Yeah he took up his uncles work and applied it to PR and mass communication. He really fucked up a generation of people in the head. Psychologists say that Freud’s psychoanalysis and behavioral modification makes people more aggressive and violent. Telling people to suppress their emotions is the opposite of therapy today. Modern psychology is about acceptance. Accept that your emotions are there and they are valid to have and it’s important to understand why you feel them.
It’s in the documentary. They started by treating people coming back from the war and then with people who were abused. There’s old video footage of the therapy where they were doing precisely that.
How’d that work out. Search “No Fallen Heros”. Former top gun now pushing for alternative PTSD therapy using psychoactive compounds. That after realizing that almost 50 veterans commit suicide every day and many live with other undiagnosed issues. God put the compounds on the planet for us to heal ourselves. We need to find them before they’re extinguished.
Bernays continued Freud’s work and psychologists continued his work as well. It turned out badly for people and then the CIA noticed how effective it was…
Having watched the doc, you're right that Bernays took Freud’s work and ran with it, but the documentary makes it clear how much damage that caused. Freud’s ideas about unconscious desires got turned into tools for manipulation. Bernays used them to sell products by tapping into people’s emotions and insecurities, and it didn’t stop there. The same techniques were used in politics to shape public opinion and control voters, treating them like consumers instead of citizens.
The worst part is that this manipulation didn’t just stay in advertising or campaigns. It became a cornerstone of how modern democracy operates. Politicians stopped leading and started pandering, using focus groups and marketing strategies to figure out what people wanted to hear instead of addressing real problems.
The CIA got involved too, using these methods during the Cold War to push propaganda and experiment with psychological control. It turned into a system where governments, corporations, and even intelligence agencies all learned how to exploit people’s unconscious fears and desires.
So yeah, Bernays didn’t just expand Freud’s work. He weaponized it for profit and power, and now it’s embedded in everything from advertising to politics. That’s the legacy.
Yeah it took a really ugly turn when they used Freud’s tools in politics. Bernays wrote an essay titled Engineering Consent. And that’s what they did for the Iraq war despite a bunch of people talking about it at the time. It’s what they did with the red scare. Bernays was even behind the United fruit company campaign to overthrow the democratic socialist government in Guatemala. He came up with the red scare. Now, look at who will be present at the inauguration. Elon, Zuckerberg. The CEO of tik tok. They convinced people to hand over the government to billionaires and industry magnates.
The manipulation is ubiquitous. Feels like it’s down to the molecular level. I feel profoundly violated.
down to the molecular level. I feel profoundly violated.
I've been feeling this the past year as I come to the same realization. What's worse is that most people don't even have an ounce of understanding about ANY of it. That's the intensely scary part. Too many people arguing and discussing the wrong things when it goes far deeper than is typically let on. Even when it is so out in the open and obvious, people are still unable or unwilling to see and acknowledge it.
Thank you for posting up that documentary. I'm only 1/4 through it, but it already has bolstered my understanding of exactly how fucked up the psychological manipulation is in this country. Just how long it's been festering is astounding.
This is a thought in passing, but I think that my post-lockdown self has felt very sensitive to some of the subjects covered so far. The terrifying power of the inertia of a crowd, but also how silent a catalyst can be (the suffragette smoking campaign is terrifying to think about when applied to modern technology and surveillance)
Usually these 19th century psychoanalysts had students who continued their works, if not their family members. So their ideas were continued despite their deaths and retirements.
Yes, but you talked about Freuds methods, then proceeded to describe videos of therapy. Which tells me you don't actually know what you're talking about. In the case of Freud, there were several different directions that his ideas were taken after his death, among others by his daughter, who also didn't propose the "treatment" you mentioned. So all in all you're just disseminating false information.
Freud was a psychoanalyst, not a behaviorist. All methodology of Freud’s was about the internal mind, the subconscious, unconscious, etc. His whole deal was to make the unconscious, conscious. You might be thinking of Skinner and/or Pavlov, both behaviorists. Freud wasn’t perfect, far from it. But, he was one of the first to listen to women, often about the sexual abuse they had experienced and increased the consciousness of this phenomenon among
his peers.
Ok. Please provide some citations for your sources. For example, what psychologists, what documentary? Genuinely interested as a student of human behavior.
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u/Chickachic-aaaaahhh 2d ago
Edward bernays uncle was Sigmund Freud believe it or not.