stewart justman - freud and his nephew.pdf

8/13/2019 Stewart Justman - Freud and his Nephew.pdf

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HisFreud and / BY STEWART JUSTMAN

I N T H E 1 9 6 0 S , with the political order under challenge andmany announcing the beginning of a new age, I rememberhearing something about Freud's acceptance of the bittertruths of necessity. It occurs to me now that the tragicreconciliation I heard of is expressed in statements like this inCivilization and Its Discontents:

We may expect gradually to carry through such alterations inour civilization as will better satisfy our needs and will escape ourcriticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves withthe idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature ofcivilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform. (Freud,1953,p. 21:115).'At a time when racial injustices in particular cried out forredress, this dispiriting caveatthis reminder of the limits ofour powers and the intractability of our own naturemusthave seemed to progressives the wrong note. Actually, thedirect political import of Freud's relative pessimism is unclear.He neither excuses the status quo nor censures the attempt toreform it. To read Freud's discouragement as an apology foroppression Alas, the hum an condition is irrem ediab le, soyou blacks will just have to bear yo ur lot would travesty hisintent. Nor does he pretend one woe is as bad as another sothat there is no point in relieving any.


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458 SO CIA L RESEAR CHmunist illusion, coupling the Soviet and Nazi systems in antic-ipation of studies of totalitarianism. This resistance of simplicityled Lionel Trilling, known for the subtlety and modulation ofhis own conclusions as well as for his disenchantment with thecommunist promise, to pay tribute to Freud in incerity andAuthenticity In Freu d's vision of the tragedy of ou r n atu re T rill-ing found a refutation of the radical doctrine that society is toblame for ourills.Arm ed with his sad know ledge. Trilling stoodagainst the radicals who talked about breaking the curse ofreality, especially those like Marcuse who came forward as heirsof Freud himself Trilling knew it was not just radicals whorebelled at the idea that we cannot do much about our condi-tion. The Freudian ethic of tragic acceptance, he concedes,offends the egalitarian hedon ism which is the educated m iddleclass's characteristic mode of moral ju dg m en t (Trilling, 1971,p. 159). But it also offends the Am erican tem pe ram en t as such.What could be farther from the reconciled acceptance of smallpossibilities than the restless striving that characterizes Ameri-can society? If Trilling, following Freud, lays stress on the con-straints of human life, the mass media tells all of us withoutdistinction we can be anything we want. Ironically, one of thefounders of the industry of mass-producing attitudes like thiswas Freud's own nephew (and Trilling's acquaintance) EdwardBernays. Perhaps he had such notable success because his ownattitude, indeed one of egalitarian hedonism, agreed so wellwith the disposition of his audience.

Engineering Social Harmony


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 459Bernays sat through an education in agricultural science atCornell, but soon found that his true calling lay elsewhere, inshaping public opinion or, as he put it, engineering consent.The formula he came up with was to rally the prominent towhatever his cause happened to be in the expectation thatothers would followan indirection that raises him abovecommon salesmen and lends his efforts an aspect of civicmerit. Editors, municipal worthies, physicians, health commis-sionersall were quite willing to be used by Bernays. IfBernays were hired to boost the sales of ping-pong sets, hewould gather a committee of experts to extol the physical andsocial benefits of ping-pong, and they would comply. Newspa-pers in particular were his toy; time and again he placedmaterial in their pages with ease. The publicity that fills ourpublic space the way ether was once thought to fill physicalspace is an homage to Edward Bernays.Bernays got his start staging a media event in a campaignagainst venereal disease and sexual hypocrisy. He created afashion for Spanish combs. He promoted Lithuanian indepen-den ce and salad dressing, Cartier jewels and racial equality. H eorganized a moderation craze. Always he pulled strings. Hewas the one, it appears, behind the carving of Ivory soap inschoolshe was the Oz behind the curtain. He orchestrated acelebration of Edison that has been called one of the mostastonishing pieces of propaganda ever engineered in thiscou ntry d ur ing peace time. ^ He agitated for measures tocounteract the severe deflation of the early 1930s. In his workfor the American Tobacco Company, his invisible hand gotphysicians to issue findings favorable to tobacco. He stage-managed a Fifth Avenue demonstration under the banner ofwomen's rights, and in the midst of the Depression got


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460 SOC IAL RESEARC Hincidentally himself, in his writings of the twenties, and by oldage saw it as one of the highest and most morally demandingof vocations.

