Consumption and repression

Abstract

Time and again consumer research shows us that people find ways to ignore what they know as they engage in consumption activities that they find immoral, unethical, embarrassing or self-destructive. To put this in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, people often repress what they know about their consumption. To explore the relationship between consumption and repression, the article offers a reading of Freud as a consumer and a detailed exposition of Freud’s account of repression. The article then sets out two ways in which repression and consumption can work together. First, the article shows how consumption produces material that people need to repress. Second, the article shows how consumption, itself, can enact repressions by allowing people to communicate things they do not want to say. The article demonstrates each of these consumer behaviours through a speculative analysis of Freud’s own consumption practices.

Keywords

Psychoanalysis repression Freud unconscious non-conscious

Introduction

Time and again consumer research shows us that people find ways to ignore useful information when it suits them. They do so to continue with consumption activities that they find immoral, unethical, embarrassing or self-destructive (see Desmond, 2012; Hamilton, 2012; Hirschman, 1992; Rook, 1987). Yet explaining how people are able to act as if they do not fully understand their consumption practices has proven more tricky.

Influenced by cognitive psychology, some have turned to the concept of the non-conscious for an explanation. Non-conscious mental processes are not active, reasoned or goal oriented but are, instead, associated with ‘a failure of volitional control or a weakness of will’ on the part of the consumer (Bargh, 2002: 280). As such, the concept of the non-conscious has been used to explain the effects of hunger, sexual desire and bodily functions on consumers (Durante et al., 2011; Irmak et al., 2011; Loewenstein, 2000). In these cases, thoughts remain non-conscious until they activate some need or want in a consumer. At this point, they burst into a consumer’s consciousness and press them into action.

The non-conscious only explains so much. It does not help us to account for incidents where people turn away from information that they are otherwise aware of in order to consume. To provide an explanation of this, consumer researchers influenced by psychoanalysis have turned to the notion of the unconscious. Unlike non-conscious thoughts, unconscious ones are goal oriented and capable of driving behaviour without becoming conscious. They allow people to simultaneously hold diametrically opposed attitudes towards a single behaviour, object or activity and to use the things they consume to fulfil desires they cannot admit to (Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Fullerton, 2007; Otnes et al., 1997).

This article seeks to further the psychoanalytic understanding of consumption. It explores how consumers can ignore what they know. To do this, the article turns to Freud’s concept of repression – which he uses to identify examples of ‘willed forgetting’ (Billig, 1999a: 13). Freud explains repression from a range of perspectives, including an early precursor to neuroscience, but comes to focus on the issue of language. Expanding this idea, Billig (1999a: 37) argues that repression is enacted through ‘the routines of language’. As we learn how to change the subject in socially acceptable ways, we learn how to push uncomfortable information away from consciousness without drawing attention to it. Adding to this, the article argues that consumption offers another communicative form through which we can enact repression. Consumption is powerful here because it allows us to express thoughts that we might otherwise find impossible to put into words. This helps us to keep things from ourselves and others.

By way of overview, the article first explores Freud’s relationship with what we now consider consumption. Here, the article offers a reading of Freud as a consumer that leads us to the concept of repression. The article then offers a detailed exposition of Freud’s account of repression and, informed by Billig (1999a, 1999b), argues that repression must be understood in the context of social interactions. Building on this, the article sets out two ways in which repression and consumption can work together. First, the article shows how consumption produces material that people need to repress. Second, the article shows how consumption, itself, can enact repressions by allowing people to communicate things they do not want to say. The article demonstrates each of these consumer behaviours through a speculative analysis of Freud’s own consumption practices. This is based on a close reading of his letters, autobiographical works and biographical accounts of his life. This speculative approach, whilst novel in consumer research, is in keeping with the methodological advice Freud sets out in his texts on repression. Finally, the article points to future directions for the psychoanalysis of consumption informed by the concept of repression.

Was Freud a consumer?

Freud was a prolific letter writer. Although some of his letters have not stood the test of time, indeed, he destroyed many himself, those that remain offer us a window into his life as he developed his most influential ideas. In this regard, when reading Freud’s published psychoanalytic works alongside his letters, a disjuncture becomes apparent. Freud rarely discusses his consumption practices in his published psychoanalytic texts, yet consumption activities are presented in his letters as an important part of his everyday experiences.

Freud lived in what Kroen (2004: 712) describes as ‘the most complex’ period in the history of consumption in Europe (see Schorske, 1981 for a full historical account). His was the social milieu from which Ernest Dichter, Paul Lazarfeld and Victor Gruen shaped the face of modern consumption. Freud’s ideas informed their work, but Freud, himself, rarely addressed the topic in his published psychoanalytic texts. Put glibly, we can say that whilst Freud (2001 [1901]) offers us a psychological analysis of everyday life, he overlooked this aspect of his daily life.

