Consuming Desire: What did Freud do for us? (Forthcoming 2008)
The paradigm of rational choice continues to maintain its powerful and deadly grip on the general area of research into management processes and specifically within consumer research. This book seeks to go beyond the economic concept of need to explore the more nebulous, troubling, insightful and relevant concept of desire. At this point one might assert, where better to start than Freud? To begin with the temptation was to try to avoid Freud, or perhaps to sidestep his theory, by devoting one chapter to his work. However the more I read into the extraordinary range and scope of his work and learned of the insights that informed his changing views,the more it became obvious that the book had to centre on his work. I realized that Freud has been hard done by, particularly in the consumer research literature. This book is not an attempt to rehabilatate Freud, becuase to assert that would be to believe that his ideas had ever actually inhabited the corpus of knowledge that stands for consumer research. On a good day this is a bricolage, on a bad day a hodgepodge, of ideas stemming from Ernest Dichter and others, where the effect has been to reify and trivialise Freud's work, prior to dismissing it out of hand.
Regardless of the insights to be achieved there are formidable obstacles in writing a book that focuses on the Freudian legacy on desire. One has had to be selective in addressing the canon of Freud's work, which spans a number of decades. There is the added difficulty that he re-formulated his concepts over time and the even more daunting challenge of relating the ideas of the post-Freudians to Freud and in developing their own explanations of desire in relation to consumption. This has forced me to make a number of decisions. Each of the early chapters focuses on one or at most, two, of Freud's main works and attempts to preserve the chronological process in which these were written. Thus the topics range from dreams, to sexuality, mastery, narcissism, and death.
The aim in discussing each chapter is to discuss the relevance of Freud's explanation in terms of explaining desire and consumption today. These chapters are also used as jumping off points for the discussion of those who have developed Freud's theories. For example the chapter on narcissism contains sections that describe how Freud's theory was subsequently elaborated on by Melanie Klien and by Jacquest Lacan and includes a comparison of their ideas.
Although the book may be regarded as being challenging to some, it is aimed at a "naive" reader; in my view that person whom, although they have never encountered Freud or his interpreters before, is willing to cast all doubts aside and to give the text a go. Care is taken to include examples and case studies in order to illustrate the points that are made.
Finally, although this book aims to be as faithful as possible to the ideas of Freud and the neo-Freudians, in order to respect their position, it is not written in a spirit of slavish adulation. Rather the aim is to critically enquire into whether these ideas, which are more than a century old, have relevance today in elaborating on ourunderstanding of desire in consumption.