FAWAZ Ziad
11:30 to 14:00
Marketing 240 : Century of the self

Edward Bernays, who was born in 1891, and died in 1995, isn’t someone famous. Few people might know him now. However, he’s surely the one who has most deeply upset society across 20th century. He pushed people nowadays, to get rich people’s lifestyle, by modifying considerably the materialistic and financial weight of industries and companies among society. But he also increased their symbolic ascendancy on the consumer by creating techniques so the consumer will be pushed to consumption. In politic, he also contributed to shape the passive and malleable individual of present day by inventing strategies which would pacify the citizen, hypnotizing and mesmerizing him transforming him into mass consumer. It is indeed him who created “Public Relations”. Not only that he accomplished spectacularly exploits, by using manipulation techniques, he’s also one of the theorists who believed that democracy should be smothered by satisfying one’s consumerist pulses. He was Freud’s double nephew. He perfectly knew the main ideas of psychoanalysis since he had immersed really soon in this field, by his familial environment. Freud’s ideas have been reused, but not really for therapeutic purposes. As the creator of “Public Relations”, he was very asked by companies to help them selling their products by touching buyers’ emotions. Let’s see first the accomplishments of Bernays, and then how Freud’s ideas have been used to submit a person instead of freeing him, getting him into mass consumers

At the beginning, Bernays had been called to help Wilson’s government to change the public opinion about war, in 1917, to get it favorable. He succeeded, using propaganda. He was then invited in Paris for the Peace conference, and when he heard President Wilson talking about propagating democracy all over the world, he had