Perhaps Freud did so to control his public image. Recently, Freud has been accused of suffering ‘from the common fin-de-siècle Viennese bourgeois affliction known as the “poorhouse or money neurosis”: the pervasive tendency of the Viennese middle classes to misrepresent themselves as underpaid and in constant financial distress’ (Bennett, 2011: 8). But Freud, by no means rich, was surprised at his ‘much vaunted frugality’ (Freud, 1960: 403). He made no secret, for example, of his passion for antique idols. They gave him ‘unsurpassed comfort’ (Bettelheim, 1989: 20). In fact, these objects were so important to Freud that he insisted they, too, flee Nazi occupation and, despite the danger, travel with him to England late in his life (Edmundson, 2007). These fetishes even take their place in the history of psychoanalysis. They were:

the most insistent presences in Freud’s working rooms … they stood in serried ranks on bookshelves, thronged table tops and cabinets, and invaded Freud’s orderly desk, where he had them under his fond eye as he wrote his letters and composed his papers. (Gay, 1988: 170)

Perhaps Freud overlooked his own consumption as a topic for psychoanalysis, instead, because he was hostile to the kinds of things we now associate with consumer culture. Freud’s letters provide some evidence of such an attitude. For instance, Freud describes how ‘awful advertisements’ disturb the beauty of European architecture (1960: 262). Yet Freud made few attempts to isolate himself from Viennese consumer culture. At the end of Freud’s street in Vienna stood the Tandelmarkt – ‘a jumble of shops most of which in Freud’s time were owned by poor Jewish storekeepers’ (Bettelheim, 1989: 20). According to Bettelheim (1989), Freud could barely afford this apartment but wanted to live in the area. Likewise, Freud’s letters make frequent references to his own everyday consumption activities. He describes his ‘pretty big’ bills from booksellers (1960: 49), purchases of furniture and clothes, visits to coffee houses, restaurants and barbers, trips to the opera, exhibitions and museums. ‘I shudder at the thought of my tailor’s bill!’ Freud writes to his fiancée Martha Bernays in 1885 (1960: 149). It is, then, difficult to accept that Freud did not discuss his consumption out of hostility or ignorance.

In fact, Freud did write about his own consumption – just not within his published psychoanalytic works. As a young man, Freud wrote about his experiences using cocaine. At the time, this was a novel substance and was the subject of many rumours and myths. In his article, ‘On Coca’, Freud (2011 [1884]: 20) explored these rumours and presented the results of ‘repeated experiments’ into the effects of cocaine. Based on his findings, Freud promoted cocaine as a medical treatment for stomach complaints and as a physical and emotional stimulant and aphrodisiac.

Yet, despite his initial enthusiasm, Freud’s experiences with cocaine were mixed. After publishing his article, he saw one of his best friends destroyed by cocaine addiction. But he continued to use the drug himself. If we were to think of Freud through the lens of contemporary consumer research we might assume that he found ways to push uncomfortable thoughts about cocaine into the background so that he could continue to consume it – in the same way that green consumers, for instance, often overlook their ethical commitments at the cash register. Put otherwise, perhaps Freud repressed his own understanding of consumption to continue as a consumer.

Freud’s repression

The importance of repression in Freud’s thinking cannot be overestimated. Not only, he explained, is it a mental process that ‘could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies’ (2001 [1915a]: 146), but it stands as ‘the foundation-stone’ (1935: 53) of psychoanalytic interpretation and as one of ‘the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of psycho-analysis’ (1935: 71). It was, Freud explained, possible to take repression as a ‘centre and to bring all of the elements of psychoanalytic theory into relation with it’ (1935: 53–4).

Like many of his key terms, Freud’s ideas about repression developed throughout his writing. Early in his clinical career he observed patients who worked to keep their thoughts at a distance. To explain how this could happen, Freud turned to his distinction between the unconscious and the conscious. He had hypothesized that we are born with unconscious instincts that we cannot control. As we later develop a conscious sense of who we are and who we should be, our unconscious instincts remain in place. Unfortunately, on occasion they can be ‘irreconcilable’ with our conscious morals and ideals and can even contradict themselves (2001 [1915a]: 147). When this happens, they can become ‘painful’ (1935: 50). To cope, we develop techniques ‘to suppress the development of affect’ from our unconscious instincts (2001 [1915b]: 178). Unfortunately, this is no easy task precisely because ‘the ego cannot escape from itself’ (2001 [1915a]: 146). We cannot switch off the feelings associated with instincts. The best we can do is prevent the ideas that represent our instincts to us ‘from becoming conscious’ (2001 [1915b]: 166).

Although Freud saw ‘the motive and purpose’ of all repression as ‘nothing else than the avoidance of unpleasure’ (2001 [1915a]: 153), he defines two forms of repression. He distinguishes ‘primal repression’ as ‘the first phase of repression’ (2001 [1915a]: 148). It involves a ‘representative’ of an instinct being denied entrance into consciousness and the instinctual aim being fixed onto a new ‘representative’ (2001 [1915a]: 148). In contrast, ‘repression proper’ is a process that ‘affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it’ (2001 [1915a]: 148). Repression proper is ‘actually an after-pressure’ produced by repression itself (2001 [1915a]: 148). That is to say, it is a repression of a repression.

