ABSTRACT
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Ernest Dichter applied psychoanalytic methods to the marketing of cigarettes. He was not afraid to consider and target the unconscious mind. Dichter reasoned that you need to look beneath the surface, and access the unconscious mind, both to cure neurosis and to manipulate the unconscious to sell brands. Smoking is so powerful, he argued, because it simultaneously satisfies unconsciously held infantile desires and yet symbolically sends out a very adult signal. But Dichter also suggested that we have to deal with the essential psychological conflict that smoking gives rise to. You need to manufacture doubt for smokers to allow them to deal with this conflict, so he maintained that it is not smoking that gives you lung cancer (as the scientific evidence was showing); it is the guilt that some people have about smoking that causes cancer. This was part of a widespread and systematic effort by the tobacco firms to generate doubt about the relationship between smoking and cancer. Their goal was ‘to convince the public that there was “no sound scientific basis for the charges,” and that the recent reports [about cigarette tar and cancer] were simply “sensational accusations” made by publicity-seeking scientists.’ The manufacture of doubt was critical to their success - for a number of decades at least.
