Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer widely regarded as the father of public relations. Drawing on the psychology of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, he recast publicity as the deliberate engineering of public opinion, and his 1928 book Propaganda made the case for consciously shaping how a person, product, or institution is perceived.
Across decades of campaigns for corporations, governments, and consumer brands, Bernays established public relations as a discipline rather than an accident of press coverage. His thinking sits directly upstream of 📝Cynthia Johnson's work: Propaganda appears on her own list of recommended reading, and her central thesis — that a person should deliberately shape their own narrative before the world shapes it for them — is a modern, individual-scale inheritance of his.