Freud characterized the difference between primal and proper repression as ‘much the same thing as the difference between my ordering an undesirable guest out of my drawing-room (or out of my front hall), and my refusing, after recognizing him, to let him cross my threshold at all’ (2001 [1915a]: 153). Both, he emphasized, are processes through which an idea, representing an instinctual aim, and the energy linked to it become split in two and suppressed (2001 [1915a]: 152). There is, Freud tells us, ‘a severance [that] takes place between the affect and the idea to which it belongs … each then undergoes its separate vicissitudes’ (2001 [1915b]: 179).

In this regard, he tells us that repression is not equivalent with three notable vicissitudes that he discusses in other texts. He explains that in phobias we displace instinctual energy through ‘a chain of connections’ that fail ‘altogether in sparing unpleasure’ and, therefore, cannot qualify as repression (2001 [1915a]: 155). Likewise, in conversion hysteria we condense instinctual energy onto a particular excitation or inhibition of our bodies, and while this process does involve some repression, the presence of the symptom means that, ultimately, nothing is repressed at all. Finally, in obsessional neuroses, we regress to an earlier stage of object relations as we substitute affectionate feelings for sadistic ones. This does not involve ‘a withdrawal of libido but a reaction formation’ (2001 [1915a]: 157) and as the ‘vanished affect comes back in its transformed shape as social anxiety, moral anxiety and unlimited self-reproaches’, there is a ‘tendency to a complete re-establishment of the repressed idea’ (2001 [1915a]: 157). These distinct instinctual vicissitudes are, then, not equivalent to those of repression.

So what does repression look like? Freud tells us that even though we can repress many thoughts at the same time each repression acts ‘in a highly individual manner’ and is unaffected by others (2001 [1915a]: 150). He describes repression as a process deeply entwined with social as well as individual concerns – we reduce the need for repression if there is ‘a weakening of what is distasteful’ he states (2001 [1915a]: 152). He tells us that repression is not a one-off procedure. It ‘demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease the success of the repression would be jeopardized’ (2001 [1915a]: 151). Finally, Freud concludes, the repressed does not want to stay repressed. Either it ‘proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression’ (Freud, 2001 [1915a]: 149) or it is ‘able to find means of discharge and of substitutive gratification by circuitous routes and thus to bring the whole purpose of the repression to nothing’ (Freud, 1935: 52–3).

How does repression work?

Tying these ideas together, Billig (1999a) argues that repression must work through language. By drawing on socially accepted discourses, we can shift the subject of a verb, select certain metaphors or subtly replace adjectives and prepositions to change the topic of our thoughts. Billig explains, ‘At its simplest, repression might be considered as a form of changing the subject. It is a way of saying to oneself “talk, or think, of this, not that”’ (1999a: 54).

Freud offers some confirmation of this discursive approach – in a theme of his work expanded by Lacan. For instance, he highlights the ‘associations’ that form between instinctual aims and substitute objects in repression. He tells us that primal repression involves derivatives – mental objects that represent a repressed instinct and have ‘free access to the conscious’ because they are ‘sufficiently far removed from the repressed representative, whether owing to the adoption of distortions or by reason of the number of intermediate links inserted’ (2001 [1915a]: 149). Psychoanalysis, as a therapeutic technique, relies on verbalized forms of these derivatives to unlock the work of repression – ‘we continually require the patient to produce such derivatives of the repressed’ Freud states (2001 [1915a]: 149–50).

Likewise, in a discussion of schizophrenia, Freud argues that associations can specifically take the form of ‘changes in speech’ (2001 [1915b]: 197). He describes organ speech as an example in which ‘the schizophrenic utterance exhibits a hypochondriac trait’ (2001 [1915b]: 198). He explains:

In schizophrenia words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream-images out of latent dream-thoughts – to what we have called the primary psychical process. They undergo condensation, and by means of displacement transfer their cathexes to one another in their entirety. The process may go so far that a single word, if it is specially suitable on account of its numerous connections, takes over the representation of a whole train of though. (2001 [1915b]: 199)

So, although Freud had earlier stated that substitutive gratifications enabled by condensation and displacement are not equivalent to repression in and of themselves, here he suggests that displacement and condensation can assist the discursive work of repression. To demonstrate how, he explores the way language connects objects, representations and the unconscious. As he explains, ‘the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone’ (2001 [1915b]: 201). Maintaining this distinction allows Freud to ‘state precisely what it is that repression denies’ (2001 [1915b]: 202). It denies an instinct ‘translation into words which shall remain attached to the object. A presentation that is not put into words, or a psychical act which is not hypercatheected, remains thereafter … in a state of repression’ (2001 [1915b]: 202). What is repressed, in short, is denied words.

This inability to be translated into language means that when a psychoanalyst ‘communicate[s] to a patient some idea which he has at one time repressed but which we have discovered in him, our telling him makes at first no change in his mental condition’ (Freud, 2001 [1915b]: 175). The words themselves cannot serve the same function for the conscious as they do the unconscious. They represent things without their instinctual relations or instinctual drives devoid of unconscious representatives.

