Abstract
Once upon a time—during the 1950s, roughly a decade before I showed up as a master of business administration candidate at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in the mid-1960s—psychoanalytic approaches to marketing and consumer research, such as the kinds of motivation research (MR) practiced by gurus like Ernest Dichter, represented a major style of investigation in the fields of advertising and product design. Dichter himself cranked out inspirational books with titles like The Strategy of Desire and Motivating Human Behavior. Pierre Martineau supplied a textbook on similar themes entitled Motivation in Advertising: Motives That Make People Buy. Vance Packard, in his memorable critique of MR entitled The Hidden Persuaders, attacked what he viewed as the dangerously manipulative aspects of such psychoanalytically grounded approaches to marketing strategy—sentiments later echoed and, indeed, magnified in sensationalistic commentaries by Wilson Brian Key in books such as Media Sexploitation.
At bottom, such debates stemmed from the same sorts of discomfort or even dread that greeted the early work of Sigmund Freud and that—in one way or another—have haunted psychoanalysis ever since. Fundamentally, the basic psychoanalytic premise holds that certain forbidden lusts, longings, urges, and desires (residing unconsciously in the id) are so threatening to conscious awareness (the ego)—because they so spectacularly violate norms for decency, rules of conduct, conventional morality, and pressure toward conformity with the standards of socially acceptable behavior (encompassed by the superego)—that these forbidden wishes and impulses get repressed so as to remain unconscious and to lurk below the level of awareness. Nevertheless, such repressed motives are so powerful that they force their way to the surface to appear, in disguised form, as various sorts of surrogate manifestations—namely, as dreams, fantasies, tips-of-the-tongue phenomena, linguistic slips, typographical errors, jokes, phobias, or, of course, works of art. As Freud cheerfully pointed out, such repressed and therefore unconscious material included all sorts of horrifying inclinations toward incest (wanting to sleep with one’s mother), patricide (wanting to kill one’s father), castration anxieties (fear of retaliation by the latter for the former), or penis envy (a woman’s wish to possess the male genitalia). Freud claimed that such psychological dynamics explained many sorts of symptoms—nightmares, illnesses, physical afflictions, aberrant behavior, and irrational thinking—and told many a compelling story to illustrate his insightful points along these lines.
Naturally, Freud and his followers aroused the shocked indignation and righteous ire of ordinary folks who did not like to be told that their son unconsciously lusted for his mother or that their daughter harbored repressed desires to sleep with her father. Nonetheless, because his insights were fundamentally so powerful, so persuasive, so revealing, so profound in their interpretive implications—as in his extraordinary work on The Interpretation of Dreams—Freud’s basic psychoanalytic framework came to be accepted as a view of the human psyche that has emerged as the essence of the conventional wisdom whereby contemporary thinkers understand the nature of human behavior. Yes, Freud has been attacked as a dirty old man, a misogynist, an adulterer, a cocaine addict, a falsifier who covered up cases of child molestation, a twister of facts to fit his theory, an enemy of science, and a perpetrator of every sort of misanthropic activity that anybody can dream up. But—despite such accusations—his views have permeated our current understanding of the human psyche. His psychoanalytic methods have stood the test of time as a key to opening the door to the secrets of how unconscious desires influence everyday events.
Unfortunately, the potential contributions by psychoanalytic approaches to the study of marketing and consumer behavior suffered a fate not unlike that aspired to by the Freud-bashers just mentioned. Circa 1960, in the wake of the famous Ford–Carnegie studies—which criticized business schools for, among other things, their lack of scientific rigor—marketing educators, professors, and researchers turned away from psychoanalytic approaches as not rigorous enough to merit academic respectability. Rather than clinical studies based on small sample sizes and focused on the interpretation of qualitative data, marketing gurus came to prefer complex models tested by elaborate statistical analyses of quantitative data collected from huge samples of respondents. Such pundits opined that clinically based psychoanalytic approaches such as MR were (1) evil (i.e., manipulative) and (2) ineffective (i.e., unscientific). (No one bothered to wonder how something could be ineffective and evil at the same time.)
For these reasons, MR and other psychoanalytically oriented approaches fell into disuse during the 1960s and thereafter. A few tireless advocates—for example, Sid Levy, Dennis Rook, Paul Albanese, and yours truly—continued to champion psychoanalytic views. But the field as a whole pretty much turned its back on Freud, Dichter, and their psychoanalytic disciples.
