Freud and ...

His
I N THE 1960S,

/
BY STEWART JUSTMAN

with the political order under challenge and many announcing the beginning of a new age, I remember hearing something about Freud's acceptance of the bitter truths of necessity. It occurs to me now that the tragic reconciliation I heard of is expressed in statements like this in
Civilization and Its Discontents:

We may expect gradually to carry through such alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needs and will escape our criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform. (Freud, 1953, p. 21:115).' At a time when racial injustices in particular cried out for redress, this dispiriting caveatthis reminder of the limits of our powers and the intractability of our own naturemust have seemed to progressives the wrong note. Actually, the direct political import of Freud's relative pessimism is unclear. He neither excuses the status quo nor censures the attempt to reform it. To read Freud's discouragement as an apology for oppression"Alas, the human condition is irremediable, so you blacks will just have to bear your lot"would travesty his intent. Nor does he pretend one woe is as bad as another so that there is no point in relieving any. Similarly modulated are Freud's views on what used to be called the social question. He commends "endeavours to fight against the inequality of wealth among men and all that it leads to" (SE 21:113n.), which is a lot farther than most Americans today will go, at the same time that he sees through the comSOCIAL RESEARCH,

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munist illusion, coupling the Soviet and Nazi systems in anticipation of studies of totalitarianism. This resistance of simplicity led Lionel Trilling, known for the subtlety and modulation of his own conclusions as well as for his disenchantment with the communist promise, to pay tribute to Freud in Sincerity and Authenticity. In Freud's vision of the tragedy of our nature Trilling found a refutation of the radical doctrine that society is to blame for our ills. Armed with his sad knowledge. Trilling stood against the radicals who talked about breaking the curse of reality, especially those like Marcuse who came forward as heirs of Freud himself. Trilling knew it was not just radicals who rebelled at the idea that we cannot do much about our condition. The Freudian ethic of tragic acceptance, he concedes, offends "the egalitarian hedonism which is the educated middle class's characteristic mode of moral judgment" (Trilling, 1971, p. 159). But it also offends the American temperament as such. What could be farther from the reconciled acceptance of small possibilities than the restless striving that characterizes American society? If Trilling, following Freud, lays stress on the constraints of human life, the mass media tells all of us without distinction we can be anything we want. Ironically, one of the founders of the industry of mass-producing attitudes like this was Freud's own nephew (and Trilling's acquaintance) Edward Bernays. Perhaps he had such notable success because his own attitude, indeed one of egalitarian hedonism, agreed so well with the disposition of his audience.

Engineering Social Harmony

Actually Bernays was Freud's nephew twice over, his mother being Freud's sister and his father's sister Freud's wife. Born in 1891 into a family proud of its intellectual tradition and high middle-class standing, Bernays grew up in privilege in New York. His father, conventionally authoritarian but independent in matters of religion, prospered as a grain broker.

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Bernays sat through an education in agricultural science at Cornell, but soon found that his true calling lay elsewhere, in shaping public opinion or, as he put it, engineering consent. The formula he came up with was to rally the prominent to whatever his cause happened to be in the expectation that others would followan indirection that raises him above common salesmen and lends his efforts an aspect of civic merit. Editors, municipal worthies, physicians, health commissionersall were quite willing to be used by Bernays. If Bernays were hired to boost the sales of ping-pong sets, he would gather a committee of experts to extol the physical and social benefits of ping-pong, and they would comply. Newspapers in particular were his toy; time and again he placed material in their pages with ease. The publicity that fills our public space the way ether was once thought to fill physical space is an homage to Edward Bernays. Bernays got his start staging a media event in a campaign against venereal disease and sexual hypocrisy. He created a fashion for Spanish combs. He promoted Lithuanian independence and salad dressing, Cartier jewels and racial equality. He organized a moderation craze. Always he pulled strings. He was the one, it appears, behind the carving of Ivory soap in schoolshe was the Oz behind the curtain. He orchestrated a celebration of Edison that has been called "one of the most astonishing pieces of propaganda ever engineered in this country during peace time."^ He agitated for measures to counteract the severe deflation of the early 1930s. In his work for the American Tobacco Company, his invisible hand got physicians to issue findings favorable to tobacco. He stagemanaged a Fifth Avenue demonstration under the banner of women's rights, and in the midst of the Depression got fashionable New York to go crazy over green, which happened to be the color of a pack of Lucky Strikes. Like an industrialist turned public benefactor, Bernays dedicated himself to noble causes in his middle years. Probably his dearest cause was that of public relations itself; he began promoting it, and not