However, this understanding of the role of language in repression creates a fundamental problem for Freud: How do we speak about a mental process that escapes language? Elsewhere, Freud gets around this issue by turning to self-analysis (see Freud, 2001 [1900]). As he explains, the golden rule of psychoanalysis is that ‘all the acts and manifestations which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else’ (2001 [1915b]: 169). Yet repression is a problematic concept in this regard. Just as we should not expect others to confirm their repressions when we point to them, we should not be able to admit our repressions either. In response, Freud advises that speculation is the only available option:

The extraordinary intricacy of all the factors to be taken into consideration leaves only one way of presenting them open to us. We must select first one and then another point of view, and follow it through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results. Each separate treatment of the subject will be incomplete in itself, and there cannot fail to be obscurities where it touches upon material that has not yet been treated; but we may hope that a final synthesis will lead to a proper understanding. (2001 [1915a]: 157–58)

In other words, because language enacts repression, we will never be able to pin it down. All we can do is offer speculative interpretations of potential repressions. These should not be judged as truth claims but in terms of their productivity. As Freud puts it, ‘[a] gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience’ (2001 [1915b]: 167). Of course, this view is at odds with much consumer research, which can focus on the science of direct experience at the expense of gains in understanding.

In this regard, Billig (1999a) argues that one productive way to explore repression is to contextualize the concept within Freud’s own life. That is to say, to perform a self-analysis for Freud. Billig explains that ‘Freud taught, and his own life illustrated, in psychoanalytic matters the theoretical is bound up with the personal’ (1999a: 3). Indeed, Billig (1999a) suggests that Freud’s intimate relationships with many of his patients led him to unconsciously censor his own accounts of their treatment and, as with any form of repression, Freud was unable to see what he was doing. As Billig puts it, ‘Freud was exemplifying something that he took to be the general condition of humanity: the great exposer of repression was routinely practising repression in his daily life’ (1999a: 72). This does not mark a weakness on Freud’s part. It shows us the very nature of repression, that is, even as we learn to recognize how others repress, we struggle to see our own repressions. The blind can only lead the blind.

If repression works through the limits of language, though, we might wonder whether other symbolic acts can also enact repression. Consumption is often understood as a symbolic act – especially in contemporary consumer cultures. Could consumption also be a method of repression? Exploring Freud’s own understanding of consumption and consumer behaviours in more detail will allow us to probe this possibility further. Accordingly, the article proceeds by illustrating how consumption can produce mental material that people need to repress. Following this, the article shows how consumption, itself, can enact repressions by allowing people to communicate things they do not want to say. In each instance, the article illustrates the relationship between consumption and repression through a speculative analysis of Freud’s own consumer behaviours.

Consumption creates material to repress

Turning, first, to the need for people to repress some aspects of their consumer behaviours, let us return to Freud’s experiences with cocaine. As we have seen, Freud published an early text on cocaine based on his own experiences with the drug. One of his experiments involved a man suffering ‘the most severe symptoms of abstinence’ following ‘the abrupt withdrawal from morphine’. Freud found that, when using cocaine, the man’s ‘condition was bearable … there was no depression or nausea as long as the effect of the coca lasted’ (Freud, 2011 [1884]: 37).

The man in this experiment was Ernest von Fleischl-Marxow. Freud met Fleischl as he was beginning his path towards psychoanalysis (Jones, 1954: 43) and later described him as ‘a brilliant man’ who he took as a role model (Freud, 1935: 15). Indeed, writing to Martha, who he later married, around the time he first met Fleischl, Freud describes him as someone he ‘envied in every respect’ (1960: 11). He was ‘[w]ealthy, skilled in all games and sports, with the stamp of genius in his manly features, good-looking, refined, endowed with many talents and capable of forming an original judgment about most things, he has always been my ideal’ (1960: 11). In fact, Freud was so in awe of Fleischl that he worried about the ease with which Fleischl could steal Martha from him. He admits in a letter to Martha:

I looked around his room, fell to thinking about my superior friend and it occurred to me how much he could do for a girl like Martha ... how she would enjoy sharing the importance and influence of this lover, how the nine years which this man has over me could mean as many unparalleled happy years of her life compared to the nine miserable years spent in hiding and near-helplessness that await her with me. I was compelled to painfully visualize how easy it could be for him ... to meet Martha at her uncle’s house. (Freud, 1960: 12)

By 1883, though, Freud’s letters to Martha reveal that Fleischl was ‘in a miserable state’ (1960: 73). He had become addicted to morphine following surgery on his thumb. In April 1884, Freud ordered cocaine to ‘[alleviate] the awful condition following withdrawal of morphine (as in the case of Dr Fleischl)’ (1960: 108). ‘If only I could relieve him of the pain!’, he wrote to Martha in January 1885 (1960: 57).