T o B ernays, publicity was a technique , a means of advancingan end. The ends he believed in include equal rights,emancipation from archaic attitudes, sexual enlightenment,getting along, and, indeed, getting ahead. In liberalism he sawa happy end to the conflict between private gain and publicgood. He missed no chance to affirm the coincidence . . .between the public and the private interest ( Bernays, 1965, p .208) as though it were the solution to the riddle of history. (Atone point, however, he mocked this, his steadiestbelief, as afantasy born of the excesses of the twenties [Bernays, 1965, p.419].) Strange to say, Bernays persuaded himself that bymolding opin ion he was actually showing the public how toexpress itself (Bernays, 1927, p. 960), and by pull[ing] thewires of the public (Bernays, 1986, p. 151), he was preservingliberty. In effect, he saw himself as teaching people to be free.As reform ers once waged a therapeu tic cam paign againstcultural backwardness (Lasch, 1992, p. 80), so Bernays workedto reform the public mind by his ingenious therapy. Heaspired to be a sort of practical Freud, emancipating peoplefrom the past and correcting the malfunctions of an industrialsociety. And the successes he claimed were too many tonumber. Whether or not everyone has unlimited possibilities,it must have seemed to Bernays that, for himself at least, notmuch was impossiblehe held the lever that could move theearth.

Manipulating the public indirectly by means of people betterplaced than himself gave Bernays mechanical advantage. Hischosen role was that of the go-between, the arranger, the


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 461influence. Influence was the ineffable something that Victo-rian women were conceded instead of powerthe consolationof marginality. The Victorian woman was said to possessunbounded power to act through others but not in her ownperson; Bernays habitually acted through others, exertingpower that he did not possess in his own right, being neither aman of politics nor of business nor of science nor even of thepress.W hen chieftains of business engag ed him, his relation tothem was always a study in contrast. A liberal, he preferredfinesse and fluidity to out-and-out domination, and when hedeplored old ideas, he had in mind the authoritarian style. Inhis dealings with men of power, there was something of witovercoming force. In any case, in a corporate world with equal op po rtun ity for all, particularly white Pro testantAmericans (Bernays, 1965, p. 348), Bernays was an ou tsider.It may be that his feminist sympathies reflect his identificationwith the outsider status of women (as well as a dislike of hisfather's dictatorial manner). In the new way of manipulation,he hit on a method that avoided both the bluntness of the bossand the crassness of the showman and that beguiled thedistinction between reality and illusion.

Like Freud's challenge to religion, Bernays's aim ofengineering social harmony derived from the Enlightenment,and so it was, perhaps, that he saw himself as a co-worker withhis uncle in the project of emancipation. Clearly, Bernays likedto think of himself as his uncle's counterpart, opening up anew science of the mind and battling prejudice and conven-tion an Am erican Freu d whose new psychology (Bernays,1927, p. 959) liberated the public mind from slavery to habit.Drawing an analogy between his services and Freud's research,he w rote: My uncle, Sigmund Fre ud, enco untered almost


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462 SOC IAL RESEAR CHcampaigning to have public relations recognized as a noblecalling. As Freud's American followers made a profession ofpsychoanalysis, so Bernays insisted that public relationsdeserved professional status. He never gave up on the fantasyof getting the occupation licensed like medicine. Did he notclaim in effect that he manipulated the public for its own goodwith the same care as a medical doctor like Freud?

In his 1927 article, Bernays speaks of the findings ofintrospective psychology tha t are the secret of his ar t and ofthe diagnostic ability req uired to read the public m ind.Implicitly, he casts himself as a Freud, except that where hisuncle emphasized the stubbo rn survival of the archaic, Bernaysstresses the ease with which his new science can overcome thehabits of the past. (In his capacity as a conqueror of prejudice,he speeded public adjustment to mass-produced bread asbeing more scientific than home baking.) Probably by design,Bernays even got himself publicized as a Freud. In a 1932piece in the tlantic M onthlywritten somewhere between jestand w ond erm ent, he is described as a nephew of that oth ergreat philosopher. Dr. Sigmund Freud. Unlike his distin-guished uncle, he is not known as a practicing psychoanalyst,but he is a psychoanalyst just the same. . . . His business is totrea t unconscious men tal acts with conscious ones (Flynn,1932, p. 563). Between uncle and nephew was a bondunrecognized here: they descend from a common ancestor,the Enlightenment. Bernays's egalitarian hedonism, which isanother name for utilitarianism, goes straight back to theEnlightenment, while Freud was so imbued with the spirit ofthe Enlightenment that Peter Gay has called him a philosophe.In widely different ways, both F reud and Bernays attem pted torelease people from bondage to their own pastsan aim that


