The Hidden Persuaders

Freud

The idea of Psychoanalysis was developed in Vienna in the 1890s by Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Structure of Personality

An easier way of viewing it

A short video about Id, Ego and Superego

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkin1FhojCo

The Theory of Psychoanalysis

• Central to theory was that you could analyze dreams, free associations and what the patient said to understand the core of their underlying problem

• Freud was convinced that people were primarily driven by dark primitive sexual and aggressive urges which they hid away in their unconscious mind

• Freud mainly practiced on middle aged middle class German white women

Life and death instinct

• Freud also believed that the id (the I want part of personality) was primarily governed by two extremely powerful drives

• The life instinct (The Labido/Eros) is the drive for joy, love, sex and creativity etc…

• The death instinct (The Thanatos) is the drive for fear and aggression, destruction etc…

• Essentially impulses would come from these two drives through the unconscious to the id who would express these drives as wants immediately triggering the superego to counter balance it.

• Freud theorized that in man’s prehistoric past this immense tension of the opposites gave rise to the Ego to mediate between them

Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct)(from Greek Mythology)

Sharing and development of the Superego and then the Ego

• In the first years of life the child is driven by the id’s wants• Then about age 3 the frontal neo-cortex develops in the brain at just

about the age children learn to share (the superego develops)• By age five the ego is pretty much formed and starts to mediate between

the ids wants and societies rules• Freud believed that it was essentially the id that drove much of much of

mans behavior and unless kept in check by the superego could wreak absolute evil in the world

The Fall in the Garden of Eden

• Freud believed that the story of the garden of Eden was a metaphor for the human species falling into consciousness from the development of the ego and superego.

• It was essentially a fall from the id or from animal nature. From being part of nature driven by instinct and not knowing good and evil to being able to be conscious of it and discern good and evil or to fall from oneness in to duality.

Reaction to Psychoanalysis

• The idea of examining your feelings was something you just didn’t do in polite society

• Freud's theories became an embarrassment to the ruling elite

• More than this they were scared that if you examined your feelings, eventually you would examine your relationship to the state and this could undermine their power

World War 1

• Then in 1914 World War 1 started when the League of 3 Empires (Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary) split and formed their own alliance systems between Austrian-Hungarian empire and the German empire

• 16.5 million people were killed in the great war

• The atrocities that were committed on all sides were horrendous

• Freud took this as proof that man kind was driven mainly by dark aggressive and dangerous impulses and not by rational thought as was the common belief at the time

Meet Edward Bernais (Freud’s Nephew) & Modern Father of PR

• Meanwhile in America Edward Bernais (Freud’s nephew) was working as a press agent with theatres and ballet mainly

• Woodrow Wilson (America’s President) had just formed the “Comitte on Public Information”

• Which he invited Bernais to Join• Bernais first job was to persuade the

American people to get involved in the war.

• What Bernais and his colleagues did was persuade the people that Woodrow Wilson rather than truthfully trying to re-establish the old order, was in fact liberating the people.

• It worked the people believed them and America joined the war in 1916

“we worked to make the world safe for democracy”

• They then asked Bernais and other committee members to go with Woodrow Wilson to the peace conference in Paris.

• The big slogan was “we worked to make the world safe for democracy”

• Wilson's reception in Paris astounded Bernays and the other American propagandists.

• They had portrayed Wilson as a liberator of the people. The man who would create a new world in which the individual would be free. They had made him a hero of the masses. And as he watched the crowd surge around Wilson, Bernays began to wonder if it would be possible to do the same type of mass persuasion but in peace time.

• While in Paris Bernays had sent his uncle a pack of cigars for his birthday. In return Freud sent him back his book on Psychoanalysis, Bernais took a keen interest in his uncles theories an sort to put them into practice

Birth of Public Relations (PR)

• Bernays then set up the first Propaganda agency in New York in 1923• Hs first task was to change the title to Public Relations rather than

propaganda as it had negative connotations associated with it• Over the next few years he took jobs advertising soap among other

contracts• 1929 was a big year for Bernays. By the end of it he would have helped

thousands of women to take up smoking.• Smoking was taboo for women and in 1922 women had been arrested for

smoking in New York and by 1929 is was still sneered at although not illegal it was certainly disapproved of

• Bernays was employed by the American Tobacco Corporation to try and persuade women to start smoking

• He went to see Psychoanalyst A.A Brill

A.A Brill

• A.A Brill told him that that women tended to "regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism

The first women who smoked probably had an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.”

• In other words women unconsciously saw cigarettes as a symbol of male power (a symbolic penis) and that if it cigarettes were associated with women’s power they would smoke them because they would have their own penis or symbol of power.

Torches of Freedom

• Acting on A.A.Brills advice Bernays employed a group of models to stage a protest on the Easter day parade.

• They would tell the press they were fighting for the equality of women

• Bernays had already informed the press this where this was going to happen so that they would be ready to catch the moment

• Bernays arranged to signal to the girls when to do it and at his command they took a single cigarette out of their garters and lit it up while shouting “Torches of Freedom”

• The news spread like wild fire and it effectively broke the taboo on women smoking.

• The words Torches of Freedom meant that if you agreed with equality, freedom and other such concepts you kind of had to get behind the women

• However in reality it was nothing to do with equality, but was just a ploy to sell cigarettes

• Cigarettes were now acceptable for women to buy, but women had been manipulated into buying them, by preying on their unconscious drives and attaching them to a product Bernays had broken the taboo and changed advertising forever

Changed Forever

• Before Bernays advertising had been done on the premise that people were rational and if you just told them the facts they would buy the product.

Old Car Ad• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCUI3gZaevo

• Freud and Bernays changed that premise and now people are largely thought of as being mainly driven by dark primitive desires

• Later governments and big business would begin to use these methods of controlling the masses by their unconscious desires

In his 1928 book Propaganda, he wrote: "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."

Messages

• Advertisers often use visual language to symbolically represent feelings and desires on an unconscious level

• Advertisers often draw on the life and death instincts to sell products• Although libido is the life instinct and thanatos the death instinct they can

be broken down to other levels such as (libido = love/sex/creative/life affirming/completeness or anything else that compliments the life force or on the other side (thanatos = fear/isolation/decay/embarrassment/feelings of inadequacy etc…