Tea with Quentin

Freud and the manipulation of society in the 20th Century

Seemorerocks

A few months ago I was put in touch with a relative-by-marriage.

I will call him Quentin.

Now, Quentin is English-born, Eton- and Oxford-educated and came to New Zealand seemingly to escape his background. He is very personable and a kind of a jack-of-all-trades in that he graduated with an engineering degree, went on to become an architect and then on to psychotherapy and then, as I learned, psychoanalysis.

I got in touch with him wanting to catch up and learned that he had moved to Wellington from Auckland some time ago but never got in touch. His immediate response was “we MUST meet up”, but I never heard any more.

After a while I contacted him again and was told that he was preparing for a conference and would be in touch when that was over. When I heard nothing I sent another text message saying “I’m still here” and within a week he turned up for a visit while his wife was away.

We had a nice catch-up in the garden. Quentin was one of the easiest people for a hard-of- hearing person to be with as he spoke very loudly. it was a breath of fresh air as he took an interest in me and was a good listener which was a novelty for me. He would ask what I was up to and when I mentioned I was blogging out came his phone while making a note for himself.

When he started asking questions about my Russian marriage 35 years ago I started to get the sense that he was taking perhaps TOO much interest without revealing very much of himself.

I realised I was talking to a trained counsellor.

We came inside for a cup of tea with Pam and the conversation took a new turn. We learned that whatever we were interested in he had been there before. When he learned that we were Buddhists we learned that he had close relationships with the the local Buddhist monastery and the Friends of the Buddhist Order.

When he learned Pam is a conservationist he demonstrated his deep knowledge of that.

Somehow it came out that he was not a counsellor as I had assumed but a fully-trained Freudian psychoanalyst (which might explain the conference).

With his spiritual interests I innocently asked what he thought of Jungian analysis.

The answer was immediate and aggressively.

Jung, Quentin told us, was psychotic and slept with his students.

That came across as slightly strange as Quentin had just been waxing eloquent about two Buddhist teachers, one of whom was notorious for abusing underage boys, the other well-known for sleeping with his female students.

We parted amicably but the conversation stayed with us.

As a postscript, after several weeks I sent an email to him showing in a light-hearted manner my disdain for Freudianism. A reply came back saying that my email was “unbelievably hostile ”.

Well you don’t offend a woke person (as I take him to be). He immediately cancelled me.

One thing I shared was the wonderful (but obviously, “offensive”) ditty from comedian, Anna Russell.

A Century of Self

I also recalled a very memorable 2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, the Century of Self.

In it Curtis traces how the ideas of psychoanalysis- especially those of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays - came to shape modern advertising, politics and consumer society. His central thesis is that 20th Century elites increasingly governed not by force alone but by manipulating the masses through understanding and manipulating people’s unconscious desires.

Freud believed that beneath our rational minds lis powerful unconscious drives, impulses and desires. Bernays took these ideas of Freud and made them a practical tool while working for governments and corporations and pioneered what became known as public relations.

Instead of selling products based on need or utility, he linked them to creating emotional desires, identity and status. This, Curtis argues, transformed capitalism. citizens were turned into consumers whose identities were expressed through what they bought. This produced societies that are materially prosperous but politically fragmented, where people think of themselves as individuals pursuing personal fulfilment rather than members of a collective capable of shaping the future.

Curtis has followed up with a series of documentaries that built on his central thesis that during the 20th Century faith in political movements declined while individual identity became increasingly central.

One of these is his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation in which he references the decline and fall of Soviet communism where everyone knew the official story about the Soviet Union was false yet everyone behaved as though it were true because there seemed to be no alternative.

Curtis argues that something similar has happened in the West.

From 3 years ago

Adam Curtis on the fall of the Soviet Union’s worrying parallels with modern Britain

The Tavistock Insitute

Another couple of works that build on Curtis’ documentary and lay bare how governments and corporations have manipulated the masses are two works on the Tavistock Institute, one by John Coleman, the other by Daniel Estulin, which was formed in 1947 as an educational institution that hid its role in pioneering methods of psychological influence that have shaped culture, corporate management, education, therapy and even pop music for decades.

We are talking social engineering here.

https://medium.com/@nicoauthor/social-engineering-went-mainstream-and-tavistock-was-already-there-18fd6aca984f

THE TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE OF MIND CONTROL

Watch HERE

The two works Century of Self and the Tavistock Institute parallel each other despite one being a respectable BBC documentary - the other being a work of ‘conspiracy theory’.

They both shed a light on the history of the 20th Century and how we got to be where we are where we are today.

However, I suspect none of this will be to the taste of my woke friend, Quentin.