ABSTRACT
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the choiceless population engineered by the wonders or horrors of an almost flawless technology of test-tube reproduction is conditioned into an automatic reverence for a being who has two names: ‘Our Ford-or Our Freud, as for some inscrutable reason he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters.’1 By the 1930s, it is feasible to imagine a partnership to the point of identification between on the one hand a psychology typified by psychoanalysis and on the other the mass production and consumption suggested by the car; and the association is appropriately encapsulated by one of the verbal techniques of modern publicity, the sloganizing style of a near-homonym. The Ford-Freud doubling suggests that consumption and psychology together made or will make the late-modern world: that for all practical purposes (and there are no others) they are one.
