ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis was not the only enterprise around the turn of the century to be interested in the answer to Freud’s famous question, “What does a woman want?” Women’s desires and the objects of their investment were of the greatest interest and profit to the respected company Stuart Ewen dubs the “captains of consciousness.”1 His phrase is intended to evoke the transformation of business concerns from production to consumption-from concentration on the manufacture of goods under the management of the nineteenthcentury captains of industry to the manufacture of minds disposed to buy them. The later captains of American industry, Ewen argues, were engaged in a deliberate endeavor to create the needs among potential buyers which would ensure the selling of the increasing quantities and types of commodity which their ever more efficient and productive factories were turning out. The use of distinctive brand names, display techniques and other means of advertising implied new methods of marketing aimed at selling the “image” of a product along with, or as part of, the thing itself.
