THE BIRTH OF A SALESMAN: ERNEST DICHTER AND
THE OBJECTS OF DESIRE
DANIEL HOROWITZ
Ernest Dichter
(1907 – 91), an émigré psychologist influential in the development of new methods of market research, articulated
an unbound optimism about the new consumer culture. Trained as a psychologist
in Vienna, after his arrival in the U.S. in 1938 he
made handsome living by using Freudian methods to help corporations and
nonprofit organizations understand the psyche of American consumers. In the
years after World War II, he worked to reshape American identity. In the
process, he linked democracy with purchasing, redefined the middle-class women,
and asserted that affluence would aid his adopted land in the fight against
Communism abroad. In book, in articles, and in thousands of studies carried out
for corporations, he promoted a decidedly anti-puritanical vision, as he called
into question the wisdom of social critics such as Vance Packard, and John
Kenneth Galbraith. With the approach of a salesman who could not easily
separate the selling of the self from the selling of his product, Dichter
offered a vision of a world filled with consumable goods that were symbols of
personal growth and creative self-expression. Yet at moments, he acknowledged
that fruits of affluence were not very satisfying. Several of the most
influential critics of advertizing – including Packard and Betty Friedan –
attacked Dichter’s work. However, they often shared with him a focus on white,
middle-class America
and a sense that the problems of consumer culture could be solved by
self-actualizing humanistic psychology.
THE MAKING OF AN
EMIGREE, PSYCHOLOGIST, AND SALESMAN
Dichter came to
maturity under inauspicious conditions, in the household racked by poverty and
in a nation traumatized by events stretching from the outbreak of World War I
in 1914 to the invasion of Germany
in 1938. Born in Vienna
on August 14 1907, ha was the oldest of three sons of William and Mathilde
Dichter. His father was “a small itinerant businessman” who sold sewing
accessories and textiles. Dichter considered him “a spectacularly unsuccessful
salesman”, someone of whom he was “ashamed”, whom he could neither “look up to”
nor tear down since “he was never high enough up for that”. In contrast, being
the first born, Dichter remembered, entitled him “to the special love and
concern” of his mother. Dichter’s relationship with his mother was particularly
intense; as he noted in his autobiography, to her he was simultaneously
“husband, lover, and son”. His father often referred to his mother as a shickse.
From the only Jewish family in the small village, his son recalled “she neither
looked, nor acted Jewish and was unfamiliar with most Jewish rituals”. She thus
stood in contrast with a “father desperately attempting to act Jewish”.
Many in Vienna,
among them, had felt the pre-1914 years were idyllic, but Dichter’s immediate
family had not experienced that world as particularly beneficent, filled as it
was for them with economic uncertainty and social disruption and not with experiences
that revolved around the world of Ringstrasse, Arnold Schoenberg, Sigmund
Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gustav Klimt. Though there was
assimilation and wealth among his father’s relatives and evidence of downward
mobility in his immediate family, young Dichter faced poverty at least well
into his teens. When his father was in the Austrian army in World War I,
Dichter’s mother fended off starvation by exchanging a treasured mirror or
painting on the black market for flour, mixing it with straw to make barely
edible bread. To provide fuel, Dichter and his brothers stole coal and cut down
trees in a park. Toward the end of World War I, his parents sent him off to Holland for a year where
he become seriously ill with a kidney disease.
When he returned
in Vienna in
1919, Dichter rejoined a family that continued to go from crisis to crisis.
Because his father had difficulty providing, his family starved on occasion,
with “nothing to eat in three days in a row”. The family was always in debt.
Things were especially rough during and after World War I, when his father, who
earned money only from commissions, often had no income. Ernest Dichter left
school at age 14 to help support his family, working first as a secretary and
then, from 1924 to 1927, as a sales clerk, sign painter, and window decorator
at his uncle’s department store in Vienna, one with 40-50 employees. In his
father’s brother, Dichter found what his father did not offer: a man to look up
to, someone who encouraged his ambition and his fascination with new ideas
about merchandising, some of which his uncle brought back from a trip to the United States. Eager
to experiment in developing a sound system for his uncle’s store, Ernest
Dichter drew on information in an American magazine and flooded the store with
music, “bringing a new atmosphere into the cold commercial display of
merchandise”. Dichter was thus able to satisfy his father’s insistence that his
son earns money and contribute it to the household, turning himself into the
provider that his father could not be. Both of his brothers, who were further
left than their older brother, considered it “demeaning” for him to work within
the capitalistic system, even though he was the family’s primary breadwinner.
It was also in the department store that his uncle had unintentionally – Ernest
later wrote – provided “objects” for his nephew’s “sexual training course”. On
company time, he had sexual experiences with a female employee. “Since all this
exploitation had to be carried out somewhat hurriedly,” Dichter recalled of a
time he was about 17, he and his partner had to be “very inventive” as they
“stood up behind rows of kitchen utensils and sundry china ware, glasses, and,
around Christmas time, behind dolls and electric trains, waiting to be given a
place in the visible shelves at the front of the store”.
Poverty and
ethnicity shaped Dichter’s identity. “I was an outcast” and “always
dissatisfied with myself,” Dichter remarked retrospectively. He ascribed these
feelings to a number of factors. Living around well-to-do, fashionable friends,
and relatives, he had to wear second-hand clothes until well into his teens. He
was a red head, something that marked him as a different among Jews and but not
an outcast among Gentiles. Indeed, when Austrian Brown Shirts sought out Jews, they
usually left Dichter alone “after a searching look”. However, as a young man he
faced the ordeal of a weekly shower where he “tried to hide what I considered
my deformity,” his circumcised penis, as it involved “a public declaration of
my ethnic ties”.
All of these
experiences of his youth shaped Dichter’s career and his ides. Being poor and
Jewish helped self-doubt turn into self-criticism. He “watched continuosly to
see whether people” around him would discover how insecure he was. For the rest
of his life, he had nightmares of poverty and starvation. “Don’t ever lose your
insecurity,” a friend told Dichter after World War II, “it is the secret of
your success. Because you yourself are insecure, you can understand other
people and discover what makes them tick”. To Dichter, being different made him
compensate “by becoming ‘outstanding’ in a positive way”. His experiences
helped shape the characteristic features of his ideology which emphasized
creative discontent, the pleasure of goods, and the desire for security. From
his father’s failure as a salesman emerged his own success as one. In his
uncle’s department store Dichter first learned about selling, the presentation
of merchandise, and the connection between sexuality and consumer goods. From
the tragedies of World War I and the sweep of fascism across Europe, he molded
a vision of an America
where democracy and consumer culture were inseparable. His hunger helped
engender in him a drive for success and an insatiable love of consumer goods.
…
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