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incidentally himself, in his writings of the twenties, and by old age saw it as one of the highest and most morally demanding of vocations. To Bernays, publicity was a technique, a means of advancing an end. The ends he believed in include equal rights, emancipation from archaic attitudes, sexual enlightenment, getting along, and, indeed, getting ahead. In liberalism he saw a happy end to the conflict between private gain and public good. 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. (At one point, however, he mocked this, his steadiest belief, as a fantasy born of the excesses of the twenties [Bernays, 1965, p. 419].) Strange to say, Bernays persuaded himself that by molding opinion he was actually showing the public "how to express itself" (Bernays, 1927, p. 960), and by "pull[ing] the wires" of the public (Bernays, 1986, p. 151), he was preserving liberty. In effect, he saw himself as teaching people to be free. As reformers once waged a "therapeutic campaign" against cultural backwardness (Lasch, 1992, p. 80), so Bernays worked to reform the public mind by his ingenious therapy. He aspired to be a sort of practical Freud, emancipating people from the past and correcting the malfunctions of an industrial society. And the successes he claimed were too many to number. Whether or not everyone has unlimited possibilities, it must have seemed to Bernays that, for himself at least, not much was impossiblehe held the lever that could move the earth. Manipulating the public indirectly by means of people better placed than himself gave Bernays mechanical advantage. His chosen role was that of the go-between, the arranger, the prompter. In one case he introduced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to President Hoover. He seems to be everywhere, this Zelig of history, and have his hand in everything, but contrary to those at the time who spoke of the Jew as the secret power of the world, Bernays did not wield power but something more like

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influence. Influence was the ineffable something that Victorian women were conceded instead of powerthe consolation of marginality. The Victorian woman was said to possess unbounded power to act through others but not in her own person; Bernays habitually acted through others, exerting power that he did not possess in his own right, being neither a man of politics nor of business nor of science nor even of the press. When chieftains of business engaged him, his relation to them was always a study in contrast. A liberal, he preferred finesse and fluidity to out-and-out domination, and when he deplored old ideas, he had in mind the authoritarian style. In his dealings with men of power, there was something of wit overcoming force. In any case, in a corporate world with "equal opportunity for all, particularly white Protestant Americans" (Bernays, 1965, p. 348), Bernays was an outsider. It may be that his feminist sympathies reflect his identification with the outsider status of women (as well as a dislike of his father's dictatorial manner). In the new way of manipulation, he hit on a method that avoided both the bluntness of the boss and the crassness of the showman and that beguiled the distinction between reality and illusion. Like Freud's challenge to religion, Bernays's aim of engineering social harmony derived from the Enlightenment, and so it was, perhaps, that he saw himself as a co-worker with his uncle in the project of emancipation. Clearly, Bernays liked to think of himself as his uncle's counterpart, opening up a new science of the mind and battling prejudice and conventionan American Freud 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 wrote: "My uncle, Sigmund Freud, encountered almost insurmountable obstacles in gaining acceptance for psychoanalysis. I decided to try to establish public acceptance for the work I was doing and have made this an avocation in the years since" {Memoirs, p. 91). So determined was his imitation of Freud on this point that in his nineties Bernays was still

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campaigning to have public relations recognized as a noble calling. As Freud's American followers made a profession of psychoanalysis, so Bernays insisted that public relations deserved professional status. He never gave up on the fantasy of getting the occupation licensed like medicine. Did he not claim in effect that he manipulated the public for its own good with the same care as a medical doctor like Freud? In his 1927 article, Bernays speaks of "the findings of introspective psychology" that are the secret of his art and of the "diagnostic ability" required to read the public mind. Implicitly, he casts himself as a Freud, except that where his uncle emphasized the stubborn survival of the archaic, Bernays stresses the ease with which his new science can overcome the habits of the past. (In his capacity as a conqueror of prejudice, he speeded public adjustment to mass-produced bread as being more scientific than home baking.) Probably by design, Bernays even got himself publicized as a Freud. In a 1932 piece in the Atlantic Monthly written somewhere between jest and wonderment, he is described as "a nephew of that other great philosopher. Dr. Sigmund Freud. Unlike his distinguished uncle, he is not known as a practicing psychoanalyst, but he is a psychoanalyst just the same. . . . His business is to treat unconscious mental acts with conscious ones" (Flynn, 1932, p. 563). Between uncle and nephew was a bond unrecognized here: they descend from a common ancestor, the Enlightenment. Bernays's egalitarian hedonism, which is another name for utilitarianism, goes straight back to the Enlightenment, while Freud was so imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment that Peter Gay has called him a philosophe. In widely different ways, both Freud and Bernays attempted to release people from bondage to their own pastsan aim that has also inspired political "therapies" and punishments neither would have condoned. The wish to transpose psychiatry from the consulting room to the agorato cure the many of their errors of thoughthas been a temptation of the age. Jtirgen Habermas, for example.

