Anna Freud - The Woman Who Designed the Normie Mind (Part Two)
The Elite have long utilized psychoanalysts to sculpt a more compliant population, yet even today, when their techniques are at their most insidious, few appreciate the true extent of their influence.
If you are a subscriber to Midnight at the Matinee, you might remember that a couple of weeks ago, I published my critique of The Century of the Self, a 2002 BBC documentary on how powerful corporate and government entities have, for the vast bulk of the last hundred years, employed the insights of psychoanalysts in order to manipulate and exploit an unwitting public.
It is every bit as chilling as it sounds.
Rewatching the film today, perhaps for the twenty-someteenth time, I find myself pausing just as frequently as I did the first, necessary as it so often is to reflect on, or even just emotionally digest, much of its relentlessly prescient commentary.
Indeed, the most recent viewing might have been my most fitful. I think that most readers will have experienced, after all, sometime over the last two years, the sensation of looking around and being simply unable to comprehend the behavior of those with whom we share our lives. It felt as though many of our fellow citizens had literally been taken possession of, gripped by a terrible and dehumanizing magic, and while those who wield that magic might have changed since The Century of the Self was released, the revelations it provides leave little doubt that the spells they cast remain very much the same.
The first episode, for anyone who doesn’t mind a one-paragraph refresher, follows the work of Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud and a man often referred to as “The Father of Public Relations”.
And let me tell you, this guy was cynicism distilled.
By tapping into his uncle’s idea of the Unconscious - that seldom acknowledged, much less explored aspect of our bestial selves - Bernays was able to articulate the factors behind human decision-making far more precisely than any one decision-maker. Needless to say, there were plenty keen to recruit his services. In the fields of both business and politics, Bernays’s methods were to prove as immense as they were unquantifiable - the only true measure of his legacy found not in the products we buy or even the politicians we elect, but rather in a society whose inhabitants remain trapped inside a cage of their own desire.
Upon reading over my previous analysis in preparation for writing this one, I fear that I have failed to properly convey one of Bernays’s most defining characteristics: namely, however cynical, so too was he his own peculiar kind of idealist. It was his conviction, and apparently a very sincerely held one, that an enlightened and benevolent elite would be required to provide guidance for civilization, steering it away from whatever catastrophe the masses would inevitably set sail for. Y’know, the experts.
In addition to Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Obama, Hillary, and George Whoopsie-doodle Bush, Bernays’s philosophy of government also shared considerable overlap with his cousin Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund, and focus of the series’ second episode, The Engineering of Consent.
This instalment begins amid the victory celebrations of World War Two, as waves of soldiers made their triumphant return to America. Jubilant though they might have been, many of these men were suffering not just from the physical but also the psychological consequences of the conflict, and so, in their desperation, the Army directed them into the care of a group these soldiers had just liberated - displaced psychoanalysts from Europe.