Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays opens the series by staging a 1929 publicity stunt that gets women to light cigarettes in public as "torches of freedom," a campaign he designs for tobacco money and calls, for the first time, public relations. Adam Curtis traces that idea forward across four episodes: how corporations and governments learned to treat citizens not as rational voters but as bundles of desires and anxieties to be managed, first through Freud's theories of the unconscious and later through his daughter Anna Freud's clinical work and Wilhelm Reich's rival, more liberating brand of psychoanalysis. Archival footage carries the argument, from Cold War propaganda units to the focus-group politics of Bill Clinton's White House and Tony Blair's Downing Street, where pollsters test emotional responses the way advertisers test soap. The series lands on a pointed claim, that the 1960s language of personal liberation and self-expression became, within a generation, the marketing logic of consumer capitalism itself.