Proudly I clain as a Direct Ascendent:Edward L. Bernays, a man
who, beginning during the 1910s, became one of
the most influential pioneers of American public
relations; a person whose biography, though not
widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration
of our world.
Born in Vienna in 1891, Edward L.Bernays was the double
nephew of Sigmund Freud. (His mother was Freud's
sister, his father was Freud's wife's brother.) His
family background impressed him with the enormous
power of ideas, and accustomed him to the
privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.
Bernays was also a far-sighted architect of
modern propaganda techniques who, dramatically, from
the early 1920s onward, helped to consolidate a
fateful marriage between theories of mass
psychology and schemes of corporate and political
persuasion.
