The Century of the Self (2002) is a four-part documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis that traces how psychoanalysis and public relations shaped modern politics, consumer culture, and notions of the self. At its center is the legacy of Sigmund Freud and his descendants—particularly Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the so-called “father of public relations.”
The series begins with Bernays’s work in the early twentieth century, showing how he adapted Freud’s theories of unconscious desire into tools for advertising and mass persuasion. From there it maps a century of psychological management: how corporations, governments, and social movements alike turned to the unconscious as a terrain of control. Later episodes follow the rise of therapy culture, focus groups, and the neoliberal promise of individual choice, showing how the language of freedom was entwined with consumer manipulation.
The Century of the Self reveals how the pursuit of liberation was often redirected into market segmentation and lifestyle branding, and how the “inner self” became both a site of emancipation and a mechanism of control. The series layers archival footage, narration, and music into a historical montage that unsettles as much as it informs. It asks whether the very idea of individuality in the modern West was engineered, and what it might mean to reclaim the self from a century of manipulation.
See also: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
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