was an American millionairess who, in the 1920s, fled a failed marriage and brought her children to Anna Freud in Vienna.
10:09They were suffering terrible anxieties and aggression.
10:14But Anna Freud was convinced she could free them from this by changing the world around them.
10:19She thought that she could come in and enter their environment, essentially, because they were children.
10:26You see, they didn't have independent lives of their own.
10:29She could go talk to the parents or the mother.
10:31She could go to the schools.
10:33She could influence their real world, the actual external world, to change their lives and to help them.
10:41And to change them as people?
10:43I think that was part of what her idea was, is that she felt that she could change them.
10:49From her analysis of the Berlingham children, Anna Freud developed a theory of how to help them control their inner drives.
10:56She believed that if, as well as psychotherapy, they were also encouraged to adapt to a good family and social environment,
11:04then the conscious part of their mind, the ego, would be strengthened in its struggle to control the unconscious.
11:10Anna Freud's aim was simply to help the children.
11:17But it was always the psychoanalyst who decided what was the right environment and the appropriate behavior for the children.
11:23And often as not, this reflected the social mores of the time.
11:29In my father's case, they were concerned that he would be a homosexual.
11:39And so a lot of their efforts went into preventing or trying to stop my father from becoming a homosexual.
11:48Whether or not he would have or did or, you know, it's unknown to me.
11:53Why did they want to stop him?
11:55Because they felt it was abnormal.
11:57It wasn't a normal way to develop.
12:02They wanted to have him develop along lines that society recognized to be normal.
12:09Because if they didn't, then you're going to be under the control of forces that you don't understand, that you're not even aware of.
12:15The analysis seemed to be a great success.
12:18And in the 30s, the Berlingham children had returned to America.
12:22They settled down to happy married lives in the suburbs.
12:26What they didn't realize was that their experience was about to become a template for a giant social experiment to control the inner mental life of the American population.
12:39In 1946, President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act.
12:43It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears.
12:54The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society.
12:57The aim of the act was to deal with this invisible threat to society.
12:59Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally unstable revealed by the World War II draft figures, Congress in 1946 passed the National Mental Health Act, which recognized for the first time that mental illness was a national problem.
13:16Kenely aware of the tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H. Felix, director of the vast new project.
13:23A primary objective of the National Mental Health Program is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge about mental health and about mental illness.
13:33We're not doing this. Why? Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.
13:40Two of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers, Karl and Will.
13:46Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments, and now he and his brother began to train hundreds of new psychiatrists.
13:53The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna Freud's ideas on a wide scale, and to adults as well as children.
14:03The psychiatrist's job would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control their unconscious drives.
14:10Psychoanalysis could be used to make a better society.
14:14They said psychoanalytic thinking could make for the betterment of society, because you could change the way the mind functioned.
14:22And you could take the ways in which people did hurtful things to themselves and others, and alter them by enlarging their understanding.
14:35And this was the vision psychoanalysis brought.
14:38That you could really change people?
14:40That you could really change people.
14:43And you could change them almost in limitless ways.
14:47In the late 40s, a vast project began in America to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the masses.
14:56Psychological guidance centres were set up in hundreds of towns.
15:00They were staffed by psychiatrists who believed it was their job to control the hidden forces inside the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.
15:09Yes, I need something done. I need some help.
15:18Did you have any particular teachers that you liked?
15:24I liked all my teachers except one, I remember.
15:28What was the trouble with this one?
15:30I don't know, she just scared me most of the time.
15:33Holler at me and I'd run outside and vomit.
15:37I hate my brother.
15:40Loathe him. Despise him.
15:43At the same time, thousands of counsellors were trained to apply psychoanalysis to marriage guidance.
15:50And social workers were sent out to visit people's homes and advise on the psychological structure of family life.
15:57Behind all this was the fundamental idea of Anna Freud's.
16:01That if people were encouraged to conform to the accepted patterns of family and social life,
16:06then their ego would be strengthened.