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thought the psychoanalytic method "serviceable for conceiving the normative relations of political organizations aiming at human emancipation to the masses which, through them, are to achieve enlightenment concerning their own social situation" (McCarthy, 1976, p. 487). In plain words, the many are patients to be treated by political doctors. (Freud for his part denied that anyone possessed "the authority to impose . . . a therapy" on a group [SE 21:144].) As dark as the scheme of Habermas is, it is nothing compared with Chinese procedures for the rectification of thought or the Soviet practice of punitive psychiatry, realities that little concern our theorist. In this context, Bernays's therapy for the public mind appears like a way of inoculating society against more menacing forms of political "education." At least that is its effect. To people taught that science means sanitary bread, the thesis that science is class struggle must appear grotesque. Next to indoctrination camps and psychiatric prisons, the techniques of Bernays seem like the innocence of childhood. But childhood is not really innocent and neither, as will be seen, were the methods of Bernays.

Nephew and Uncle

In his dealings with Freud himself, Bernays was at his best: he was not just dutiful but devoted and in business matters waived his percentage. In gratitude for a box of cigars, his
uncle sent him a copy of his General Introductory Lectures, which

became America's introduction to Freudian thought. Were the cigars a royalty for the use of the title of psychoanalyst? Another crux is the epigraph to Bernays's memoirs. He chooses a passage from Freud's favorite poet, Milton, seemingly unaware that the words he quotes are those of Dalila, a notorious deceiver: "That grounded maxim / So rife and celebrated in the mouths / Of wisest men; that to the public good / Private respects must yield." Yet Bernays was

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hired to paint the interest of his clients as the public good, a task made easier by his belief that private and public interest meshthe same ethos that today depicts the timber lobby as stewards of nature and the education lobby as a force for "excellence." Employed to puff hairnets, Bernays managed to show that hairnets were in the public interest. Employed to puff luggage, he produced the same result. While retained by the American Tobacco Company, he looked for "some way to link public interest in a new sanitary method of cigar manufacture with the private interest of American Cigar in selling more" of its machine-made products. (It was Havanas he sent Freud.) In keeping with the American taste for operational values, Bernays tried to put Freudian thought to work, and the result was a way of marketing consumer goods. In old age, Bernays's constant complaint was the cheapening of his thought by newcomers who cared nothing for his deeper concerns; never did he realize that he stood in approximately that relation to Freud. I doubt that Freud wanted to be marketed. At the prompting of Bernays, the editors of Cosmopolitan once proposed to him that he furnish articles on popular topicsthe kind of pieces Bruno Bettelheim would write in later years. He rejected the offer with indignation. Apparently he despised publicity as much as he loved fame.^ In the spirit of elitism, he instructed Bernays that:
This absolute submission of your editors to the rotten taste of an uncultivated public is the cause of the low level of American literature and to be sure the anxiousness to make money is at the root of this submission. A German publisher would not have dared to propose to me on what subjects I had to write. In fact, the subjects brought forward in your letter are so commonplace, so far out of my field, that I could not give them the attention of my pen (Bernays, 1965, pp. 264-5).

