DOCUMENTARY FILM

Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self is a high ranking and award winning documentary film about the Freud family and their contribution to analyzing government, corporation, and business. Their main objective being the methods of controlling people. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud altered the notion of the human mind and way of thinking. From his base ideas, the majority of this documentary is about others taking such ideas and using them to created the idea of “public relations”. The direct correlation of Freud's ideas to consumers, entrepreneurs and advertisers is what made them so important. Almost ever human falls into one of the 3 categories, making his ideas widely influential to the public. In the first episode, Edward Bernays is the person of interest. Being Freud’s nephew, he applied many of his uncles ideas and strategies to manipulate his way into having a great reputation in the manufacturing and business world. Of many of his accomplishments, his biggest success may have been known as the reversing of the taboo against women smoking cigarettes. He manipulated the public into believing that this was a symbol of freedom and strength. He related it to a mans genitals, evening the playing field for women. This was a common theory for Freud and Bernays. He would “Forge the mind of the nation” to take meaningless objects and connect a powerful idea or meaning that related to personal identity to it. This episode continues to develop upon eras and major events like The Great Depression as well as contrasting the effects of their theories in Germany as well as the United States. Freud’s psychoanalysis in the united states is introduced as the second episode begins. Conveniently after the war, this type of manipulation was necessary for the mental problems of all of the returning soldiers. By dissecting their emotional trauma, psychoanalysis was moving forward in America. Also at the time the nation was moving into an age of consumerism. People were subconsciously buying things based on impulses and fears that advertisements aroused. By adopting the ideas from psychoanalysis into the the production and consumption business, the economy was slowly improving. Slowly the documentary moves into talking about Ernest Ditcher using these theories in business to increase sales for common products, such as something as simple as cake mix. Other abstract ideas such as brain washing are analyzed as well as how psychoanalyst’s went back to the early stages of psychoanalysis and fixed many of the beginning failures. Towards the end of the episode, we see people challenging psychoanalysis and claiming it was false propaganda and “planned obsolescence”. Although some people thought it was dangerous, in my opinion it was an important and great influence as well as an enormous movement in history. Controlling people is the basis to so many industries and organizations. It almost has a snowball effect that we have all fallen into because we are all conformed to these ideas in business and advertisement of pleasing the consumer, giving them what the want to hear, and convincing them of what we want. The Freud’s created a strategy, theories and ideas that will forever be influential on the human race.