16:08They would be able to control the dangerous forces within them.
16:12When your emotions control your actions, it affects not only yourself, but the people around you.
16:22And if this sort of flare-up is repeated often, it might lead to a permanently warped personality.
16:29You can control the fire of your emotions so that your personality becomes more pleasant.
16:37So we expect that someone who's been through that experience to be much more insightful,
16:42much more understanding, and a much better regulated person.
16:47And what happens to the government?
16:48And regulation includes being able to let go, as it were, to enjoy a football game or a soccer game.
16:53A more understanding, yes rational, but also appropriately emotional person.
17:03The regulatory aspects of the human mind would really be in charge.
17:09Instead of?
17:10Instead of being overwhelmed by our passions and by our darker impulses.
17:15That one would be master or mistress of one's own passions.
17:20They just felt that the road to happiness was in adapting to the external world in which they lived.
17:28That people could be uncrippled from their own neurotic conflicts and impulses.
17:34That they would not engage in self-destructive behavior.
17:37That they would, in fact, adapt to the reality about them.
17:40They never questioned the reality.
17:44They never questioned that it might itself be a source of evil or something to which you could not adapt
17:50without compromise or without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way.
17:56So there was this fit with the politics of the day.
18:00And a balance of emotions is important to a well-rounded personality.
18:10But it was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America.
18:15Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business
18:18and use their techniques not just to create model citizens, but model consumers.
18:25Last week's episode showed how Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays,
18:29had been the first to convince American corporations that they could sell products
18:33by connecting them with people's unconscious feelings.
18:36But now a group of psychoanalysts were going to take what Bernays had begun
18:41and invent a whole range of techniques to get inside
18:44and manage the unconscious mind of the consumer.
18:48They were led by Ernest Dichter.
18:50Dichter had practiced next door to Freud in Vienna.
18:53But he had come to America and set up the Institute for Motivational Research
18:58in an old mansion north of New York.
19:01This is the Institute for Motivational Research.
19:06A place devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave as they do.
19:12Why they buy as they do.
19:14Why they respond to advertising as they do.
19:17And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter.
19:20We don't go out and ask directly, why do you buy, why don't you.
19:26What we try to do instead is to understand the total personality,
19:30the self-image of the customer.
19:32We use all the resources of modern social sciences.
19:35It opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any new product.
19:39Like the other psychoanalysts, Dichter believed that American citizens were fundamentally irrational beings.
19:46They could not be trusted.
19:48Their real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires and feelings.
19:53And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he called the secret self of the American consumer.
20:00He was trying to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations that they had for purchasing.
20:09These could be sexual, they could be psychological, they could be sociological,
20:14they could be a demand for status, a demand for recognition.
20:18There were things that people couldn't verbalize or wouldn't verbalize because they were too secret to them.
20:23They were too much a part of their nature and they would be embarrassed.
20:27They would be embarrassed if they came out and said things like this.
20:30He would interview people, but not ask them direct questions, but let them talk freely like you do in psychoanalysis.
20:46And that was his background.
20:49And so he said, why can't we have a group therapy session about products?
20:54All right?
20:55And so Dichter built this room up above his garage.
21:00And he said, we can have psychoanalysis of products.
21:03They can actually act out and verbalize their wants and needs.
21:07What we're going to do is try a couple of these salad dressings.
21:12So let's see what happens.
21:14Here is our typical housewife.
21:17She doesn't follow the instructions.
21:19And they could be observed and watched and other people could comment and they could talk about it and everybody could join in.
21:27He was the first to do this.
21:28This was absolutely the first thing that was ever done.
21:31And he had a movie projector up there where you could show advertisements and things like that and people could react to them.
21:38And he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious about the hidden psychological wants that people had about products.
21:46This became the focus group.
21:49It worked!
21:51Dichter's breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker Foods.
21:57Like many food manufacturers in the early 50s, they had invented a new range of instant convenience foods.
