The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)

What people said

badrabbit · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

I wholly distrust anything freudian. Every major claim he made I keep finding serious flaws in it. Freud did not popularize the unconscious or thinking about how you think. Basic children's sunday school at a Church even talks about how you think. Major religions from Christianity to Buddhism talk about how the thought life of a person affects everything and the split and conflicted nature of humans. They just don't use post-freudian terms like conscious and unconscious. What freud popularized was a secular way of coping with how humans think, analyzing it in a purely secular context and considering thousands of years of knowledge on the subject as childish fairytales and defining a framework by which a modern secular world can explain the actions of people and respond to them. Socially, I have seen horrific impacts of his work from criminal punishment to people attempting to understand and help people who have chosen to be evil (worst examples being child rapists, school shooters,etc... not sick, evil! But evil has no place in a freudian context). This documentary shared on HN a while back was eye opening for me, how almost every aspect of modern capitalist life was influenced by freud: [VIDEO] (Century of the self). Worth watching the whole thing. I don't discount psychoanalysis as quackery but I am very hostile to it. I would need to filter any attempts of psychoanalytical thinking with a ton if critical analysis, taking it with buckets of salt!

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orasis · 2022-09 · Strong recommendation

“The Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis. [VIDEO] It goes through each decade of the 1900s and explains how Freud’s psychology and the new field of marketing completely reshaped society. For the first time in my life I feel like I understood the “why” of how things work in American society. This film is probably best if you’re age 40+ and actually remember some of the events.

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mistermann · 2020-04 · Strong recommendation

The documentary Century of Self (re: Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays) gets into this type of thing , and many, many others. [LINK] Full: [VIDEO] 10 minute trailer/summary: [LINK] If someone wants to check out the above political aspect, fast forward to the 3 hour mark or so. Fair warning, this would be typically filed under conspiracy theories / propaganda by most people, but even so, it is by far one of the most compelling ones I've seen. It very much advocates for the common man, and I believe makes a decent case. It certainly has had a major effect on the way I view how the world works, but YMMV.

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