Season 1
A secret history of the 20th century.
Synopsis
The Century of the Self (2002), Season 1 is Adam Curtis's BBC documentary you can watch online on iFILM — four episodes tracing how Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious became a tool for managing whole populations.
It starts with one man: Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, who turned his uncle's ideas into the public relations industry in the 1920s. From there the season widens. Post-war America borrows the same psychology to keep the masses content. In the sixties a radical wave of therapists, drawing on the disgraced Freudian Wilhelm Reich, tries to tear the whole edifice down. By the close, focus groups — a psychoanalyst's invention — are steering Blair's Labour and Clinton's Democrats. Four chapters, one argument: consumer society did not simply happen, it was engineered.
Curtis's signature is all over it — dense archive footage, that flat, certain narration, jump-cuts that wire advertising straight to the couch. The season asks for patience and never flatters its viewer, but if you like ideas-driven BBC documentary, it hands you a strange new lens on the twentieth century. Stream The Century of the Self Season 1 online on iFILM.
4 episodes
S1·E1Happiness Machines
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
S1·E2The Engineering of Consent
The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.
S1·E3There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads. He Must Be Destroyed
In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.
- S1·E4
Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
How both the Labour Party in Britain and the Democrats in America have sought to gain power through use of the focus group, invented by psychoanalysts to fulfil desires of the inner self.
1 seasons
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