22:04But although consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea, in fact, they were refusing to buy them.
22:11The worst problem was the Betty Crocker cake mix.
22:14Dichter did a series of focus groups where housewives free associated about the cake mix.
22:20He concluded that they felt unconscious guilt of the new image being promoted of ease and convenience.
22:27In other words, he understood that the barrier to the consumption of the product was the housewife's feeling of guilt about using it.
22:37They basically, on one hand, wanted to make it easy for themselves, but they felt guilty about it.
22:42So what you've got to do in those circumstances is remove the barrier.
22:46The barrier being guilt.
22:48The way you do that is to give the housewife a greater sense of participation.
22:53And how do you do that?
22:55By adding an egg.
22:58Simple as that?
23:00Simple as that.
23:01Dichter told Betty Crocker to put an instruction on the packet that the housewife should add an egg.
23:06It would be an unconscious symbol, he said, of the housewife mixing in her own eggs as a gift to her husband, and so would lessen the guilt.
23:15Betty Crocker did it, and the sales soared.
23:18My cake is ready.
23:20The consumer may have basic needs that the consumer himself or herself doesn't fully understand.
23:27You have to know what those needs are in order to fully exploit the consumer.
23:37Is it wrong to give people what they want by taking away their defenses, helping remove their defenses?
23:52It seems so much longer than last year.
23:54It is.
23:55Nearly four inches longer in some models.
23:58Oh!
24:01Dichter's success led to a rush by corporations and advertising agencies to employ psychoanalysts.
24:09They became known as the Depth Boys, and they promised to show companies how to make millions by connecting their products with people's hidden desires.
24:17Dichter himself became a millionaire, famous for inventing slogans like a tiger in your tank.
24:24Even the marketing of the Barbie doll came from a children's focus group.
24:28And so it goes.
24:31But Dichter was convinced that this was far more than just selling.
24:35Like Anna Freud, he believed that the environment could be used to strengthen the human personality.
24:41And products have the power both to sate inner desires and give people a feeling of common identity with those around them.
24:49It was a strategy for creating a stable society.
24:52Dichter called it the strategy of desire.
24:55To understand a stable citizen, you have to know that modern man quite often tries to work off his frustrations by spending on self-gratification.
25:06Modern man is eternally ready to fill out his self-image by purchasing products which complement it.
25:12If you identify yourself with a product, it can have a therapeutic value.
25:22It improves your self-image, and you become a more secure person, and you have suddenly this confidence of going out in the world and doing what you want successfully.
25:39Modern man believed that that would then improve the whole of our society, and become the best society on this planet.
25:52By the early 50s, the ideas of psychoanalysis had penetrated deep into American life.
26:03The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful.
26:08Many had consulting rooms overlooking Central Park in New York.
26:12Politicians and famous writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams became their patients.
26:18They were seeking not just help, but to understand the hidden roots of human behavior.
26:24We were sought after.
26:27Washington was interested in what we think.
26:30You know, the important writers, important politicians were undergoing psychoanalysis.
26:39We had waiting lists because there were so many patients that wanted to be analyzed.
26:47So, it gave us a little bit of a swell head.
26:52And as the psychoanalysts' ideas took hold in America, a new elite began to emerge.
26:58In politics, social planning, and in business.
27:01What linked this elite was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational.
27:06To make a free market democracy like America work, one had to use psychological techniques to control mass irrationality.
27:17They actually believed that this elite was necessary because individual citizens were not capable, if left alone, of being democratic citizens.
27:26The elite was necessary in order to create conditions that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer and also behaving as a democratic citizen.
27:39They didn't see their activities as anti-democratic, as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy.
27:46Quite the opposite.
27:48They understood that they were creating the conditions for democracy's survival and future.
27:55Anna Freud had never intended that her ideas be used in such a way.
28:00But she happily accepted the rise to power and psychoanalysis in America.
28:05She remained in England, living with Dorothy Berlingham.
28:08On the surface, it was an idyllic life.
28:10She and Dorothy had bought a weekend cottage on the Suffolk coast.
28:14And in the summers, Dorothy's children came from America to visit with the grandchildren.
28:20But underneath, things were going badly wrong.
28:23Both Bob and Mabbie Berlingham, who Anna Freud had analyzed in the 1930s, had suffered personal breakdowns and their marriages were collapsing.
28:32Bob was drinking heavily and Mabbie suffered terrible anxieties.
28:36The real reasons for the visits to England were yet more analysis with Anna Freud.
28:42The problem was that it didn't look very good, did it?
28:48Because here you have somebody who's having nervous breakdowns and is having alcoholic binges.
28:54And this is not exactly, doesn't really sit well.
28:59You know, from a humane standpoint, obviously this is not desirable.
29:03You know, you want to help these people.
29:05But it also had the wider ramifications of everybody in an analysis in analytic circles knew that Bob and Mabbie were guinea pigs.
29:14They were the living proof that this was a wonderful process.
29:18It was very much swept under the rug.
29:21It really didn't get out.
29:22I mean, these people had such, their power and influence was such that, you know, you were very careful.
29:33Anna Freud was a very powerful person.
29:35And you were the grandchildren.
29:38And she knew a great deal more than you did about what went on in your parents' lives and so forth.
29:44It was not something you were going to tangle with.
29:46And you were a product of the whole situation.
29:49But at the same time, we all knew that something was really out of whack.
29:58As she grew older, she became more and more important, didn't she?
30:02Politically and scientifically, but she didn't know when to stop.
30:07She was a bit too righteous.
30:11What she did was always the thing, and she would never, to my knowledge, acknowledge that she could make a mistake or be wrong.
30:25That is my feeling.
30:27But the power and influence of the Freud family in America was about to grow even more.
30:34Politicians were about to turn to Anna Freud's cousin, Edward Bernays, for help in a time of crisis.
30:42He was going to manipulate the inner feelings and fears of the masses to help America's politicians fight the Cold War.
30:50I don't mean to say, and no one can say to you, that there are no dangers.
30:55Of course there are risks if we are not vigilant.
30:58But we do not have to be hysterical.
31:01In 1953, the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb,
31:05and the fear of nuclear war and communism gripped the United States.
31:09Those in power became concerned about how to reassure the population.
31:14Committees were set up and public information films made, appealing for calm in the face of new threats, like nuclear fallout.
31:22It's the fallacy of devoting 85% of one's worrying capacity to an agent that constitutes only about 15% of an atomic bomb's destroying potential.
31:34At this point, Edward Bernays was living in New York.
31:39In the 1920s, he had invented the profession of public relations,
31:43and was now one of the most powerful PR men in America.
31:47He worked for most of the major corporations and advised politicians, including President Eisenhower.
31:54Like his uncle Sigmund, Bernays was convinced that human beings were driven by irrational forces.
32:00The only way to deal with the public was to connect with their unconscious desires and fears.
32:07Bernays argued that instead of trying to reduce people's fear of communism,
32:12one should actually encourage and manipulate the fear,
32:15but in such a way as it became a weapon in the Cold War.
32:19Rational argument was fruitless.
32:22What my father understood about groups is that they are manipulative.
32:28They are malleable, and that you can tap into their deepest desires or their deepest fears,
32:38and use that to your own purposes.
32:41I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment,
32:47that they very easily might vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing,
32:53so that they had to be guided from above.
32:56One of Bernays' main clients was the giant United Fruit Company.
33:00They owned vast banana plantations in Guatemala in Central America.
33:05For decades, United Fruit had controlled the country through pliable dictators.
33:09It was known as a banana republic.
33:12But in 1950, a young officer, Colonel Arbenz, was elected president.
33:17He promised to remove United Fruit's control over the country.
33:22And in 1953, he announced the government would take over much of their land.
33:27It was a massively popular move, but a disaster for United Fruit.
