Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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.
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