In 1947, Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays published an essay entitle “The Engineering of Consent.” Bernays defined “the engineering of consent” as the art of manipulating people, specifically Americans, whom Bernays described as “fundamentally irrational” and not to be trusted.
Undisciplined, non-intellectual, and amoral people (Bernays claimed) are vulnerable to influences of which they are not even aware and accordingly are highly susceptible to want things they do not actually need. This means that producers of merchandise and ideas can increase the population’s “need” for their products by tapping into people’s unconscious desires. Ernest Dichter, regarded by many as the “father of motivational research,” referred to this impressionable unconsciousness as “the secret-self of the American consumer.”
Bernays was among the first to use psychological techniques in advertising, and is considered the father of the public relations industry.
As discussed earlier, in 2002 the filmmaker Adam Curtis released a four-part documentary called “The Century of the Self” which explores how Freudian theory has been used to influence Bernays’s “engineering of consent” by politicians, advertising and public relations people for the past 100 years.
The film examines modern consumerism, the way people see themselves, superficiality, and the ways in which politicians and business people appeal to the consumers’ primitive and irrational impulses in order to influence their behavior. Curtis cites Paul Mazer, a banker who worked for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s who said: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things; even before the old have been entirely consumed; man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”