33:32Then they turned to Bernays to help get rid of Arbenz.
33:35United Fruit brings in Bernays, and he basically understood that what United Fruit Company had to do
33:40was change this from being a popularly elected government that was doing some things that were good for the people there,
33:46into this being, very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy.
33:51That being at a time in the Cold War when Americans responded to issues of the Red Scare and what communism might do,
33:59he was trying to transform this and brilliantly did transform it into an issue of a communist threat,
34:04very close to our shores, taking United Fruit again as a commercial client out of the picture
34:09and making it look like a question of American democracy, American values being threatened.
34:16In reality, Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow.
34:21But Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America.
34:26He organized a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists.
34:31Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics.
34:36Bernays arranged for them to be entertained and to meet selected Guatemalan politicians
34:41who told them that Arbenz was a communist controlled by Moscow.
34:47During the trip, there was also a violent anti-American demonstration in the capital.
34:52Many of those who worked for United Fruit were convinced it had been organized by Bernays himself.
35:00He also created a fake independent news agency in America
35:04called the Middle American Information Bureau.
35:07It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala
35:13as a beachhead to attack America.
35:15All of this had the desired effect.
35:17In Guatemala, the Jacob Arbenz regime became increasingly communistic
35:22after its inauguration in 1951.
35:24Communists in the Congress and high governmental positions controlled major committees,
35:29labor and farm groups, and propaganda facilities.
35:33They agitated and led in demonstrations against neighboring countries and the United States.
35:38What was profoundly new in terms of what Bernays did is he took this menace to our backyard in Guatemala.
35:46For the first time, we saw reds a couple hundred miles from New Orleans
35:52who Eddie Bernays had us believing were a true threat to us,
35:57that it was going to be a Soviet outpost in our backyard.
36:00But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime.
36:05He was part of a secret plot.
36:07President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government, but secretly.
36:13The CIA were instructed to organize a coup.
36:17Working with the United Fruit Company, the CIA trained and armed a rebel army
36:22and found a new leader for the country called Colonel Arbenz.
36:26The CIA agent in charge was Howard Hunt, later one of the Watergate burglars.
36:31What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly,
36:38terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified
36:44the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II
36:50and just rendered everybody paralyzed.
36:55As planes flown by CIA pilots dropped bombs on Guatemala City,
36:59Edward Bernays carried on his propaganda campaign in the American press.
37:03He was preparing the American population to see this as the liberation
37:07of Guatemala by freedom fighters for democracy.
37:14He totally understood that the coup would happen when the public and the press,
37:18when conditions in the public and the press allowed for a coup to happen
37:22and he created those conditions.
37:23He was totally savvy in terms of just what he was helping create there
37:27in terms of this overthrow.
37:29But ultimately he was reshaping reality, reshaping public opinion
37:32in a way that's undemocratic and manipulative.
37:37On June 27, 1954, Colonel Arbenz fled the country and Armas arrived as the new leader.
37:44Within months, Vice President Nixon visited Guatemala.
37:48In an event staged by United Fruit's PR department,
37:52he was shown piles of Marxist literature that had been found, it was said,
37:56in the Presidential Palace.
37:59This is the first time in the history of the world that the Communist government has been overthrown by the people.
38:08And for that we congratulate you and the people of Guatemala for the support they have given.
38:13And we are sure that under your leadership, supported by the people whom I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala,
38:22that Guatemala is going to enter a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people together with liberty for the people.
38:32Thank you very much for allowing us to see this exhibit of communism in Guatemala.
38:39Good work.
38:40And for dinner, see what mother has for dessert, banana gingerbread shortcake.
38:45Just another of the many tempting ways in which this nutritious fruit can be prepared.
38:50So now that you've seen where bananas come from, before they reach your table,
38:55our journey to banana land has ended.
38:57We hope you enjoyed the trip.
38:59We know you like bananas.
39:02Bernays had manipulated the American people.
