Inclusion without cure will liberate us all

Journal of Mental Health Promotion, Mar 2004 by Faiers, Adrian

The mastermind behind the policy was Edward Bernays, regarded by many as the father of public relations, and a significant supporter of the policy was US president Herbert C Hoover. Bernays was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud. By applying his uncle's ideas, he showed US corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they did not need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

However his ideas went further. As explained in the BBC2 documentary series, he concurred with a political commentator of the day, Walter Lipman. Lipman agreed with Sigmund Freud that the masses were driven by irrational forces and that it was therefore necessary to rethink democracy. What was needed was a new elite who could manage the bewildered masses by using psychological techniques to control their unconscious feelings.

Bernays argued that he had already developed such a technique. he believed that by stimulating people's inner desires and satisfying them with consumer products he was creating a new way to manage the irrational forces of the masses. It was called the Engineering of Consent. By satisfying people's inner selfish desires in this way, society made them both happy and docile.

In the 1950s this form of deliberate social control was being practised on both sides of the Atlantic and another member of the Freud family, Sigmund Freud's own daughter Anna Freud, became a significant player.

Engineering of Consent may no longer be deliberate government policy, but the exploitation of unconscious desires by big business is certainly deliberate. It is a continuation of what, according to Century of the Self, the 1950s business psychologist Ernest Dichter called the 'Strategy of Desire', which aimed to create a stable society in which consumers buy products. The effect is the same.

By challenging the values in modern western society that undermine positive mental health and that may contribute to mental ill health, we discover we are tackling far more fundamental freedoms and opening up the possibility of far greater liberation than we might have imagined.

The impact on inclusion without cure

What might not be clear is how challenging status and consumerism could create a society in which inclusion without cure is more possible. It might well help to reduce the amount of mental ill health and it might contribute to the overall mental well-being of the general population. But how, for example, will it help include psychotic people, on the terms Bentall has suggested, through mutual acceptance of difference rather than a framework of pathology?

The key could be that it would open us up to valuing different types of contribution to society and therefore different types of meaningful work. At the heart of nearly all current social inclusion policy is an overwhelming determination to get people off benefits and into making a conventional contribution to the national economy through paid employment. Clearly this is right in some circumstances, just as cure is right in some circumstances. Maybe both are right in many circumstances. But, released from our own desire to move higher and higher up a failing status-based, consumerist social scale, we might find more circumstances than we expected in which we recognise other types of contribution. A society that develops in this way may then consider itself duty bound to ensure that those who make such contributions are not only included but also rewarded with appropriate opportunities and decent living standards.