Espinar, Jhon Paul D.

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Reflection Paper

The Century of the Self - Part 2: "The Engineering of Consent

The film is explaining how those in power post-war America used Freud's theories
about the unconscious mind to try to control the masses. Politicians and planners began
to believe Freud's underlying premise, that all humans have dangerous and irrational
desires and fears deep within them. They believed that the unleashing of these instincts
was the cause of Nazi Germany's barbarism. They set out to find ways to control this
hidden enemy within the human mind to prevent it from happening again. The central
philosophy was provided by Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward
Bernays. The United States government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to
create techniques for managing and controlling the minds of the American people. But
this was no cynical game of manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to
make democracy work and create a stable society was to suppress the savage barbarism
lurking beneath the surface of everyday American life.

The film delivered their point so detailed that filled me with different reactions
and feeling when I watch it. When I watched the film is filled with curiosity and desired to
know what happened during that time and that leads me to a different reaction. I feel grief
for the people who are in this time because they suffer a lot from this barbaric action.
Also, I admire Sigmund Freud who is widely regarded as the father of the psychodynamic
approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior.
Freud held that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions
based on psychological drives. I am also amused by the idea and concept of Sigmund
Freud which is a reservoir of thoughts, memories, and emotions that exist outside of the
conscious mind's awareness. He also proposed that personality was composed of three
major components: the id, the ego, and the superego. According to this film,
psychoanalysis is defined as a set of psychological theories and therapeutic methods
derived from Sigmund Freud's work and theories. Psychoanalysis is based on the idea
that everyone has unspoken thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories. Furthermore, I
learned that engineering consent is the application of an engineering approach—that is,
action based solely on a thorough understanding of the situation and the application of
scientific principles and tried practices to the task of persuading people to support ideas
and programs—to the task of persuading people to support ideas and programs. I also
realize that the idea of Sigmund Freud has a major barrier which is also their subject
which is society.

In conclusion, Sigmund Freud's idea has great potential if it works because it

ensures that the horrible past will not be repeated, but many barriers make this research
impossible and lead to the failure of this research. Marcus's argument say’s that you can`t
control people by using unconscious desire because human beings have inner emotional
drives that can`t be inherently evil or violent thus it by repressing and distorting these
drives, society made them dangerous.