The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Founder of the First Sexual Revolution -- (Chapter VIII, Part 35)

With his electrified shock of hair, hiss fairy stronk accent and screwball hypotheses, Wilhelm Reich (like Freud) would be laughable if so many people still didn't take him seriously.

In fact, one reason I've come to Vienna is to see the Jewish Museum's temporary exhibit in honor of the archetypal mad scientist.

Whereas Freud was a Victorian at heart, arguing that the libido had to be controlled to preserve society, his Galician disciple was a child of the sexed-up fin de siècle—'Willy' had started having sex with one of his family's maids when he was eleven, and both his parents had killed themselves over his mother's affair with one of his teachers.

Unlike his mentor in Vienna, Reich echoed Rousseau's view that humans were fundamentally good; it was society's hang-ups that were bad.

If people's libidos could be let off the leash, Reich argued, the world would be revolutionized: in fact, he coined the term 'Sexual Revolution' way back in 1930.

A couple of years later, the young psychoanalyst committed an unpardonable sin in Freud's eyes.

While the father of psychoanalysis had been exploring masochism with his daughter, he had also developed a new pet theory: the so-called 'death instinct,' the counterpart to the libido that drove humans to destruction.

Sacrilegiously, though, Reich had the audacity to debunk Freud's latest universal discovery, linking it to just one of many particular character traits.

Freud responded with the standard punishment for anyone who wouldn't kowtow to his godlike self-image: he had him excommunicated from the psychoanalytic church, using his masochistic daughter as his enforcer.

When Reich published his article on 'The Masochistic Character' in 1932, Freud tried to claim that he had written it 'in the service' of the Communist Party.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Here's Where It Really Gets Messy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 34)

As a diagnosed masochist (and elementary schoolteacher), then, Anna Freud preached that kids could be taught to control their irrational impulses and conform to society—a notion that sounds far more benevolent than it really was.

In keeping with her father's methods, Anna secretly tested her theories on the children of her lifelong female companion, the heiress Dorothy Burlingham, daughter of artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Sigmund called her kids 'naughty American children.'

Anna and Sigmund managed to escape the Nazis, 
thanks to the strings pulled by his foreign disciples:
'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime,' the director of Vienna's Freud museum told me.
'They allowed him to take everything with him.' 

Obsessed that the boy was homosexual and therefore in her view abnormal, Anna subjected him and his sister to live-in analysis throughout their childhoods.

At first, her methods seemed to work: the children turned into apparently model citizens who married and had children of their own.

Sure enough, the son didn't become gay—but he did end up drinking himself to death.

His sister committed suicide in the same house in north London where Sigmund had 'died in freedom' and Anna had subjected her to experiments (ironically, the house is now a shrine to Freudianism: the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens).

And they're still at it:
The Anna Freud Centre in London

As for Anna herself, her dad's dodgy analysis left her with a father complex so severe she ended up dying a 'vestal' virgin guarding his legacy, huddling in his overcoat as an old, childless spinster on Hampstead Heath.

By that time, unfortunately, Anna's theories had been foisted on a generation of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic.

The tragicomic implication of all this is that when the inevitable backlash came, the rebels of the Sixties wound up kicking against the wrong targets.

Behind the scenes, Freud and his disciples were as much (if not more) to blame for creating the consumerism and conformity of the 1950s as the usual scapegoats: namely, religion, bigotry and the nuclear family.

What's more, when a generation of disillusioned rebels tried to break with the past and create a new future, they looked to another misguided follower of Freud as their savior.

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Anna Freud, Guinea Pig -- (Chapter VIII, Part 33)

As feted as he was at his death, though, Freud's legacy climaxed after the war.

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.'

Freud's Birthday: Thus Began the Age of Selling Out

To mark Freud's birthday this month (May 6th), do yourself a favor and check out this must-see series from the BBC called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.

You can watch it for free on the Web (in fact, I think that's the only way you can see it; I've tried to do the right thing and buy it, but it doesn't seem to be available on DVD).

The documentary starts starts off by profiling the man who founded modern PR: Freud's American nephew.

Ironically, Goebbels was one of his biggest fans.

Edward Bernays,
Freud's American nephew

Here are the program notes and the links to each part.

Part I: Happiness Machines

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.

He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

'You're NOT just one of the crowd.'
A poster from 1933

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom.

But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

Branded baby
(at Forward Escape)

Part II: The Engineering of Consent

The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. 

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that 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. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. 

But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

Part III: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.

Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics. 

This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.

But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. 

To do this, they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

Part IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self. 

Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.

Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.

The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. 

But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

Here are the links again to all four parts: 

Part I: Happiness Machines

Part II: The Engineering of Consent

Part III: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

Part IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering