ABSTRACT
This book has been an exploration of a number of different but ultimately related themes all concerning the ‘conflicted mind’ as it has appeared in research in a number of different domains of social psychology across many decades. It traces the idea in its explicit, or sometimes implicit, form through the work of some of the most influential theorists that have shaped our discipline of social psychology. Some of them are the obvious ‘giants’ of the discipline – Gordon Allport, Leon Festinger, Stanley Milgram, Jamie Pennebaker; some exist in that interdisciplinary space that is harder to label like Gregory Bateson, on the cusp of anthropology, cybernetics and psychology; some have come from outside the discipline proper, like Ernest Dichter, from psychoanalysis through marketing and the commercial domain, but all have left a significant legacy in psychology, both intellectual and, one might say, practical. Dichter’s approach to the conflicted mind, his probing of the unconscious, his techniques to allow people to happily enjoy a habit that could kill them (and at one level they knew this), clearly worked. His ‘practical’ legacy is that we still have to deal with the destructive habits that he created through his functional analysis of smoking and his prototypic clever ads.