39:05But he had done so because he, like many others at the time,
39:09believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible,
39:14especially when faced with the threat of communism.
39:17But Bernays was convinced that to explain this rationally to the American people was impossible,
39:23because they were not rational.
39:25Instead, one had to touch on their inner fears and manipulate them in the interests of a higher truth.
39:32He called it the engineering of consent.
39:36He was doing it for the American way of life, to which he was devoted, sincerely devoted.
39:46And yet, he felt the people were really pretty stupid.
39:50And that's the paradox.
39:52If you don't leave it up to the people themselves, but force them to choose what you want them to choose,
40:01however subtly, then it's not democracy anymore.
40:05It's something else. It's being told what to do.
40:11It's that old authoritarian thing.
40:15But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population,
40:23in the interests of fighting the Cold War, now began to take root in Washington.
40:28Above all, in the CIA, who were going to take it much further.
40:32They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods
40:38to actually alter the memories and feelings of people,
40:41the aim being to produce more controllable citizens.
40:44It was known as brainwashing.
40:50Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible,
40:54and that they should try to do it themselves.
41:00The image of the human being that was being built up at that particular time,
41:04was that there was a great deal of vulnerability in every human being.
41:10And that that vulnerability could be manipulated to program somebody to be something that I wanted them to be,
41:21and they didn't want to be.
41:25That you could manipulate people in such a way that they could be automatons, if you will,
41:32for whatever your own purposes were.
41:35This was the image that people thought was possible.
41:38In the late 50s, the CIA poured millions of dollars
41:42into the psychology departments of universities across America.
41:45They were secretly funding experiments
41:48on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings.
41:53The most notorious of these experiments
41:55was run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association,
41:58Dr. Ewan Cameron.
42:01Like many psychiatrists at that time,
42:03Cameron was convinced that inside human beings were dangerous forces
42:07which threatened society.
42:09But he believed that it was possible not just to control these forces,
42:13but actually remove them.
42:15He thought that psychiatry should not just concentrate on sick people, mentally ill,
42:20but should actually go into government,
42:23that politicians should listen to psychiatrists,
42:26psychiatrists should be in every parliament,
42:29and should direct and monitor political activities,
42:33because they knew in a rational, scientific way what was good for people.
42:42Cameron had set up a clinic in a hospital in Montreal called the Allen Memorial.
42:47It is now long since closed down.
42:50Cameron took patients who suffered a wide range of mental problems.
42:53His theory was that these resulted from forgotten or oppressed memories.
42:58But he was impatient with the idea of using psychotherapy to uncover them.
43:03Instead, he would simply wipe them.
43:06Cameron used drugs, including LSD,
43:08and the technique of ECT, electroconvulsive therapy.
43:13It was conventionally used at that time to relieve depression.
43:16But Cameron was going to use it in a new way, to produce new people.
43:22He was really using it to try and change the fundamental function of the individual,
43:32to alter their past memories, their past ways of behaving.
43:40And as I think he said at one point,
43:45to just sort of erase everything from their past,
43:49so that you then had a slate in which you could record new ways of behaviour.
43:58And so he used massive doses of shock,
44:01of people receiving several shocks a day,
44:05and over a course of time, hundreds of ECT treatments,
44:12so that they were just reduced to a sort of a very primitive vegetable state.
44:20I don't remember what happened to me.
44:23I was introduced to Dr. Cameron, and I don't remember Dr. Cameron at all.
44:28I don't remember any of that.
44:30They shipped me up to what they call the sleep room,
44:32and they gave me all of these electro-convulsive shock treatments,
44:37and megadoses of drugs, and LSD, and all of that,
44:41and I have no memory of any of that.
44:44Nothing in the... of that time in the Alan Memorial,
44:48or any of my life previous to that, all gone, wiped.
44:52And then having de-patterned somebody, or brought them down to where basically nothing but the essential functions of the body were going on in terms of breathing and things of this nature.