Unfortunately, Freud’s hope that cocaine could help his friend proved to be misplaced. His help made things worse. Fleischl became addicted to cocaine and lived, by all accounts, a pathetic existence for the remainder of his life. As Freud puts it in a text published 3 years after ‘On Coca’ entitled ‘Remarks on Cocaine Addiction and the Fear of Cocaine’, Fleischl’s decline was one of ‘the sad results of trying to replace one evil by another’ (2011 [1887]: 72). Carter offers this review of the incident:

At the age of twenty-four, Fleischl had had the thumb of his right hand amputated, after contracting an infection. The infection persisted and he was in a constant state of pain, coping only by taking morphine, to which he became addicted. Freud endeavoured to help him overcome the addiction by the use of cocaine, but his friend eventually developed chronic cocaine intoxication. Freud thought that Fleischl would probably only live for another six months or so, but in fact his agony dragged on for many more years. (2011: viii)

We might expect that Freud would have stopped using cocaine having seen these sad results. But he did not. Rather, Freud’s experiments with cocaine established his status among his peers. As he admits in a letter to Martha dated 1885, ‘coca is the first thing associated with my name’ (Freud, 2011: 42). Cocaine also eased Freud’s painful migraines and stomach complaints. He enjoyed taking cocaine socially and found that it helped him to work. In the same way as the young Freud appeared to feel both admiration and jealousy towards Fleischl, then, he may well have felt ambivalent feelings towards cocaine. It could be evil, but it was enjoyable, useful but unhealthy, productive but destructive.

According to Carter (2011: viii), Freud ‘suffered guilt feelings about his treatment of his friend for many years to come, especially in relation to his initial encouragement of subcutaneous injections which he later repudiated and the memory of which he appears to have repressed’. Of course, we cannot know whether this is really the case. But it is worth speculating how he might have repressed these memories.

There is some evidence to suggest that Freud repressed his guilt concerning Fleischl’s demise through the published interpretations of his dreams. That is to say, by favouring one interpretation of his dreams, Freud may have enacted a repression. In his analysis of the ‘Dream of Irma’s Injection’ in The Interpretation of Dreams, in particular, Freud offers the following commentary on an image of a throat and sinuses marked by white patches and scabs that appears midway through the dream:

At that time [of the dream] I frequently used cocaine, to suppress troublesome swellings of the nose. . . . The recommendation to use cocaine, which was initiated by me in 1885, has also brought grave accusations against me. A dear friend, who had already died in 1895 (the date of the dream), had hastened his own decline through the abuse of this remedy’. (2011 [1900]: 85)

Here, then, Freud seems to use his dream analysis to show his fondness for Fleischl, who he describes as a dear friend, and that he was not responsible for Fleischl’s pain. He recognizes that some unnamed actor has made grave accusations against him for promoting cocaine as a cure – perhaps his own superego – but emphasizes that it was Fleischl who hastened his own decline by abusing the remedy. There is certainly evidence to suggest that Fleischl ignored Freud’s directions when taking cocaine, but it is revealing that, at the same time as he acknowledges that there is something to account for, Freud denies his need to feel guilty. What he earlier described as evil is now presented as a remedy that had been abused by his dear friend.

Freud repeats the same interpretation later in his analysis of this dream. In the dream, it is worth noting, Freud worked over mental material concerning a patient he called Irma who he was not able to convince to fully adopt his methods (see Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, for a detailed contextualization of this dream in Freud’s life). It is one of the first dreams Freud analyzed in detail. Exploring a sequence in which his friend injects Irma, Freud states:

The injections remind me again of the unlucky friend, who poisoned himself with cocaine. I had given him the remedy only to be taken internally during withdrawal from morphine, but he promptly gave himself cocaine injections. (2011 [1900]: 89)

In this instance, Freud again claims responsibility for initiating Fleischl’s use of cocaine and again adds the disclaimer that it was Fleischl who poisoned himself. Through shifting the subject of the verb here, we might say, Freud is able to displace his guilt feelings onto his friend.

But given that Freud (2001 [1900]) himself argued that dream images fulfil our unconscious wishes – an idea he repeated later in life when he stated ‘a dream is the (Disguised) fulfilment of a repressed) wish’ (Freud, 1935: 81, emphasis original) – we might suspect that these dream images allowed Freud to picture himself without guilt precisely because he felt unconscious guilt. In fact, Freud’s general interpretation of the dream is that he was seeking to alleviate his guilt surrounding the treatment of Irma in real life by substituting himself for others in the dream. Reversing it, this, Freud interprets the images he relates to Fleischl as an indication that Fleischl, not Freud, was responsible for his cocaine addiction. Rather than see this as the fulfilment of a wish, he presents it as a matter of fact. This interpretation denies, then, not only the possibility that Freud did feel guilty but also the possibility that he might have been satisfied in some way that his idol had fallen – that his esteemed friend was no longer a threat.

