This video talks about how America used Freud’s theories to manipulate the economy. Freud’s nephew, Bernays, thought if propaganda could help in war, it could help in peace time as well. He saw that if you wanted to sell a product, you needed to find a way to get an emotional connection between our basic desires and the product. During the 1920′s in NYC, you started to see this connection of glamorizing the consumer within advertising. This driving the hidden desires in merchandise, people started to feel better when they had the best of the best products. This brought a new era of advertising from the 1920′s to present day.
Programmed to Buy!!
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This Video is fantastic. For one, it reveals yet another area of 20th century in which Freud’s ideas had a massive, powerful and yet unintended splash on history. Secondly, it portrays how rapidly the ideas of subconscious manipulation proliferated in both the world of advertising and business and the world of government and authoritarian control. Bernays developed a way to play on the population’s unconscious emotional needs thus inventing what is essentially the way advertising and marketing firms still operate. We see how Freud, who detested American consumerism along with our culture in general, actually had a key hand in advancing consumerism into what it is today. As buying goods became a psychological tranquilizer, consumerism increasing supplemented religion and nationalism as the opiate of the masses in America.