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 463tho ug ht the psychoanalytic m etho d serviceable for conceivingthe normative relations of political organizations aiming athuman emancipation to the masses which, through them, areto achieve enlightenment concerning their own social situa-tion (McCarthy, 1976, p . 487 ). In plain wo rds, the many arepatients to be treated by political doctors. (Freud for his partdenied that anyo ne possessed the authority to impose . . . atherapy on a grou p [SE 21:144].) As dark as the scheme ofHabermas is, it is nothing compared with Chinese proceduresfor the rectification of thought or the Soviet practice ofpunitive psychiatry, realities that little concern our theorist. Inthis context, Bernays's therapy for the public mind appearslike a way of inoculating society against more menacing formsof political education . At least that is its effect. T o peopletaugh t tha t science mean s sanitary bre ad , the thesis that scienceis class struggle must appear grotesque. Next to indoctrinationcamps and psychiatric prisons, the techniques of Bernays seemlike the innocence of childhood. But childhood is not reallyinnocent and neither, as will be seen, were the methods ofBernays.

Nephew and UncleIn his dealings with Freud himself Bernays was at his best:he was no t ju st dutiful bu t devoted and in business m atterswaived his percentage. In gratitude for a box of cigars, his

uncle sent him a copy of his Gen eral Introductory Lectures whichbecame America's introduction to Freudian thought. Were thecigars a royalty for the use of the title of psychoanalyst?Another crux is the epigraph to Bernays's memoirs. He


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464 SO CIAL RESEARC Hhired to paint the interest of his clients s the public good, atask made easier by his belief that private and public interestmeshthe same ethos that today depicts the timber lobby asstewards of nature and the education lobby as a force for excellence. Employed to puff hairne ts, Bernays m anag ed toshow that hairnets were in the public interest. Employed topuff luggage, he produced the same result. While retained bythe Am erican Tobacco Com pany, he looked for some way tolink public interest in a new sanitary method of cigarmanufacture with the private interest of American Cigar inselling m ore of its machine -made p rod ucts . (It was Havanashe sent Freud.) In keeping with the American taste foroperational values, Bernays tried to put Freudian thought towork, and the result was a way of marketing consumer goods.In old age, Bernays's constant com plaint was the ch eap ening ofhis thought by newcomers who cared nothing for his deeperconcerns; never did he realize that he stood in approximatelythat relation to Freud.

I doubt that Freud wanted to be marketed. At theprompting of Bernays, the editors of osmopolitan onceproposed to him that he furnish articles on populartopicsthe kind of pieces Bruno Bettelheim would write inlater years. He rejected the offer with indignation. Apparentlyhe despised publicity as much as he loved fame.^ In the spiritof elitism, he instructed Bernays that:

This absolute submission of your editors to the rotten taste ofan uncultivated public is the cause of the low level of Americanliterature and to be sure the anxiousness to make m oney is at theroot of this submission. A German publisher would not havedared to propose to me on what subjects I had to write. In fact,the subjects brought forward in your letter are so commonplace,


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FREUD AND H IS NEPH EW 465prompter and go-between, who suggested commonplace topicsto the editors in the first place. Particularly offensive to Freud,in any case, was the editors' lack of independence and theirassumption that he was as yielding, as interested in gettingalong, as they. Getting along was one of B ernays's watchwords. It is now generally recognized that people, gro up s, an dorganizations need to adjust to one another if we are ever tohave a sm oo th-ru nn ing society (Bernays, 1955, p . 7). Bernaysentitles the second phase of his life Ad justment. W hen hedropped a friendly hint to someone important and thingsbegan to happenwhen, at his suggestion, art galleries puttogether an exhibit to further the marketing of salad oilthewheels went around because everyone was in adjustment.Ideally, all the meshings were frictionless. For the purposes ofBernays, adjustment was a mechanism of infinite utihty. Withits indirect methods and teasing suggestions and wondrousefficacy, the ethic of getting along must have seemed to him anadvance over the authoritarianism of his father.