In this sense, we can begin to see that, whilst psychoanalytic theory provides a vocabulary through which we can identify repression, psychoanalytic practices such as dream analysis provide a mechanism for repression. To illustrate this, Billig (1999a) rereads Freud’s case study of Little Hans. Little Hans was a 5-year-old boy who suffered from a phobia of horses as a result of seeing a horse collapse in his local park. Freud interpreted this as a trauma forced on Hans by the sight of the collapsed horse’s penis which, Freud claimed, was an image overdetermined with anxieties for Hans. These ranged from anxiety over the forthcoming arrival of a sister, feelings of shame related to masturbation and Oedipal desires for his mother. Freud ultimately interprets Hans’ fear of horses as a fear of his father who Hans supposedly saw as a rival for the affection of his mother.

Billig (1999a) argues that, in this case, Freud and Hans’ parents may have colluded through the practice of psychoanalysis to project their own sexual desires, neuroses and jealousies onto Hans so that they could talk about those desires, neuroses and jealousies without having to admit to them. It was Hans’ father, Max Graf, not Freud, who psychoanalyzed Hans – although he did report back to Freud. He began to worry that Hans was becoming overly affectionate towards his wife after he heard an analyst report to a meeting hosted by Freud about the dangers of excessive affection towards children. But what, Billig asks, does it take for natural affection to become overly affectionate? Billig (1999a) asks us to consider the possibility that Hans was not a jealous rival but simply a child who enjoyed comforting hugs from his mother and that Max Graf interpreted this as a sexual act to shift the subject of his own unconscious feelings. Indeed, whilst Freud’s analysis of Hans was conducted by proxy through Hans’ father, Freud had psychoanalyzed Max Graf’s wife. In fact, he describes her twice in his case notes as ‘beautiful’. Perhaps, Billig (1999a) suggests, some of Graf’s jealousy of Hans was also jealousy of Freud – the brilliant psychoanalyst who had intimate discussions with his wife that Graf was excluded from. As such, psychoanalysis, itself, may have provided Graf with a vocabulary through which he could talk to Freud about his jealousy and desires without having to take ownership of them.

So, the Fleischl incident shows us that sometimes the things people consume provide material that they and others need to repress. Indeed, Freud’s continuing use of cocaine suggests that the things we consume can be motivated by repressed feelings of guilt, envy and narcissism. In contrast, the case of Little Hans and Freud’s interpretation of images in his dream of Irma’s injection shows us how language can be used to repress uncomfortable thoughts related to consumption practices. Routines of language provides cover stories that allow us to feel that we have nothing to be guilty for, that our envy is justified and our narcissism necessary (see Tuckett and Taffler, 2008, for further psychoanalytic interpretations of cover stories in the market).

Repression through consumption

Consumption can be a highly symbolic practice. We can use objects to demonstrate our social worth, self-esteem and our feelings for others. We can consume objects to reward ourselves, to construct our identities and to express our attitudes and beliefs. So, if language facilitates repression by allowing us to talk about something without talking about it, to what extent can symbolic forms of consumption enact repressions as well?

Freud was aware that the objects he consumed carried many meanings. His letters reveal how he carefully selected gifts for his fiancée both to show his love for her and to seek reassurance that she loved him in return. In a letter to Martha in 1882, for instance, Freud explains that he had purchased notepaper to make it easier for her to write to him. But, he continues, he chose notepaper that was monographed with their initials to convey a much more important message:

I decided to acquire some notepaper for the dear industrious child and chose some on which she could write to me only. An M and an S intimately entwined as the generosity of the engravers grants us, renders every page useless for intercourse save between Marty and me. (Freud, 1960: 18)

Freud’s thoughtful gift was, then, folded into a number of relationships and feelings. In this example, he was willing to admit that he used his generosity to communicate his possessiveness. But Freud was also aware that through consumption we can communicate thoughts that we are less willing to admit either to others or to ourselves. On this point, Freud recounts a revealing story:

which I recently told among a circle of friends and used as proof of my assertion, that forgetting is very often the carrying out of an unconscious intention and nevertheless allows one to deduce something about the secret state of mind of the person who forgets. A young woman who was used to finding a bouquet from her husband on her birthday, misses this sign of tenderness on one such anniversary and bursts into tears about it. The husband arrives, and cannot explain her crying to himself, until she says to him: ‘Today is my birthday.’ He strikes himself on the forehead and exclaims: ‘I’m sorry, I completely forgot it,’ and wants to go and get her some flowers. But she will not be consoled, for she perceived in her husband’s forgetfulness proof of the fact, that she does not play the same role in his thoughts as she once did. (2011 [1900]: 99)

Here, we see Freud acknowledge that consumption not only allows us to express feelings and emotions but, importantly, allows us to express feelings and emotions we do not know about. In the story, it is not that the husband forgets his wife’s birthday that is the issue. It is that he has forgotten to purchase flowers. This shows the wife that her husband no longer loves her. When he gave her flowers she knew she loved him, not giving them tells her that he does not. No matter what the husband says, no matter how he protests his innocence, he cannot conceal the true meaning revealed by the omission. His actions expose the feelings he cannot admit to himself – and these are taken to be much more important. Through consumption practices, Freud suggests in this anecdote, we can reveal our secret state of mind.

