THE CEN­TU­RY OF THE SELF
Mon­day 29 April -​ Thurs­day 2 May 2002 7pm-​8pm

Episodes: One | Two | Three | Four

Three: There is a Po­lice­man In­side All Our Head: He Must Be De­stroyed
Wednes­day 1 May 7pm-​8pm

In the 1960s, a rad­i­cal group of psy­chother­a­pists chal­lenged 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 pro­gramme 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 re­alised 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.

Episodes: One | Two | Three | Four