Why psychoanalysis now?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We live in a post-Freudian world. The basic tenets of psychoanalytic theory form part of our common sense. Even if we do not visit a clinical psychoanalyst for therapy, we encounter psychoanalytic concepts throughout our everyday lives. A Freudian slip, the unconscious, narcissism, repression, fetishism, projection and displacement are terms defined and developed by Freud, which are still in regular usage. Indeed, it is easy to forget that Freud’s basic idea – that, in addition to the conscious mental material and mental processes we engage in, there are thoughts and ways of thinking that are not available to us but are key in explaining why we do what we do – was ever controversial at all. Marketing scholars will probably be most aware of psychoanalysis through the recent surge of retrospective analyses of Ernest Dichter’s contribution to marketing in the 1950s (such as Fullerton and Stern, 1990; Schwarzkopf and Gries, 2010; Tadajewski, 2006). Such research has illustrated Dichter’s role in the history of interpretative consumer research, explored his methods and exposed his brilliance as a self-publicist. But it may be his application of psychoanalytic theory to markets that remains Dichter’s most influential contribution. Recently Rory Sutherland (2013), former president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, explicitly called for a return to psychological models of the human actor that are informed by psychoanalysis. He noted that many of our most enduring brands and successful advertising campaigns were built on a psychoanalytic model of consumer behaviour promoted by Dichter and others. We hope that this special issue, which we are privileged to present to you, provides a bridge from this past to future paths for psychoanalysis. What of psychoanalysis away from the domain of marketing practice? It is currently encountering something of a renaissance in the academy as it moves back from the humanities into the social and life sciences. Within the neurosciences, for instance, we see the return to Freud’s initial project for a scientific psychoanalysis as means to explain empirical findings that cannot be accounted for by any other theory (Turnball and Solms, 2007). In psychology, it is argued that psychoanalysis offers a necessary alternative explanation to reductive accounts of human behaviour based ultimately on the human genome (Fonagy and Target, 1998). There has been a resurgence of interest too in cognate