Freud and you

Meanwhile the psychiatrist has entered the advertising field and up and down Madison Avenue the hucksters are earnestly consulting resident sages of the unconscious. These highly paid hacks of the conference room are working (quite correctly) on the theory that a consumer's brain is a hindrance to effective advertising. In return for their salaries they perfect schemes to by-pass rational processes and assist their sponsors' sales by manipulating the public's unconscious wish-fulfillment drives and other hidden mental quirks. For example, in one campaign a brassiere firm instructed its artists along lines suggested by the psychiatrists. They prepared media which played on the submerged exhibitionistic tendencies present in most young Women. "I Dreamed I Stopped Traffic in my Maidenform Bra" ran the ads with illustrations of slim maidens sleepwalking in the firm's product before a multitude of admiring men in Times Square. This advertisement paid off in millions of brassiere sales.

For the greeting card industry the analysts turned up the fact that the fastest selling cards were those that had designs incorporating the classic Freudian symbols. A lot more candles have been put on the Christmas cards since then. Freudian theory is no novelty to the hucksters but the attempt to condition consumers by playing on sexual energies has got beyond the beach-girl-selling-tractor stage. More and more sexual stimuli of a kind varying from the commonplace to the pathological is being employed.