Freud's nephew used his uncle's ideas to sell bacon and eggs
Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew twice over, and he applied psychoanalysis and crowd psychology to persuasion. He rebranded cigarettes as feminist Torches of Freedom in 1929 and promoted bacon and eggs as the all-American breakfast. His obituary called him the father of public relations; critics call his methods manipulation.
Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891. His mother Anna was Freud's sister, and his father Eli was the brother of Freud's wife Martha. The family moved to New York in the 1890s after Eli found work as a grain exporter. Edward graduated from Cornell in agriculture in 1912 but turned to journalism, writing for a nursery trade journal and briefly reading grain cables in Paris.
His first campaigns mixed causes with publicity. As co-editor of a medical review he backed showers over corsets, then championed Damaged Goods, a translated play about venereal disease, recruiting patrons such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt. As a press agent he tied a stage play to charity for orphans and presented Enrico Caruso's voice as so delicate that it needed absurd protection. During the First World War he worked for the Committee on Public Information on Latin American opinion, calling it psychological warfare, and concluded afterwards that the same methods would work just as well in peacetime.
From 1919 to 1963 he practised in New York as a public relations counsel, insisting his work differed from advertising. Clients included Procter & Gamble, General Electric, politicians and charities. His books Crystallizing Public Opinion in 1923 and Propaganda in 1928, drawing on Gustave Le Bon, Walter Lippmann and Freud, portrayed the public as irrational and herd-driven and explained how experts could steer it. His wife, Doris Fleischman, a member of the Lucy Stone League, quietly ghost-wrote many of the firm's memos and speeches.
His record is heavily criticised. In the 1950s he worked for the United Fruit Company, linked to the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala's elected government in 1954, and critics tie his techniques to propaganda that weakened democratic engagement. Life magazine still named him one of the century's 100 most influential Americans. Larry Tye's biography The Father of Spin and Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self examine his legacy. He died in 1995, aged 103.
Source: Edward Bernays