Does this portrayal of editors as panderers bear a second reference to Bernays in spite of his generosity to Freud himself? For it was Bernays, acting in his accustomed role as

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prompter and go-between, who suggested commonplace topics to the editors in the first place. Particularly offensive to Freud, in any case, was the editors' lack of independence and their assumption that he was as yielding, as interested in getting along, as they. Getting along was one of Bernays's watchwords. "It is now generally recognized that people, groups, and organizations need to adjust to one another if we are ever to have a smooth-running society" (Bernays, 1955, p. 7). Bernays entitles the second phase of his life "Adjustment." When he dropped a friendly hint to someone important and things began to happenwhen, at his suggestion, art galleries put together an exhibit to further the marketing of salad oilthe wheels went around because everyone was in adjustment. Ideally, all the meshings were frictionless. For the purposes of Bernays, adjustment was a mechanism of infinite utihty. With its indirect methods and teasing suggestions and wondrous efficacy, the ethic of getting along must have seemed to him an advance over the authoritarianism of his father. According to Bettelheim, Freud, in contrast to Bernays, "cared little about 'adjustment' and did not consider it valuable," although, significantly, his American interpreters set great store by this ethic (Bettelheim, 1984, p. 40). How could Freud promote adjustment to society when his thinking went well beyond what society considered decent and when he took upon himself "the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the 'compact majority'?" {SE 20:9). If Freud challenged public opinion in the tradition of Mill, Bernays offered himself as Mill's successor, no longer just scoffing at public opinion but doing something about it. But when Bernays sent Freud a copy of his first book. Crystallizing Public Opinion, Freud responded with disdain: "I have received your book through Boni and Liveright. As a truly American production it interested me greatly" {Memoirs, 269-270). That is all. Can Bernays have missed the contempt in Freud's voice? (Can he not have thought twice about his methods when he learned that Goebbels, the mover behind the campaign to

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"crystallize" Jewish windows, used the book as a guide?) Freud's sharp reply hints at deep differences with the nephew who styled himself after him and who, in his own fashion, participated in the Enlightenment tradition. If, as Lionel Trilling claims, Freud enables us to oppose the seductions of our cultureto resist and not adjust to its appeals and demands (Trilling, 1955, p. 49) then at some point he must oppose Bernays.

Unlimited Possibilities

As a technician of social harmony, Bernays recalls Bentham, that child of the Enlightenment whom Mill broke with, more or less. Bernays attempted to wire and operate people and often succeeded. For all his goodwill, this policy of using people for their own good speaks of a disrespect for others. As Bernays described his practice"teaching the public to ask for what it wants"it sounds all too much like teaching a dog to beg (Bernays, 1927, p. 960). Is it really possible to respect those whose passive responses we manipulate and whose imitative motions we engineer? Ironically, Bernays uses the language of a thinker known for his felt objections to mechanized responses: Mill. In the tradition of Mill (whom Freud thought an advanced mind), he extols individualism and originality. He attacks "blind slavery to habits" {Memoirs, p. 83). In the case in point, though, the habit that bothers him happens to be the surliness of ticket-sellers on Broadway. His actual complaint is so far out of proportion to his language that the effect verges on parody. Bernays had a gift for the incongruous. At times, indeed, as in his recollections of salad art, there is an absurdist quality to his narrative that brings to mind the parodic reductions and all-deriding festivities of our own popular culture. Bernays takes delight in exposing his own methods as though marveling that such impressive results sprang from

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such trite formulas. No success is too large or too small for his ledger. "From Lithuania 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 a market for more beautiful silks" (Bernays, 1927, p. 967). Encountering this master of presentation, one begins to suspect that the line, "You can be anything you want to be," is simply a presentable version of the manipulator's secret belief that there is nothing he cannot achieve. Rather than declaring that there is no limit to his powersa delusion to be surethe publicist promotes the notion that there is no limit to what anyone can do. America, says Bernays, is "the land of unlimited possibilities" (Bernays, 1986, p. 121). It is true that Bernays played down his abilities as much as he vaunted them. He conceded his powers were limited by the nature of the human material with which he dealt. But he did not feel very constrained. "Human nature is readily subject to modification" (Bernays, 1923, p. 150).^ The liberator of Lithuania came close indeed to affirming his own omnipotence when he wrote, "The fields in which public opinion can be manipulated to conform to a desired result are as varied as life itself" (Bernays, 1927, p. 967). Never was the vision of boundless possibility more provocatively phrased. When in Sincerity and Authenticity the author cited Freud's reminder of the constraints of our nature, his criticism was directed at Utopians, and his language charged by the knowledge that the earthly paradise of communism was a monstrous lie. For the most part, he spared American ideology and its aggressively marketed belief in totally undetermined beingits myth that there are no limits to what we can produce, consume, achieve, or become. Wanting to believe that they lived in the Day One of time, confronting an open range of choices, some Americans after Hiroshima spoke of the atom's infinite possibilities for good or evil, even though the bomb was something more than possible (it had been built without public consent) and atomic ocean liners not possible at all. Bernays viewed pub-

