Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

HISTORY (cont’d)
Accession 2407
ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS
Packaging: The Sixth Sense? (1975), Total Self-Knowledge (1976), Getting Motivated
(1979), and How Hot a Manager Are You? (1987). Attempts to explain his work to his
oldest grandson Sasha resulted in a series of Sacha books on psychological concepts for
children published in Paris in the mid-1970s.
Ernest Dichter died of heart failure in the Hudson Valley Hospital Center near
Peekskill, N.Y., on November 21, 1991. His work is perpetuated by Dichter Research
AG, successor to the old Zurich office, and the Ernest Dichter Institut. Motiv-,
Marketing- Kommunikationsforschung GmbH & Co. KG in Frankfurt. At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, Dichter’s work has been rediscovered by a new generation of
historians of consumer culture.
Although Dichter saw himself as first and foremost a psychologist, a balanced account
of his life must concede some points to his critics. It would appear, perhaps reflecting his
earlier devotion to literary studies, that, whatever his other gifts Dichter was also a
sometimes-brilliant artist whose medium was the symbolic element of advertising and
whose methods had a large intuitive component. That is, Dichter used his training in
psychology and logic, his personal experiences, and those of his subjects to craft
explanatory narratives that were highly plausible if not always completely convincing.
There is an anecdote that Nestlé finally balked at hiring him, saying in effect, that since
the premises and conclusions of his reports were the same, it made no sense to pay for
what was in the middle.
Of course, there was nothing really new here. Seers, poets, artists, and their kin have
been coining intuitive readings of situations into pithy images and phrases since the dawn
of human history, and traders, merchants and manufacturers have depended upon intuitive
readings of their customers’ emotional needs and have tried to turn luxuries into
necessities ever since commerce began. From that perspective, Dichter did not so much
venture into unexplored territory as develop a style, a distinctive voice in a long-running
conversation. It is perhaps appropriate that automatic Internet translation software
renders the name of his German successor literally as “Ernest Poets Institute.”
Dichter’s wish to be taken seriously as a social philosopher will always be
compromised by his participation in commerce, but perhaps equally so by his deep
immersion in the messiness of everyday life, both his own and that of his subjects.
Unlike professional therapists, Dichter made no pretense of curing the psychically
damaged of their traumas nor of elevating humanity onto some straight and narrow path.
At the same time, the charges of Vance Packard and other moralizers seem overblown in
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