Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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Accession 2407 ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS Table of Contents History…………………………………………………………..….1 Proposals & Studies………………………………………………14 Publications………………………………………………………..22 Speeches, Quizzes & Seminars…………………………………...27 Publicity……………………………………………………………35 Writings & Drafts…………………………………………….…..42 Correspondence………………………………………….………101 Also includes a list of Ernest Dichter’s Research Reports (box number, report number, title, client and date); as well as a copy of the photo archive inventory that is housed in the Pictorial Department.
HISTORY Accession 2407 ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS Ernest Dichter, one of the pioneers in consumer motivational research, was born in Vienna on August 14, 1907, the oldest of three children of William and Mathilde Dichter, a family of Polish and Sudeten-German immigrants. His father was a traveling salesman of textiles and sewing accessories. Dichter later wrote that he “never really had a psychological father” and of being “ashamed” of him by age nine or ten. However, as the oldest son, Dichter enjoyed a special status within the family and was obliged to assume the breadwinner role as his father’s business and health failed. Ernest Dichter had red hair and blue eyes which made him stand out among Jews but not Gentiles, and the family was at best only moderately observant. The Dichters were downwardly mobile and were barely affected by the glittering high culture of pre-World War I Vienna. During and immediately after World War I, the family was severely impoverished as William Dichter was first drawn into the army and then often unable to earn commissions. Ernest Dichter would always recall the poverty and starvation of his formative years and credit it with sharpening his awareness of the pleasures and comforts to be had in even the most basic and essential material goods. In his own words, Ernest Dichter “concentrated on earning money” from the age of fourteen. He began by picking wild mushrooms and berries in the countryside, which he sold to grocery stores. By 1924, he was forced to drop out of school for lack of money and secured a position in an uncle’s department store as a clerk and window decorator. Although he remained poor, Dichter was able attend the University of Vienna where he studied German literature from 1927 to 1929, thanks to a new law that permitted working students to take classes on nights and weekends. In the latter year, he fled to Paris to escape family pressures and enrolled at the Sorbonne, where he continued his literary studies. Here a woman fellow-student, a refugee from the Russian Revolution with whom he had a relationship, turned his interests away from literature towards socialism and psychology. Because of the Depression, Dichter was forced to return to Vienna in 1930, where he resumed his studies at the University, supporting himself as a tutor and window dresser. He now pursued a doctorate in psychology. His most important mentors were Karl Bühler (1879-1963) and Charlotte Bühler (1893-1974), who taught an anti-Freudian, empirical and developmental psychology and a motivation-based theory of personality. Dichter himself later credited the analytical philosopher Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), under whom he studied epistemology and logic, as having the greater influence and giving him the intellectual tools most essential to his later work. However, it was his statistics teacher, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901-1976), who would later provide the entry to his American career. 1
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Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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