There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

Date: Friday, December 10, 2010, 8 pm
Location: The New School Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 2nd Floor, 55 W 13th St, New York

FREE. No RSVP necessary.

A co-presentation with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis & the New School

Cabinet, The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, and the New School present a screening of There Is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed and Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering, parts 3 and 4 of The Century of the Self, the extraordinary BBC documentary on the intertwined histories of Sigmund Freud, modern consumerism, and representative democracy. At its heart is the idea that public relations and politicians have used Freud's theories to engineer a society of consent.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction by George Prochnik, Cabinet contributor and author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology (2006) and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2010). It will be followed by an open discussion with psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann, who is a participant in the documentary.

Parts one and two of the documentary (Happiness Machine and The Engineering of Consent,) were screened on November 12, with a short introduction by Jane Kupersmidt, faculty at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and member of the Freudian Society. A transcript of the introduction is available here. The first two parts of the The Century of the Self can be seen online here.