Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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HISTORY (cont’d) Accession 2407 ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS Dichter also studied the art and psychology of public speaking in a class taught by Esti Freud, the daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud. In 1934, Dichter received his Ph.D., and his father died. In the following year, Dichter married Hedy Langfelder, a concert pianist, the three events together marking his entrance into the professional class and into adult family life. He worked with developing infants, mentally ill children, offered vocational guidance to adults, and authored a popular syndicated column on practical psychology. He also conducted a private psychoanalytical practice and studied with Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940) and August Aichhorn (1878- 1949), both of whom practiced a more clinical and empirical form of psychoanalysis than Freud. During 1936-37, he also worked at the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Mitarbeiter des Ősterreichischen Wirtschaftspsychologischen Forschungsstelle (Employees Association of the Austrian Economic Psychology Research Center) where Lazarsfeld, who had emigrated to America in 1933, had developed innovative market research that employed psychological depth interviews. However, Dichter claimed to have been unaware that the Center was a haven for socialist dissidents and what the new right-wing government of Austria considered subversive activities, and he found himself arrested and held for interrogation without warning. Early in 1937, at the same time as the Center was formally shuttered, Dichter and his wife fled to Paris, where he was forced to work at his father’s old trade of commission salesman, a setback, but one that forced him to hone his ability to deliver a successful sales pitch and drove home the fact that the product generally does not sell itself. Dichter was one of those fortunate refugees from Nazism who accurately gauged the threat Hitler posed to all of Western Europe and escaped in time. He secured a visa to the United States in the spring of 1938 by, as he claimed, personally convincing the American Vice Consul in Paris of the value of his skills to the U.S. consumer economy. The Dichters arrived in New York with only $100 between them in September. However, with a recommendation from Lazarsfeld, who had established himself in the U.S. in 1933 and was busily developing and refining many of the techniques that Dichter himself would later employ, Dichter secured a position with a market research firm within three days and settled into the refugee community in New York City. Unlike many refugee intellectuals and professionals, however, he sought professional help to replace his Viennese accent with an American one. 2
HISTORY (cont’d) Accession 2407 ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS Within a short time, Dichter began to solicit short-term consulting jobs, the first with Esquire magazine, then for Procter & Gamble’s Ivory soap, and then for Chrysler’s new Plymouth line of low-priced cars, all incidentally, products that had a high psycho-sexual or erotic component to their consumer appeal. Within eighteen months of his arrival, Dichter had been noticed by Time magazine, and these first successes led to the post of director of psychological research with the influential advertising agency J. Stirling Getchell, Inc. After Getchell died, Dichter accepted an offer from Frank Stanton of the Columbia Broadcasting System, where Lazarsfeld was doing pioneering work on audience response. Stanton, Lazarsfeld, and their teams aired programs for test audiences and used a Program Analyzer to accurately measure fluctuating listener attention, thereby discovering what parts of the program people liked most. Where Lazarsfeld’s research was both rigorously quantitative and qualitative, Dichter’s approach was almost entirely qualitative. Where Lazarsfeld favored collaboration and team effort, Dichter worked on the basis of personal insight and in the role of an individual expert. Naturally independent and entrepreneurial, Dichter chafed under the working conditions within a large organization like CBS, and in 1946 established his own consulting firm, which he incorporated as the Institute for Research in Mass Motivations in 1952. He was soon commanding fees of $500 a day. He moved his office from New York to a small farm in Montrose in 1953, and about a year later, to a 26-room mansion on a hill top overlooking the river in Croton-on-Hudson about thirty miles north of Manhattan. It 1955, it was restyled the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc., and it was under this title that the Dichter organization was at its most productive. The 1950s were the heyday of the type of motivational research that Dichter practiced. Whether Dichter originated M.R. or was merely its most important and aggressive practitioner is still debated. He clearly benefited from his place in the New York market and from his forceful, charismatic personality. Dichter was capable of using a barrage of controversial, speculative and Freudian assertions (a watered-down Freudianism was everywhere permeating contemporary American culture) and a talent for what would later become known as “thinking outside the box” to command the attention of manufacturers and their advertising agencies. Dichter followed a consistent operating procedure for most of his career. He came to employ a staff of as many as sixty or seventy people, about a third of which were social scientists, along with a pool of as many as 2,000 part-time interviewers scattered around the country who worked with carefully constructed groups of test subjects drawn from the target population. Dichter also maintained a smaller and more permanent pool of 3
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