According to Bettelheim, Freud, in contrast to Bernays, cared little abou t 'adjustm ent' and did no t consider itvaluable, although, significantly, his Am erican interpre ters setgreat store by this ethic (Bettelheim, 1984, p. 40). How couldFreud promote adjustment to society when his thinking wentwell beyond what society considered decent and when he tookup on himself the fate of being in the Op position and of beingput under the ban of the 'compact majority'? {SE 20:9). IfFreud challenged public opinion in the tradition of Mill,Bernays offered himself as Mill's successor, no longer ju stscoffing at public opinion but doing something about it. Butwhen Bernays sent Freud a copy of his first book. rystallizingPublicOpinion Freud respon ded with disdain: I have received


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466 SO CIAL RESEAR CH crystallize Jewish windows, used the book as a guide?)Freud's sharp reply hints at deep differences with the nephewwho styled himself after him and who, in his own fashion,participated in the Enlightenment tradition. If, as LionelTrilling claims, Freud enables us to oppose the seductions ofour cultureto resist and not adjust to its appeals anddemands (Trilling, 1955, p. 49) then at some point he mustoppose Bernays.

Unlimited ossibilitiesAs a technician of social harmony, Bernays recalls Bentham,that child of the Enlightenment whom Mill broke with, moreor less. Bernays attempted to wire and operate people and

often succeeded. For all his goodwill, this policy of usingpeople for their own good speaks of a disrespect for others. AsBernays described his practice teaching the public to ask forwhat it wants it sounds all too much like teaching a dog tobeg (Bernays, 1927, p . 960). Is it really possible to respect thosewhose passive responses we manipulate and whose imitativemotions we engineer?Ironically, Bernays uses the language of thinker known forhis felt objections to mechanized responses: Mill. In thetradition of Mill (whom Freud thought an advanced mind), heextols individualism an d originality. H e attacks blind slaveryto habits {Memoirs p. 83). In the case in point, though, thehabit that bothers him happens to be the surliness ofticket-sellers on Broadway . H is actual com plaint is so far ou t of

proportion to his language that the effect verges on parody.Bernays had a gift for the incongruous. At times, indeed, as in


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FREUD AND H IS NEPHEW 467such trite formulas. No success is too large or too small for hisledger. From Lithuan ia to silks is a long distance, he writes. And yet the same technique of creating circumstance [that is,staging events] which freed the Lithuanians helped to create amark et for more beau tiful silks (Bernays, 1927, p . 967).Encountering this master of presentation, one begins tosuspect that the line, You can be any thing you want to be, issimply a presentable version of the manipulator's secret beliefthat there is nothing hecann ot achieve. Ra ther than declaringthat there is no limit to his powersa delusion to be surethepublicist promotes the notion that there is no limit to whatanyo ne can do. Am erica, says Bernays, is the land ofunlim ited possibilities (Bernays, 1986, p. 121). It is tru e thatBernays played dow n his abilities as much as he vau nted them .He conceded his powers were limited by the nature of thehuman material with which he dealt. But he did not feel veryconstrained. H um an natu re is readily subject to modification(Bernays, 1923, p. 150).^ The liberator of Lithuania came closeindeed to affirming his own om nipotence when he wrote, Th efields in which public opinion can be manipulated to conformto a desired result a re as varied as lifeitself (Bernays, 1927, p.967). Never was the vision of boundless possibility moreprovocatively phrased.When in Sincerity nd uthenticity the author cited Freud'sreminder of the constraints of our nature, his criticism wasdirected at Utopians, and his language charged by the knowl-edge that the earthly paradise of communism was a monstrouslie. For the most part, he spared American ideology and itsaggressively marketed belief in totally undetermined beingitsmyth th at the re are no limits to what we can p rodu ce, con sume,achieve, or become. Wanting to believe that they lived in the


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468 SOC IAL RESEAR CHlie relations as something like the mythical atom: a discovery ofuntold power that could be put to happy or unhappy uses. Byhis own account, of course, his uses of the new political ura-nium were innocent, and his tricks were clean fun. Others maytake a different view. For while by no m eans singly responsiblefor any of our ills, Bernays contributed richly to the culture ofmanipulation that defines our political life.