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lie relations as something like the mythical atom: a discovery of untold power that could be put to happy or unhappy uses. By his own account, of course, his uses of the new political uranium were innocent, and his tricks were clean fun. Others may take a different view. For while by no means singly responsible for any of our ills, Bernays contributed richly to the culture of manipulation that defines our political life. That our politicians style their public images, that politics itself is largely given over to the production of imagery for public consumption, everyone knows. And here the innocence of public relations ceases. No great gap separates Bernays's vision of the wondrous possibilities of "Manipulating Public Opinion" from Nixon's belief that presidents "must try to master the art of manipulating the media not only to win in politics but in order to further the programs and causes they believe in."^ (It irked Bernays that Nixon gave public relations a bad name.) But Nixon was no more obsessed with publicity than his predecessor. The other side of the public myth of infinite possibility is the infinite profit of duping the public, and it was in the Vietnam War, construed by Johnson as a public relations drama and plotted by men who were taken with "the unlimited possibilities in manipulating people" (Arendt, 1972, p. 35), that the worst fallacies and heaviest costs of the engineering of consent really came out. At the very time Lionel Trilling was theorizing about a due regard for limits and the humbling constraints of the Reality Principle, the United States was pouring violence beyond all measure on a small country, while the authors of this policy spoke of the struggle to impress audiences and win over their hearts, using a language that harked back to the origins of publicity in show business. As the Tet offensive began, Johnson's first response was "to orchestrate a public relations drive designed to promote optimism" (Karnow, 1983, p. 547).

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When Bernays wrote that the public relations man had to know how "to speak in the language of his audience" (Bernays, 1923, p. 173), he little imagined the fruit his advice would bear forty years later in Vietnam. In a manual on the art of shamming produced there in 1967, America "psyoperators" were given the same counsel. "DO try to be subtle," they were told. "[A]ttempt to develop PsyOp items which do not appear to be 'obvious propaganda.' . . . PsyOp items which are not readily identifiable as propaganda are more credible than any other type of message." Again, "DO NOT produce messages which contain obvious lies OR INGREDIBLE TRUTHS." "DO attempt to be objective. A message which 'rants and raves' at the enemy is not likely to induce them to perform the desired act. "6 How reminiscent of Goebbels it all isthe pretense of scientific detachment and psychological insight, the stress on the persuasive power of images, the preference for a straight style that does not appear propagandistic, the doctrine that credibility is all, the avoidance of "incredible truths," the anxiety that something said might backfire. And yet the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Vietnam modeled its work not on that of Goebbels but on American public relations. Its aim, the manufacture of attitudes, was the aim of all those in the business of Bernays, as its strategy mirrored his conclusion that the best way to get people to perform the desired act is exactly not to bid them to do it in the manner of an advertiser. Bernays remained offstage, worked through "impartial" others, avoided the vulgarity of selling; the psychological warriors of JUSPAO dreamed of making invisible propagandapropaganda that did not advertise its own nature. These resemblances are no accident, for it is out of the American culture of manipulation that the thinking of the "psyoperators" arose. And Bernays contributed to that culture, though he did not create it. In his introduction to The

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Engineering of Consent, published in 1955 and containing an essay likening public relations to military tactics, he issued cautions on the art of winning hearts and minds which, trite as they are, virtually predict the Vietnam manual. Bernays: "[T]he use of pictures to illustrate text is sound tactics. But if you were preparing a promotion piece on new fashions about town, you would want to make sure no out-of-date gowns or accessories were worn by anyone in the picture." JUSPAO: "DO NOT use illustrations which contradict specific statements in the text." Bernays: "In public relations necessity for care extends to every aspect of tactical effort." JUSPAO: "Every item produced should be viewed as putting the entire PsyOp program on trial" (Bernays, 1955, p. 24). But the art of selling imagery met with less success in Vietnam than here for it did not find the market that exists here. Unable to win the hearts and minds of the people, we avenged our failure in fire. In Vietnam, the philosophy of liberating people in spite of themselves grew into an attempt to liberate people if we had to kill them to do it.