At this point, we can return to the case of Little Hans. As we have seen, for Billig (1999a), the published case study represses relations between Freud and Hans’ parents. The image of the horse is key to Freud’s published interpretation. The horse represents prohibited sexuality. It is interesting to find out, then, that Freud himself had given Hans a rocking horse ‘as a present for his third birthday’ (Billig, 1999a: 122). It is worth quoting Billig at length here:

He had carried it up four flights of stairs to the Graf’s apartment to deliver it personally. Yet, he fails to mention the toy. It is a strange omission, to say the least. … A psychoanalyst would treat the omission as significant … According to Freud’s ideas at the time, a horse was not a neutral symbol … Freud, in one of the Wednesday meetings at which Graf was present, asserted that the horse was a symbol of sexual intercourse. He made the remark in November 1907, just weeks before Hans was to develop his fear of horses. Although no longer a young man himself, Freud carried the large gift up the stairs to the Graf’s apartment. And this act also has sexual significance for Freud. In a footnote added for the 1910 edition of ‘The interpretation of dreams’, he suggested that ‘the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs’ for ‘we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we get to the bottom again’. We can imagine Freud carrying an object, which he believes to be a symbol of sexual intercourse, to the Graf’s house – to the home of the young mother, whom he calls ‘beautiful’. He becomes increasingly breathless as he approaches the apartment. If he could see himself, Freud would have a ready interpretation’. Yet it is omitted, to be forgotten as the story passes into psychoanalytic culture. We, the readers of the case history, are to remember Hans, running with fright from the sight of horses with big widdlers, or riding on the back of his nurse. We are not invited to imagine Freud climbing the stairs to the Graf household with a rocking-horse in his arms, the father of psychoanalysis introducing the symbol of sexual intercourse into the house of the child. (1999a: 122–3)

By emphasizing the importance of the horse in his published analysis of Hans’ case whilst omitting the story of the rocking horse, Freud, according to Billig’s (1999a) reading, offers us an example of repression in action. He encourages us to imagine what Hans, not to mention his father and mother, thought when they read Freud’s analysis of Hans or his ideas about the symbolic meaning of horses. Could they look at the rocking horse the same way again? Freud’s interpretation, we might say, hides his repression in plain sight.

We see an even more striking example of consumption possibly denying what it reveals when we look at Freud’s consumption of cigars. Freud began smoking at the age of 24 and became ‘fatally addicted’ to cigars (Gay, 1988: 170). He was, he admitted in 1931, ‘a passionate smoker’ (1960: 403). He believed that ‘the “habit or vice,” as he called it, greatly enhanced his capacity of work and his ability to muster self-control’ (Gay, 1988: 169). Indeed, in a letter of 1919, Freud compared food as the ‘material for life’ to cigars as the material for ‘work’ (1960: 325). Yet smoking caused Freud a number of health problems. He knew the damage it did but could not stop himself.

Famously, though, in spite of these ambivalent feelings and symbolic interpretations, Freud claimed that cigars had no symbolic value. As he is reported to have said in a particularly un-Freudian quote: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (Maynard, 1962; Solomon, 1983). In keeping with Billig’s (1999a) belief that little words support powerful repressions, we might wonder if the use of sometimes is important here. Whilst saying that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar might seem like a denial of the symbolism of cigars, simultaneously it acknowledges that sometimes a cigar is much more than just a cigar.

Actually, we know that Freud had some intriguing thoughts about what the consumption of cigars might represent. Gay summarizes:

Freud the cigar smoker was, of course, in sizable company in those days. For the weekly gatherings at his house the maid scattered ashtrays across the table, one for each guest … When his nephew Harry was seventeen, Freud offered him a cigarette, and when Harry refused, his uncle told him “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.” It was a sensual gratification which Freud could not deny himself and for which he was to pay an extortionate price in pain and suffering. In 1897, we know, sharing an intuition he never developed into a paper, he told Fliess that addictions – and he explicitly included addiction to tobacco – are only substitutes for the “single great habit, the ‘primal addiction,’” masturbation. But he was unable to translate this psychological insight into the decision to give up smoking. (1988: 169–70)

So, Freud recognized that cigars could be much more than just cigars. They were capable of arousing passions and enhancing his capacity to work. They could also be substitutes for masturbation. At first, this might seem like the very worst of psychoanalysis – the tendency to reduce the psychoanalytic framework to simple ‘penis spotting’. But it was not the symbolism of the cigar but the act of giving oneself pleasure through an object that made this act equivalent to masturbation. The act is important not the object (see Mitchel, 1974, for an elaboration of this distinction).

