His nephew taught his clients, namely the White House and major multinationals, to 'engineer consent' by appealing to the irrational sides of consumers.
Politically, this was meant to keep the masses in check and the Commies at bay. (Goebbels, Hitler's propagandist, had also hailed Bernays as an inspiration.)
By constantly stimulating people's irrational sides, though, companies conditioned them to behave more irrationally.
Consumers no longer looked to advertisements mainly for information but for entertainment.
 |
| Here we are now entertain us |
And as admen increasingly used sex to sell consumer goods, they created the modern concept of sex as a consumer good.
Meanwhile, Freud's daughter Anna was trying to set the world straight by re-educating the masses in America.
Unfortunately, she was profoundly screwed up herself.
As a young woman, Anna had been psychoanalyzed—not by one of Freud's colleagues—but by her father, whose analysis inevitably focused on sex.
Freud secretly used his favorite daughter as a guinea pig to develop his theories on masochism.
Without acknowledging that she was the subject in question (or her father the analyst), Anna later wrote a paper on 'Beating Fantasies and Daydreams' that told of a girl who'd supposedly fantasized about incest with her father, which then led to fantasies about being beaten when she was five or six years old.
And whenever she dreamt of being beaten, she would masturbate (not for nothing is it called 'beating off').
However, given Freud's dodgy ethics and obsession with sex, it's very likely that he planted these fantasies in the mind of his impressionable young daughter.
Anna admitted as much, noting in her paper that 'the girl never gave any detailed account of any individual scene of beating… which left to the analyst the task of completing and reconstructing a picture of the original situation.'
No comments:
Post a Comment