Leaders and Followers

But let us glance back to that passage in Civilization and Its Discontents where Freud cautions that some of the miseries of civilization "will not yield to any attempts at reform." As distressing as his message already is, he goes on to say that another cause of worry awaits usthe rise of group formations on the American modelalthough he seems to consider these less as costs of civilization than threats to it. Over and above the tasks of restricting the instincts, which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our notice the danger of a state of things which might be termed 'the psychological poverty of groups'. This danger is most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of its members with one another, while individuals of the leader

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type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods {SE 21:115-116). What makes these delphic remarks the more puzzling is that the normative model of a group used herethe leader's followingappears in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the

Ego as a throwback to the primal horde, a social formation linked with the suppression of critical thought, the surrender of conscience, the excitement of powerful emotions, in all the eclipse of the higher faculties of the mind. Why should the displacement of a horde by a leaderless group be a cause for worry? If the modern horde so resembles the mass depicted in Mein Kampf (published almost simultaneously with Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), should its dying-out not be

welcomed? It happens that the very values most endangered by the masscritical thought and responsibilityare prized by Freud. And what is a leaderless group and why is it so worrisome to Freud? Is it the soft tyranny Tocqueville prophesied, the despotism of equals, the exercise of rule without a scepter? I do not know that these riddles can be answered, but some light may come from the recognition that Freud did not equate all groups with mobs. The two groups singled out in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the army and the Catholic

Church, both highly structured, bear little resemblance to a formless crowd under the will of a demagogue. No apologist for either army or church, Freud nevertheless accepts the principle of hierarchy. While he commends efforts to reduce inequality of wealth, he holds that some inequalities are in the nature of things, underwriting, for example, the distinction between leaders and followers. More or less in the tradition of Mill, Freud would like to see a natural aristocracy of the best

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minds in charge of society, though he well knows his ideal will not be realized. His is an ominous vision with something of the Grand Inquisitor in it. Followers, he says,
constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses. {SE 22:212)

Neither this model of political guardians keeping enlightenment to themselves, nor the Habermas model of political doctors dispensing it, nor the Bernays method of circulating it through the marketplacenone of these derivatives of the Enlightenment makes for a particularly enlightened political life. Freud does not, then, equate groups with mobs. No doubt some groups are mobs, but if, as Freud says, civilization is sustained by common emotional interests, then groups may also civilize. It is as though groups shared in the duality of civilization itself, to which we owe "the best of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from" {SE 22:214). Not only do groups command loyalty and stir the soul in ways that individualism cannot seem to match, but they join people by bonds that go "beyond what is merely profitable" {SE 18:103). Croups are capable of transcending the profit motive that famously dominates American life. And in their higher functions, Freud believes, groups require leaders. In fact, they memorialize "the personalities of great leaders" of the past {SE 21:141), likened by Freud to the conscience of civilization. It appears Freud takes a Creat Men view of history. If Freud's model of leader and led tends to ignore intermediate groups in which people find themselves (Roazen, 1968, p. 231), Bernays concentrates his technique directly on

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those affiliations: his favorite way to reach consumers is to enlist their "group leaders." And by making puppets of the latter, he subverts what Freud calls individuals of the leader type. He uses leaders "for ends which they often neither see nor understand" (Flynn, 1932, p. 570). As for Bernays himself, unlike someone of the leader type he neither exhorted nor even came forward. The school children carving Ivory soap never heard of him. A group that Bernays called into being was in some sense a leaderless group, the sort of formation Freud views with foreboding even though it does not appear subject to the grim pathologies of the authoritarian crowd. Surely the ploys and tricks of Bernays, however devious, are preferable to the Hitler cult or for that matter the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. What is it then about the leaderless group on the American model that so disturbed Freud, writing in 1930? We know that he laid the state of American literary culture to editors too craven to lead, and in his eyes the decline of culture may have portended a decline of civilization. In the group without a head, the father has been blotted out, and perhaps it seemed to Freud that the achievements of civilization are so bound up with repressive patriarchal structures that they cannot well survive the erasure of the father. The memoirs of Bernays leave no doubt of his erasure of his father. But it was by employing the reputedly "feminine" methods of influence and coaxing with such effect that Bernays contributed most to that abolition of the father whose cultural consequences Freud may have dreaded. Concerned as he was for "the masculine character" (Trilling, 1955, p. 27), Freud could hardly have applauded his nephew's use of the teasing craftiness identified with women by cultural tradition. Women, said Rousseau, know the mechanics of moving the hearts of men. He as much as called them engineers of consent. What else might have led Freud to issue his shadowy prophecy of "damage to civilization"? Maybe he felt that the venality of American life discouraged those deeper libidinal

