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.
Remarkably, these professionals did not attribute their patients’ mental and emotional anguish to the horrors they had endured. As disciples of Sigmund Freud, they instead saw their patients’ trauma as both the brutal manifestations of their Unconscious as well as the final, unassailable proof of their progenitor’s theories. The implications were troubling. What these psychoanalysts were claiming, was that beneath the idyllic veneer of American life, bubbled the same irrational urges and violent impulses that had erupted in Germany. Naturally, politicians and policymakers wished to prevent the same madness from again taking hold, turning, in their search for solutions, to the same psychoanalysts who had first diagnosed the problem.
Chief among them was Anna Freud. Although today she remains very much in her father’s formidable shadow (as indeed, she was rarely far from him during their lives), she was, at the time, considered a renowned figure within the global psychoanalytical movement and upon his death, ascended to the role of its de facto leader.
She was not, however, nice. Through interviews conducted with Anna’s surviving relatives, The Century of the Self paints a picture of a woman who was cold, humorless, and almost singularly driven by the compulsion to spread the gospel of Sigmund Freud. This she did through the children of Dorothy Burlingham. Suffering from the emotional fallout of her failed marriage, they were taken to stay with Anna in the hope of alleviating their symptoms, and prescribed a regime of strict conformity to prevailing social norms of the time. It was Anna Freud’s belief that by imposing such norms, she would strengthen the children’s rational Ego at the expense of their irrational Unconscious, thus freeing them from their anger and anxiety.
And on the face of it, her techniques worked. The Burlingham children grew up and were successfully absorbed into middle class suburbia, lauded first as cast iron proof of Anna Freud’s wisdom, and second as the blueprint for the psychological wellbeing of the country.
After all, when President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act of 1946, what he was effectively signing into law was the psychoanalytic philosophies of Carl and Will Menninger, a pair of psychiatrist brothers and keen advocates of Anna Freud’s methods. The legislation was unprecedented in its scope. Psychiatrists’ offices were established throughout the country. There were marriage counsellors trained to advise on the proper roles within relationships as well as social workers attending to family dynamics. This was not merely the psychoanalysts’ attempt to improve the mental welfare of the population; their concern, and in many cases, their explicitly stated goal, was in the cultivation of the ideal citizen - rigorous in their spending habits, committed to their defense of democracy - and most of all, perfectly at ease with the society around them.
Pertinent to remember, is the geopolitical situation at this time. With the Cold War having just begun (or in the latter stages of limbering up, depending on which historian you ask), the America public were now being to be exposed to, with varying degrees of legitimacy, tales of bizarre experiments being conducted on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Naturally, the CIA decided they should probably try their hand, too. Working from Anna Freud’s own playbook, what they sought to achieve was not merely the creation of new exemplars of citizenship, but rather the ability to wipe the human mind clean in order that it might be rebuilt. Mercifully, their attempts failed. All they instead succeeded in producing were groups of irreparably damaged test subjects, undermining in the process, the implicit assumption that human beings were as infinitely programmable as Anna Freud considered them to be.
By now, her theories were also beginning to be questioned in the wider public. This disillusionment had been, to a very large degree, precipitated by the suicide of Marilyn Monroe who was well known to have been undergoing treatment from Anna’s Freud friend and ideological ally, Ralph Greenson. This most iconic of deaths (facilitated by an overdose of barbiturates) threw into more skeptical focus, the role psychoanalysis now played within American life, Monroe’s husband Arthur Miller providing The Century of the Self with perhaps its most resonant quote:
“My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.”
But of course, by that point, the poison was in the wound. No matter how genuine Anna Freud’s attempts to help the Burlingham children (one of whom would go the same way as Monroe, killing herself in Freud’s own house), her most lasting impact remains in the psychoanalytic infrastructure that proliferates across America - an infrastructure which still today, allows government and other sufficiently powerful entities to peer into, and ultimately to manipulate, the innermost lives of its citizens.
If you are interested in checking out the rest of The Century of the Self, you can do so right here, while if you prefer, you can always hit the subscribe button below and I’ll be sure to send Part Three of my analysis (along with loads of other great stuff) straight to your inbox.
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