That our politicians style their public images, that politicsitself is largely given over to the production of imagery forpublic consumption, everyone knows. And here the innocenceof public relations ceases. No great gap separates Bernays'svision of the wondrous possibilities of M anipulating PublicOpinion from N ixon's belief that presidents must try tomaster the art of manipulating the media not only to win inpolitics but in order to further the programs and causes theybelieve in. ^ (It irked Bernays that Nixon gave public relationsa bad name.) But Nixon was no more obsessed with publicitythan his predecessor. The other side of the public myth ofinfinite possibility is the infinite profit of duping the public,and it was in the Vietnam W ar, construed by Joh nson as apublic relations drama and plotted by men who were takenwith the unlimited possibilities in manipu lating people(Arendt, 1972, p. 35), that the worst fallacies and heaviestcosts of the engineering of consent really came out. At thevery time Lionel Trilling was theorizing about a due regardfor limits and the humbling constraints of the RealityPrinciple, the United States was pouring violence beyond allmeasure on a small country, while the authors of thispolicy spoke of the struggle to impress audiences and win


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 469The Gulture of Manipulation

When Bernays wrote that the public relations man had toknow how to speak in the languag e of his audien ce (Bernays,1923, p. 173), he little imagined the fruit his advice would bearforty years later in Vietnam. In a manual on the art ofshamm ing prod uced there in 1967, Am erica psyoperatorswere given the same counsel. DOtry to be subtle, they weretold. [A]ttempt to develop PsyOp items which do not app ea rto be 'obvious propaganda.' . . . PsyOp items which are notreadily identifiable as propaganda are more credible than anyothe r type of message. Again, DO NOT produce messageswhich contain obvious lies OR INGREDIBLE TRUTHS. DOattempt to be objective. A message which 'rants and raves' atthe enemy is not likely to induce them to perform the desiredact. 6 How reminiscent of Goebbels it all isthe pretense ofscientific detachment and psychological insight, the stress onthe persuasive power of images, the preference for a straightstyle that does not appear propagandistic, the doctrine thatcredibility is all, the avo idance of incred ible tru th s, theanxiety that something said might backfire. And yet the JointUnited States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Vietnammodeled its work not on that of Goebbels but on Americanpublic relations. Its aim, the manufacture of attitudes, was theaim of all those in the business of Bernays, as its strategymirrored his conclusion that the best way to get people toperform the desired act is exactlynotto bid them to do it in themanner of an advertiser. Bernays remained offstage, workedth ro ugh imp artial oth ers, avoided the vulgarity of selling;the psychological warriors of JU SP A O d ream ed of m akinginvisible propagandapropaganda that did not advertise its


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470 SO CIAL RESEAR CH ngineering of Consent published in 1955 and containing anessay likening public relations to military tactics, he issuedcautions on the art of winning hearts and minds which, trite asthey are, virtually predict the Vietnam manual. Bernays: [T]he use of pictures to illustrate text is sound tactics. But ifyou were preparing a promotion piece on new fashions abouttown, you would want to make sure no out-of-date gowns oraccessories were worn by anyon e in the picture . JU SP A O :DONOT use illustrations which contradict specific statementsin the text. Bernays: In public relations necessity for careextends to every aspect of tactical effort. JU SPA O : Everyitem produced should be viewed as putting the entire PsyOppro gra m on trial (Bernays, 1955, p . 24). But the art of sellingimagery met with less success in Vietnam than here for it didnot find the market that exists here. Unable to win the heartsand minds of the people, we avenged our failure in fire. InVietnam, the philosophy of liberating people in spite ofthemselves grew into an attem pt to liberate peop le if we had tokill them to do it.

Leaders and FollowersBut let us glance back to that passage in Civilizationand Its

Discontents where Freud cautions that some of the miseries ofcivilization will no t yield to any attempts at re form . Asdistressing as his message already is, he goes on to say thatan oth er cause of worry awaits us the rise of gro up formationson the American modelalthough he seems to consider theseless as costs of civilization than threats to it.


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F R E U D A N D H I S N E P H E W 471type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them inthe formation of a group. The present cultural state of Americawould give us a good opportunity for studying the damage tocivilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid thetemptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization;I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employAmerican methods {SE21:115-116).