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bonds, the bonds more profound than calculations of profit, that support civilization. Maybe he felt that the ethic of social adjustment, predicated on our rational interest in getting along, was simply too weak; or that the society of opinion polls was too hostile to intellectual distinction for its own good; or that the mass marketing of happiness can only sharpen our resentment at the actual unhappiness which is our lot as civilized beings. Certainly he considered ill will too rooted in our nature to be transformed into something called goodwill by the wand of public relations. It happens that an eloquent account of malice precedes his comment on the state of
America in Civilization and Its Discontents. If Freud had lived to

see bombs, poison, and fire poured on Vietnam, he would have had his understanding of human malice richly confirmed. Freud simply cannot have believed in public relations as a civilizing force. In disparaging America, he must have had in mind somewhere his own nephew's practice as America's leading conjurer of goodwill, promoter of fads and fashions, and prompter of mutual imitation, and all this in the guise of a Freud. When Freud abstains from a critique of American culture, he more particularly keeps silent on an embarrassment in his familya would-be psychoanalyst, a man who bragged of his "ability to understand and analyze obscure tendencies of the public mind" in a book he presented to Freud himself (Bernays, 1923, p. 173). The demystifier says nothing about the engineer of false consciousness; the smasher of idols says nothing about the fiatterer of the idols of the marketplace. In declining to rally his readers behind an attack on American civilization, it is as if Freud said, "I leave rallying to my nephew." In a sense, however, Freud could no more cut ties with
Bernays than with himself. Civilization and Its Discontents was

born in a repudiation of the accommodation of interests. Freud's own model before he tangled in the unconscious

model of society as a working As Trilling shows, this was recast his theory of the ego as (Trilling, 1971, p. 150). Yet

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Bernays too subscribed to that model of society, although with less reservation than Freud. Between himself and his imitative nephew was more than Freud may have cared to concede.
Civilization and Its Discontents comes near the end of what is

called the canon, the reading-list of Western culture. It is a bitter irony that the works of the canon, sharing a hierarchical worldview as they mostly do, seem nevertheless distinctly more favorable to intellectual freedom than the modes of discourse that now oppose them. After all, any number of works in the canon defied the censor, as did Freud himself, whereas many of those campaigning against the canon favor some kind of thought control as if the twentieth century had not had enough of that already. I doubt Bernays would have approved of censorship; he was too much a part of the liberal tradition that also included Freud. With critics of the canon, though, he shared the goal of correcting attitudes, and like them he thought of himself as enlightening the many, championing the cause of the oppressed, and lifting the dead weight of the past. He showed what a fairly benign attempt at mind-management looks likeother schemes may be less benignand one can only say that it rests on sham. The attempt to administer to people their own freedom ends in mockery. By a similar irony, it turns out that freedom is better served by Freud's sober sense of human possibilities than by the belief that there is no limit to what anyone can do once the mind is set free.

Notes: ' Henceforth, Standard Edition is abbreviated in my text as SE with page references following. ^ Leonard Doob cited in Bernays (1965, p. 459). ^ See Trilling, 1955, p. 29. ^ We might number Bernays among all those post-Freudians who consider human nature more tractable and its conflicts easier to

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finesse than the author of Civilization and Its Discontents. On this point, see Roazen (1968). ^ Cited in Washington Post Weekly, July 13-19, 1992, p. 36. ^ These are excerpts from a Joint United States Public Affairs Office Field Memorandum, "Lessons Learned from Evaluation of Allied PsyOp Media in Viet Nam," dated December 13, 1967. The document is included in Latimer (1978).

Bibliography:
Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Bernays, Edward L., Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923). Bernays, Edward L., "Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How," American Journal of 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 Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965). Bernays, Edward L., The Later Years: Public Relations Insights, 1956-1986 (Rhinebeck, NY: H&M, 1986). Bettelheim, Bruno, Freud and Man's Soul (New York: Vintage, 1984). Flynn, John T., "Edward L. Bernays: The Science of Ballyhoo," Atlantic Monthly (May 1932). Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983). Lasch, Christopher, "Hillary Clinton, Child Saver," Harper's (October 1992). Latimer, Harry D., U.S. Psychological Operations in Vietnam (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1973). McCarthy, T.A., "A Theory of Communicative Competence," in Paul Connerton, ed.. Critical Sociology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Roazen, Paul, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Knopf, 1968). Trilling, Lionel, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955). Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).