45:08Then he would begin to feed material into these individuals, positive material,
45:13such that the brain would be programmed in a positive way, so that the individual would be completely altered.
45:21Then he put these tapes under our pillows, called psychic driving.
45:26He would... he would then put back into this empty brain a program of whatever sort he decided upon,
45:34and the people like myself would wake up another person, I guess.
45:42In fact, Cameron's experiments were a complete disaster.
45:47All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss,
45:51and the ability to repeat the phrase,
45:54I am at ease with myself.
45:57And it was not an isolated case.
46:00Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful.
46:05Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was
46:11to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind.
46:17We had been really chasing a phantom, if you will, an illusion,
46:22that the human mind was more capable of manipulation from the outside,
46:31by outside factors than it is.
46:35We found out that the human being is an extremely complex thing.
46:41There were no simple solutions.
46:44But you've just got to bear in mind that these were very strange times.
46:52The psychoanalysts had come to power in America
46:56because of their theory that they knew how to control the dangerous forces inside human beings.
47:02But now the psychoanalysts were about to face a high-profile failure
47:07that would lead people to begin questioning the very basis of their ideas.
47:11It began in Hollywood.
47:15The film industry had become fascinated by psychoanalysis,
47:20and Anna Freud was a powerful influence on dozens of analysts in Los Angeles.
47:25They treated film stars, directors and studio bosses.
47:29Anna Freud's closest friend was the most sought-after of all, Ralph Greenson.
47:34And in 1960, the most famous star in the world turned to Greenson for help.
47:43Marilyn Monroe was suffering from despair and had become addicted to alcohol and drugs.
47:48Well, when I walked in to dinner, here was Marilyn Monroe.
47:54And I made a picture with her, called All About Eve.
47:57This is dinner at Ralph Greenson.
47:58Yes.
47:59And the only thing was that Ralph was trying to show her, Romy, I never called him Ralph in my life.
48:08Romy was trying to show her that the way a family life ought really to be.
48:17So we were walking the dog after us, I said, what the hell are you doing here?
48:22I said, you never asked me to dinner.
48:24And he said, you weren't that sick.
48:27And I said, oh, no, he said, the point is just this child has no, no frame of reference.
48:36In other words, she doesn't know what the goal is.
48:41What Greenson did was follow Anna Freud's theory.
48:45If Marilyn Monroe could be taught to conform to what society considered a normal pattern of life,
48:51that would help her ego control her inner destructive urges.
48:55But Greenson pushed it to an extreme.
48:58He persuaded Monroe to move into a house nearby that was decorated like his own.
49:02He then took her into his own family life.
49:06And he, his wife and his daughter played at being Monroe's own family.
49:11Greenson himself would become the model of conformity.
49:15And so this, someone whom she regarded as important and she idealised,
49:24if he turned out to be a very gratifying father figure,
49:28she, her ego would benefit from that. That was the theory.
49:34His wife and children, everyone was involved in it.
49:37They were strengthening the person.
49:39They were strengthening the mind.
49:41They were strengthening the agent that controls inner life against adversity,
49:46against insufficiency, against too much frustration.
49:50So that Marilyn Monroe would no longer be a helpless person looking for love.
49:57She'd have enough love.
49:59But despite all his efforts, Greenson was unable to help Marilyn Monroe.
50:04On August 5th, 1962, she committed suicide in her house.
50:08The suicide shocked many in the analytic community, including Anna Freud.
50:17And high-profile figures in American life,
50:20who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis,
50:23now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America.
50:27Was it really because it benefited individuals?
50:31Or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order?
50:36The critics included Monroe's ex-husband, Arthur Miller.
50:41My argument with so much psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake,
50:47or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness.
50:51When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering.
50:57That the problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth,
51:01but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it.
51:09And avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness.
51:14There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him.
51:20Of defining him, rather than letting him go.
51:26And it's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power mad.
51:30Hey, have you heard about the crazy new way
51:37To send a message today
51:41It's flashed on its screen, too quick to see
51:44But still you get it subliminally
51:47At the same time, an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people.
