After the war, it was actually Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who first used Freud’s ideas in America. An intelligence officer during the war, he found himself in need of a job. His theory was that if the Nazis could manipulate people in wartime, then surely business owners and politicians could manipulate people in peacetime. He called his new idea “public relations” and became the so-called “father of American advertising.”14 Never heard of him? Most haven’t. He predicted as much in his book Propaganda: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
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