What makes these de lph ic remarks the more puzz l ing i s tha tthe norm at ive m ode l of a g r ou p used her e the leader sfo l lowingappears in Group Psychology and the Analysis of theEgo as a throwback to the p rima l h orde , a social forma tionlinked with the suppression of critical thought, the surrenderof conscience, the excitement of powerful emotions, in all theeclipse of the higher faculties of the mind. Why should thedisplacement of a horde by a leaderless group be a cause forworry? If the modern horde so resembles the mass depicted inMein Kampf (published almost simultaneously w ith Group sychologyand the Analysis of the Ego , should i ts dying-out not bewelcomed? It happens that the very values most endangeredby the masscritical thought and responsibilityare prized byFreud. And what is a leaderless group and why is it soworrisome to Freud? Is it the soft tyranny Tocquevilleprophesied, the despotism of equals, the exercise of rulewithout a scepter?

I do not know that these riddles can be answered, but somelight may come from the recognition that Freud did not equateall groups with mobs. The two groups singled out in Group sychology and the Analysis oftheEgo, t he a rmy and the Cathol icChurch, both highly structured, bear little resemblance to aformless crowd under the will of a demagogue. No apologistfor either army or church, Freud nevertheless accepts the


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472 SO CIA L RESEA RCHminds in charge of society, though he well knows his ideal willnot be realized. His is an o m inous vision with so m ething of th eGrand Inquisitor in it. Followers, he says,

constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authoritywhich will make decisions for them and to which they for themost part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests thatmore care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upperstratum of men with independent minds, not open tointimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business itwould be to give direction to the dependent masses.{S 22:212)Neither this model of political guardians keeping enlighten-ment to themselves, nor the Habermas model of politicaldoctors dispensing it, nor the Bernays method of circulating itthrough the marketplacenone of these derivatives of theEnlightenment makes for a particularly enlightened politicallife.

Freud does not, then, equate groups with mobs. No doubtsome groups are mobs, but if, as Freud says, civilization issustained by common emotional interests, then groups mayalso civilize. It is as though groups shared in the duality ofcivilization itself to which we owe the best of what we havebecome, as well as a good part of what we suffer from {S22:214). Not only do groups command loyalty and stir the soulin ways that individualism cannot seem to match, but they joinpeo ple by bonds that go beyond w hat is merely profitable{S 18:103). Croups are capable of transcending the profitmotive that famously dominates American life. And in theirhigher functions, Freud believes, groups require leaders. Infact, they memorialize the personalities of great leade rs ofthe past {S 21:141), likened by Freud to the conscience of


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 473those affiliations: his favorite way to reach consumers is toenlist their gro up leaders. An d by making pup pets of thelatter, he subverts what Freud calls individuals of the leadertype. H e uses leaders for ends which they often ne ither seeno r un de rst an d (Flynn, 1932, p. 570). As for Bernayshimselfunlike someone of the leader type he neither exhorted noreven came forward. The school children carving Ivory soapnever heard of him. A group that Bernays called into beingwas in some sense a leaderless group, the sort of formationFreud views with foreboding even though it does not appearsubject to the grim pathologies of the authoritarian crowd.Surely the ploys and tricks of Bernays, however devious, arepreferable to the Hitler cult or for that matter the demagogu-ery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. What is it then aboutthe leaderless group on the American model that so disturbedFreud, writing in 1930? We know that he laid the state ofAmerican literary culture to editors too craven to lead, and inhis eyes the decline of cu lture may have porte nd ed a decline ofcivilization. In the group without a head, the father has beenblotted out, and perhaps it seemed to Freud that theachievements of civilization are so bound up with repressivepatriarchal structures that they cannot well survive the erasureof the father. The memoirs of Bernays leave no doubt of hiserasure of his father. But it was by employing the reputedly feminine m ethods of influence an d coaxing with such effectthat Bernays contributed most to that abolition of the fatherwhose cultural consequences Freud may have dreaded.Conc erne d as he was for the masculine cha racte r (Trilling,1955, p. 27), Freu d could hardly have app laud ed his nephew 'suse of the teasing craftiness identified with women by culturaltradition. Women, said Rousseau, know the mechanics of


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474 SO CIA L RESEAR CHbonds, the bonds more profound than calculations of profit,that support civilization. Maybe he felt that the ethic of socialadjustment, predicated on our rational interest in gettingalong, was simply too weak; or that the society of opinion pollswas too hostile to intellectual distinction for its own good; orthat the mass marketing of happiness can only sharpen ourresentment at the actual unhappiness which is our lot ascivilized beings. Certainly he considered ill will too rooted inour nature to be transformed into something called goodwillby the wand of public relations. It happens that an eloquentaccount of malice precedes his comment on the state ofAmerica in Civilization and Its D iscontents If Freud had l ived tosee bombs, poison, and fire poured on Vietnam, he wouldhave had his understanding of human malice richly con-firmed.

Freud simply cannot have believed in public relations as acivilizing force. In disparaging America, he must have had inmind som ewhere his own nephew's practice as Am erica's lead ingconjurer of goodwill, promoter of fads and fashions, andprom pter of mutual imitation, and all this in the guise of a Freud .When Freud abstains from a critique of American culture, hemore particularly keeps silent on an embarrassment in his fam-ilya would-be psychoanalyst, a m an w ho bragged of is abilityto understan d and analyze obscure tendencies of the public m indin a book he p resen ted to Freud himself (Bernays, 1923, p. 173).The demystifier says nothing about the engineer of false con-sciousness; the smasher of idols says nothing about the fiattererof the idols of the marketplace. In declining to rally his readersbehind an attack on American civilization, it is as if Freud said, Ileave rallying to my nephew.


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FREUD AND HIS NEPH EW 475Bernays too subscribed to that model of society, although withless reservation than Freud. Between himself and his imitativenephew was more than Freud may have cared to concede.

ivilization and Its Discontentscom es ne ar the e nd of w hat iscalled the canon, the reading-list of Western culture. It is abitter irony that the works of the canon, sharing a hierarchicalworldview as they mostly do, seem nevertheless distinctly morefavorable to intellectual freedom than the modes of discoursethat now oppose them. After all, any number of works in thecanon defied the censor, as did Freud himself whereas manyof those campaigning against the canon favor some kind ofthought control as if the twentieth century had not hadenough of that already. I doubt Bernays would have approvedof censorship; he was too much a part of the liberal traditionthat also included Freud. With critics of the canon, though, heshared the goal of correcting attitudes, and like them hethought of himselfas enlightening the many, championing thecause of the oppressed, and lifting the dead weight of the past.He showed what a fairly benign attempt at mind-managementlooks likeother schemes may be less benignand one canonly say that it rests on sham. The attempt to administer topeople their own freedom ends in mockery. By a similar irony,it turns out that freedo m is better served by Freud s sobersense of human possibilities than by the belief that there is nolimit to what anyone can do once the mind is set free.

Notes:


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476 S O C I A L R E S E A R C Hfinesse than the author of Civilizationand ItsD iscontents.On this point,see Roazen (1968).^ Cited in Washington Post Weekly, July 13-19, 1992, p. 36.^ Th ese are excerpts from a Jo int Un ited States Public AffairsOffice Field M em oran dum , Lessons Learned from Evaluation ofAllied PsyOp Media in Viet Nam , dated Decem ber 13, 1967. T hedocument is included in Latimer (1978).

Bibliography:Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1972).Bernays, Edward L., Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni &Liveright, 1923).Bernays, Edw ard L., M anipulating Public Opinion: T h e Why andthe How, American Journalof Sociology 33 (1927).Bernays, Edward L., ed.. The Engineering of Consent (Norman, OK:The University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).Bernays, Edward L.,Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public RelationsCounsel EdwardL. Bernays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).Bernays, Edward L., The Later Years: Public Relations Insights,1956-1986 (Rhinebeck, NY: H&M, 1986).Bettelheim, Bruno,Freudand Man s Soul (New York: Vintage, 1984).Flynn, Jo hn T., Edw ard L. Bernays: T he Science of Ballyhoo,

Atlantic Monthly (May 1932).Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam:A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983).Lasch, Chris topher, Hillary Clinton , Child Saver, Harper s(October1992).Latimer, Harry D., U.S. Psychological Operations in Vietnam (Provi-dence, RI: Brown University, 1973).McCarthy, T.A., A Theory of Communicative Com petence, in PaulConnerton, ed..Critical Sociology(Harmondsw orth: Penguin, 1976).


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