Meanwhile, I had married Sally Loring Milton on August 14, 1965, and had followed her to New York City where she was completing her second year in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Social Work with a specialization in psychiatric counseling. Sally’s own work and education as a psychotherapist continued and blossomed for many years after that until she ultimately received a doctor of philosophy in clinical social work from New York University and developed a successful private psychotherapy practice in her office at our apartment on Riverside Drive. As part of her lengthy training, she underwent a full-fledged Freudian psychoanalysis. As so often happens when one member of a family engages in deep psychotherapy, others soon follow. So it came to be my turn to embark upon a six-year four-times-a-week-on-the-couch Freudian analysis. In this process, I became convinced that psychoanalytic approaches lead to discoveries not accessible to other more conventional methods of inquiry.
Back in college, I had taken a survey course on social relations that had touched briefly on Freud. Even with that short exposure, I had marveled at the clarity of his writing and the profundity of his insights. A few years later, when I took John Howard’s course on buyer behavior, I noticed that he was preaching an extremely rational model of the consumer and asked him how this information-processing decision-oriented approach could account for, say, sexy leotard-clad women draped across the hoods of convertibles in magazine advertisements for snazzy automobiles. John had no answer for that. But, given his adherence to the logic of the Ford–Carnegie study, you can bet that his working hypotheses would not have included an appeal to unconscious or irrational car-related sex drives.
As I gradually turned away from my moorings in the rational economic theory of buyer behavior and acknowledged the possibility of a role to be played by more hedonic or experiential aspects of “fantasies, feelings, and fun,” I realized that the material I was working on in my own psychoanalysis mirrored aspects of relevance to ordinary consumers. As a reflection of such aspects, I wrote a couple of articles on a psychoanalytic interpretation of the artistic objects in our home(s). These can be found by searching for (“morris b. holbrook” “psychoanalytic interpretation” “consumer behavior”) at Google Scholar. I’ll be happy to send PDF versions to anyone interested. The shorter of these two articles appeared in ACR’s Advances in Consumer Research (1988). But the longer one got rejected by the Journal of Consumer Research before finally appearing in Research in Consumer Behavior (1988) through the good graces of my friend, editor, and fellow psychoanalysis sympathizer Beth Hirschman (who is more Jungian than Freudian).
After my experience with the difficulty of publishing an article on psychoanalysis in the climate permeated by scientistic approaches to the modeling of buyer behavior, I grew discouraged with studies of the psychodynamics of consumption experiences. However, my participation in this type of research was reawakened a few years later by Dennis Rook – a student of Sid Levy – who coaxed me into participating with him on a psychoanalytically oriented presentation at one of the ACR conferences. This project covered a study in which Dennis held lengthy in-depth sessions with just one consumer at weekly intervals for several months. Via his highly developed skills as an interviewer, he managed to probe deeply into this informant’s unconscious associations in ways that gradually became so revealing that we felt compelled, on ethical grounds, to suspend the study and to refrain from reporting it in anything beyond the most general terms.
This experience convinced me of the power of psychoanalytic approaches in consumer research. But it also taught me that—in my opinion—the wisest strategy is to practice such approaches on oneself as part of a broader approach that I refer to as subjective personal introspection (SPI). The beauty of SPI—including psychoanalytically oriented SPI—is that it allows one to investigate a phenomenon to its fullest extent without the fear of invading other people’s privacy. Some of my own work in this direction can be found at Google Scholar by searching for (“morris b. holbrook” “subjective personal introspection”). I also recommend the deeply revealing personal introspections published by Markus Wohlfeil in connection with his consumption experiences as a fan of the actress Jena Malone. These can be found at Google Scholar by searching for (“markus wohlfeil” “movie” “jena malone”).
Going forward, I hope to see a revival of interest in psychoanalytically oriented approaches to the study of marketing and consumer behavior. Paul Albanese has made strides in that direction in his book entitled The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior. Further progress appears in the present special issue of Marketing Theory. Obviously, such new initiatives will move beyond my own fairly primitive understanding of Freudian analysis. In this, I would caution those to come that they should avoid the tendency toward obfuscation that so often appears in psychoanalytic prose. For example, I once tried to read some works by Jacques Lacan and found them as impenetrable as one might imagine in his wildest night terror. I have heard a story that—when Professor Lacan lectured in class—he would stand with his back to the audience, scribble on the blackboard, block their view of what he had scribbled and then erase it before anyone had had a chance to read it. Whether true or not of his classroom demeanor, this habit of inscrutability perfectly describes his writing style and should not, please, inspire emulation by tomorrow’s generation of psychoanalytic marketing and consumer theorists. Rather, let us honor the memory of Freud by writing in a style that approaches his penchant for clarity. One reason for the profundity of Freud’s influence, I believe, is that—thanks to his limpid manner of communicating, unconsciously or not—we understand what he says with a constant feeling of epiphany. May the same be true for the future creators of psychoanalytic work in the field of marketing and consumer behavior.