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“The Century of the Self,” a four-part series produced for BBC television, cogently argues that Sigmund Freud’s seminal theory of the subconscious has been successfully deployed over the past century as an instrument of consumer manipulation and social control. According to the film, the father of this transformation was Edward Bernays, Freud’s American nephew, who was responsible for coining the term “public relations” in the 1920′s. Bernays managed to pull off a number of impressive marketing coups in his long career, including the popularization of smoking among women, by tapping into the tenets of psychoanalysis to predict and shape consumer behavior. To tell the story, Adam Curtis, the film’s director and writer, has dug up a whole collage of fascinating clips: home movies by Anna Freud; Reichian scream therapy sessions; a British focus group in which housewives were encouraged to impersonate their own appliances and more….

Watch The Century Of The Self:

Part One – Happiness Machines

Part Two – The Engineering of Consent

Part Three – The Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads

Part Four – Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering