The Century of the Self is a 2002 British 🏷️#documentary series by 📝Adam Curtis on how business and government used 📝Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious to manage the public in an age of mass democracy.
The four-part series aired on BBC Two from 17 March to 7 April 2002 and was produced by RDF Television with the BBC. Its episodes are "Happiness Machines," "The Engineering of Consent," "There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed," and "Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering." It won Best Documentary Series at the Broadcast Awards.
The first episode follows 📝Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew and a pioneer of 📝Public Relations, who applied psychoanalytic ideas to selling products and shaping opinion. Later episodes turn to Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich's opposition to Freudian theory, and the market research of Ernest Dichter. The final episode presents political strategist Philip Gould and PR consultant Matthew Freud, Sigmund Freud's great-grandson, as figures in the 1990s return to power of the US Democratic Party and New Labour in Britain, campaigns that relied on focus groups first developed by psychoanalysts working for US corporations.
Curtis argues that politics and marketing shifted from appealing to rational thought toward satisfying desires, so that people who feel free are in fact governed by those desires. In the first episode he states that the series "is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." The argument carries into his later films, including 📝HyperNormalization.