Episode Two of this extraordinary intellectual masterpiece by Adam Curtis explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.  Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise ─ that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears.  They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.  To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.  Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy.  The U.S. government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people.  But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation.  Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.
 

Episode Three of this extraordinary intellectual masterpiece by Adam Curtis begins in the 1960s with a radical group of psychotherapists challenging the influence of Freudian ideas in America.  They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family.  He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled.  It should be encouraged to express itself.  Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics.  This episode shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training -- into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.  But the American corporations soon realized that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity.  It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality.  To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.
 

Episode Four of this extraordinary intellectual masterpiece by Adam Curtis explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfill the inner desires of the self.  Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power.  They set out to mold their policies to people's inner desires and feelings just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.  Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism.  One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.  The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual.  But what they did not realize was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not to liberate people but to develop a new way of controlling them.