Freud had, after all, long argued that people rarely give up pleasures. He believed that people find new ways to attain their existing pleasures by investing their desires into new objects (Billig, 1999b). As Freud puts it:

whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man to give up than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. (2001 [1908]: 144)

Freud describes such exchanges as, fetishes where the original object of an instinctual aim ‘is replaced by a substitute by displacement, often a displacement on to something very small or indifferent’ (2001[1915a]: 157). Fetishes, though, are often fully acknowledged by the fetishist (see Cluley, 2014). Repression is different. It involves more than the creation of substitute objects. It creates a relationship that we cannot make sense of through language. It creates objects of desires we cannot understand or admit to. In this context, consumption is particularly powerful because it allows us to use objects to express thoughts that we might struggle to say out loud or even think to ourselves. Indeed, even where we admit the possibility of these thoughts, we can always deny them, falling back on well-worn discourses about the things we consume – collapsing the personal life of things into their social lives, as happens when we excuse our narcissism as bargain hunting, caring about our children or the environment (Cluley and Dunne, 2012).

Consumption is, therefore, a powerful resource because it allows us to communicate without speaking – it involves ideas free from words which, we have seen, Freud recognized as an essential component of repression. As a result, we can add a further symbolic function to consumption in addition to those that are regularly acknowledged in consumer research. Consumption can help us to repress. In the case of the husband forgetting flowers for his wife, his omission could be taken as revealing his secret state of mind. Likewise, in purchasing a rocking horse for Hans, Freud might have been enacting a repression. Equally, for Freud to continue to consume cigars, he might have needed to repress his awareness of their power and meaning.

Discussion: Consuming and repressing

The concept of repression stands at the very heart of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. It was a key that unlocked the mind for his form of psychoanalytic interpretation. However, to date, marketing and consumer researchers have rarely considered the ways that consumption practices provide material that we need to repress or enact repression themselves. This is no doubt due to the dominant image of a non-conscious that is put forward as the opposite of, rather than the foundation of, consumers’ conscious mental processes. It is, undoubtedly, also due to the gaps in Freud’s own explanation of repression. In addition, it is possibly a result of the methodological problems involved with unconscious processes according to the norms of marketing science. But this does not mean that unconscious processes are not important for understanding consumption.

The article has looked in detail at Freud’s own consumer behaviours. It has offered a speculative reading which, to emphasize, does not claim to be true, objective or complete. As Freud himself argues, such criteria are not relevant to discussions of repression. The only valid criterion for assessing speculations into repression is whether they are productive of new understandings.

In this sense, the article has speculated that Freud developed ways to talk about his own consumption practices that allowed him to repress painful thoughts associated with them. In the case of Fleischl’s addiction to cocaine, for instance, Freud’s recommendation of certain forms of consumption caused a great deal of physical pain for a friend he admired and envied. Where images of these events emerged in his dreams Freud chose to take them at face value. Here, Freud’s own experiences demonstrate how consumption can produce material that needs to be repressed. To this, we can add other well-known examples from the wider consumer behaviour literature including compulsive consumption and narcissistic consumption. In each of these cases, consumption produces thoughts and feelings that need to be repressed. One way this can happen is through the routines of language that helps us to shift the subject and stop us thinking about some things by focusing on others.

Freud also saw consumption as a way to express our thoughts without saying them out loud. By giving notepaper to his fiancée, for example, Freud used a gift to express his desires and his insecurity. The article he chose was monographed. As he admits, this not only tied them together symbolically but also literally ensured that she would only be able to write to him. Freud was less willing to commit his thoughts about the consumption of cigars to paper. Clearly, they were something he cherished but he was not able or willing to expand his analysis of why he cherished them into a sustained psychoanalytic account. He hinted that the pleasures of smoking cigars went beyond their taste. For Freud, cigars not only were food for work but also satisfied his narcissistic desires. In this example and others, Freud’s experiences as a consumer demonstrate how consumption can enact repression by allowing us to communicate to ourselves and others without words. We can expand this speculation to other consumer behaviours. We need to only think of the negligent parent and the adulterous partner who lavish gifts on their child or spouse to alleviate their guilt as further examples. In both cases, the expensive gifts might point to an unspoken issue and reward silence.

By reading accounts of Freud’s own consumption through the concept of repression, then, we can both expand our understanding of consumption and repression. It is, though, perhaps worth ending on a cautionary note. Repression occurs when the reality of the situation would put us in the painful position of recognizing our own flaws. But it, itself, is a faulty mechanism. The material we repress returns. Here, psychoanalysis provides the tools with which we can interpret and unpick repressions. Yet if used uncritically it also provides the means through which we can amplify it. In this regard, further research could make a useful contribution to psychoanalytic theory if it could provide more detail about the processes through which consumption is motivated by and supports repression. If it could explore instances where these processes break down, it would shed further light on the dark sides of consumption.

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that, whilst by no means methodologically perfect, Freud’s work suggests significant the problems with consumer research that trusts consumers to reveal their own motivations. More precisely, it cautions us against the tendency within interpretative consumer research in particular to privilege consumers’ own accounts of what and why they consume. The possibility of repression means that we may overlook a significant aspect of consumer motivation if we only go on what consumers tell us. It is entirely possible that consumers have relations with things that cannot be put into words. This, I think, marks an important distinction that has been glossed over by recent attempts to position psychoanalytically informed research practices such as motivation research within a tradition of interpretative consumer research (such as Tadajewski, 2006). Both involve interpreting consumers’ actions and words but they assume very different consumers.

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