51:54The first blow came with a bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard.
52:00It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets,
52:05whose only function was to keep the mass production lines running.
52:08They did this by manipulating people's unconscious desires, to create longings for ever new brands and models.
52:17They had turned the population into unwitting participants in the system of planned obsolescence.
52:25The second blow came from an influential philosopher and social critic, Herbert Marcuse.
52:30He had been trained in psychoanalysis.
52:32This is a childish application of psychoanalysis, which does not take at all into consideration the very real, political, systematic waste of resources, of technology and of the productive process.
52:53For example, plant obsolescence.
52:54For example, the production of innumerable brands and gadgets, who are in the last analysis all the same.
53:04The production of innumerable different marks of automobiles.
53:11And this prosperity at the same time, consciously or unconsciously, leads to a kind of schizophrenic existence.
53:20I believe that in this society an incredible quantum of aggressiveness and destructiveness is accumulated precisely because of the empty prosperity, which then simply erupts.
53:38simply erupts.
53:47Marcuse's argument was not simply that psychoanalysis had been used for corrupt purposes.
53:53It was more fundamental.
53:55Marcuse said that the very idea that you needed to control people was wrong.
54:00Human beings did have inner emotional drives, but they were not inherently violent or evil.
54:05It was society that made these drives dangerous by repressing and distorting them.
54:11Anna Freud and her followers had increased that repression by trying to make people conform to society.
54:18In so doing, they made people more dangerous, not less.
54:22Marcuse challenged that social world and he said that's a world that should not be adapted to.
54:29And in fact, what the individual was adapting to was corrupt and evil and corrupting.
54:37In other words, he switched, he switched the source of evil from inward conflict to the society itself.
54:48That the sickness of society lay in the society level, not at the sickness of human beings in it.
54:53And if people did not challenge that, then they were in fact submitting to evil.
55:01Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology.
55:08It is the word maladjusted.
55:10It is the ring and cry of modern child psychology.
55:17Maladjusted.
55:18Now, of course, we all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.
55:25But as I move toward my conclusion, I would like to say to you today, in a very honest manner,
55:34that there are some things in our society and some things in our world
55:39for which I am proud to be maladjusted.
55:43And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized.
55:50I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to racial segregation and discrimination.
56:00I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry.
56:06I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few,
56:14and leave millions of God's children smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.
56:25The political influence of the Freudian psychoanalysts was over.
56:29Instead, they were now accused of having helped to create a repressive form of social control.
56:35Anna Freud and Dorothy Berlingham lived on in Sigmund Freud's old house in London.
56:44In 1970, Dorothy's son Bob died of alcoholism.
56:48And in 1973, his sister Mabby returned for yet more analysis with Anna Freud.
56:55She went back for more analysis.
56:57She was living in 20 Maristville Gardens in the Freud house, as I guess she did when she wasn't with her husband.
57:05And she committed suicide.
57:08She took an overdose of sleeping pills.
57:12In Freud's own house?
57:14In Freud's own house, right.
57:15So, I mean, you know, the obvious, there are a lot of implications that one can draw from that.
57:26And I just think she happened to reach the end of the rope there.
57:30Although, it would seem to be a very pointed act.
57:34Obviously, suicide is a very politicized act.
57:38And to do it in Sigmund Freud's own house is certainly different from doing it in Riverdale back in New York.
57:51Next week's episode will tell the story of the rise to power of the enemies of the Freud family.
57:57They believed that the way to build a better society was to let the self free.
58:01But what they didn't realize was that this idea of liberation would provide business and politics with yet another way to control the self.
58:11By feeding its infinite desires.
58:14You know not what it means to be lonesome.
58:16You know not what it means to be blue.
58:21Someday you'll realize and pay for all those lies.
58:26than you'll know what it means to be blue.
58:31No!
58:32No!
58:33No!
58:34No!
58:35No!
58:36No!
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