Adventures in the Orgasmatron (66 page)

Dichter, who went on to study psychology at the University of Vienna under Charlotte and Karl Bühler, was trained as an analyst by an American studying in Vienna who treated him in return for German classes. He came to New York the year before Reich did, with only a hundred dollars to his name, and found an apartment in the Bronx, then known as the Fourth Reich because it was so full of European immigrants. His first job was as a market researcher. Unimpressed with the discipline’s bland empiricism, the thirty-one-year-old Dichter wrote to six corporate giants to try to interest them in a psychoanalytic approach to marketing. “I am a young psychologist from Vienna,” he wrote by way of introduction, “and I have some interesting new ideas which can help you be more successful, effective, sell more and communicate better with your potential clients.”
⁹
Four companies were intrigued enough to respond, and there followed a flurry of work that firmly established his reputation in America and made him the leading practitioner in the new field of “motivational research.”

Dichter went to work for
Esquire
magazine, where he used psychoanalytic methods to discover the perhaps obvious fact that subscribers were attracted to the publication because of the nude pictures (he told the company not to be embarrassed about this but to stress to potential advertisers that readers lingered longer on the page, and with wider eyes); he conducted a study for Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Soap that laid bare that there was an erotic element to bathing, and that a bath was seen as a purification ritual whereby one washed one’s troubles away. The resulting jingle was “Be Smart and Get a Fresh Start with Ivory Soap.” He helped Chrysler market Plymouth cars, discovering that women most often made the decisions about which car a family bought and that, while convertibles sucked men into the salesroom, they were seldom sold—men associated them with the fantasy of having a mistress but settled for a wifely sedan.

Only eighteen months after arriving in the United States, Dichter’s clever analyses of the sexual appeal of commodities earned him a write-up in
Time
, where he was described as “a small, neat, emphatic man who speaks almost perfect English.”
¹⁰
Dichter claimed to be “the first to apply to advertising the really scientific psychology.” Advertising agencies, Dichter liked to say, were “advanced laboratories in psychology.” Consumers were docile and malleable, Dichter thought, and ads should try to bypass their rational minds and appeal to the softer ground of their unconscious: “Dr. Dichter scoffs at advertising that tries to reason with potential customers, to scare them or lecture them on their shortcomings,”
Time
explained. “He believes in tapping hidden desires and urges.” Chrysler was just about to launch its “Dichterized advertisements,” which, the magazine concluded, would do just that. “Probable motif: the subconscious lure of the open road, the deep passion to master a machine.”

In 1947 Dichter published
The Psychology of Everyday Living
(a play on Freud’s
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
), in which he introduced his ingenious psychoanalytic findings about soap, cars, appliances, and cigarettes to a wide public. The book was designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans “accept the morality of the good life.”
¹¹
Dichter thought that the country’s traditional puritanical values were desperately out of sync with capitalist ideology. He wanted to encourage people to shed their guilty feelings about self-indulgent pleasures and find erotic satisfaction in the buying of things.

Dichter was, in his way, also an idealist. He embraced consumer culture wholeheartedly as a bulwark against fascism and the best weapon against communism. Like many European exiles, he felt that the totalitarian threat was simmering beneath the surface of American life. Dichter saw the motivational researcher as a psychoanalyst-at-large whose job was to safeguard democracy by assuaging the fears of an anxious society; he turned consumption into a kind of therapy. Whereas thinkers such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills saw mass affluence as leading to an epidemic of alienation, Dichter interpreted it as the very thing that kept democracy and the economy on the march. “If we were to rely exclusively on the fulfillment of our immediate and necessary needs, our economy would literally collapse overnight,” Dichter said.
¹²
Citizens bought into the American dream with their every purchase.

Like Reich, Perls, and other American interpreters of Freud, Dichter introduced a permissive version of psychoanalysis to America, one that identified sex with liberation. But Dichter was a Freudian ambassador to an entirely different sector of society—big business; he worked separately but to striking overall cultural effect. From a diametrically opposite position as that of Reich, Perls, et al., Dichter spoke the language of the counterculture: he called for hedonism, pleasure, and self-expression, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. He promised to help members of an emerging generation that spurned convention and puritanism (but not materialism) discover their individuality and sense of inner satisfaction through owning objects.

As America entered the 1950s, the decade of commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism. “Hedonism,” Dichter argued, “as defended by the old Greeks, has to be brought to the surface again. We have to learn to forget the guilt of original sin.”
¹³
Dichter maintained that Americans had to shed their outmoded concept of morality if they were to discover their freedom in commodity culture without the destructive guilt that might lead to fascism or communism. “We are fighting a sham battle with rockets and hydrogen bombs,” Dichter wrote, “while underneath the real struggle, the silent war, is for the possession of men’s minds.”
¹⁴

Meanwhile, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse was framing the belief that the booming, automated, and advanced economy of 1950s America might bring about an altogether different political structure. Capitalism, he wrote, had only resulted in “concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs,” and he maintained that, perhaps for the first time, the great postindustrial riches that were being enjoyed in America made the realization of a leftist alternative a possibility.
¹⁵
In
Eros and Civilization
(1955), he proposed an influential vision of a sexual utopia that was informed by Reich’s sex-pol vision.

Marcuse was perhaps the most radical member of the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory associated with the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main, relocated to Columbia University in 1934. The Frankfurt School’s other prominent members were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm. In 1932 Reich, then at the height of his Freudo-Marxism, had published an article in the first issue of the Institute of Social Research’s journal, and its members followed his lead in grafting together psychoanalysis and Marxism, and acknowledged this debt. But during the Second World War, Adorno and Horkheimer embraced Freud’s theory of the death drive in order to help explain current events, which Reich had never done, and emphasized Freud’s political pessimism as a result—Erich Fromm, for example, dismissed the revolutionary Freud as a myth.

In 1934, Marcuse emigrated to the United States. During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a unit of the American government’s espionage and covert operations and the forerunner of the CIA. There he developed the ideas Reich had outlined in
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
and applied them to government policy, identifying anti-Nazi groups within Germany and working on ways in which the Americans could disseminate propaganda that would turn Hitler’s people against him. (“Marcuse,” argued the historian Paul Robinson, “was in substantial agreement with Reich…Even in the 1930s Marcuse considered bodily repression, and in particular sexual repression, one of the most important attributes of the exploitative social order.”)
¹⁶
When the OSS was disbanded in 1945, Marcuse moved to the State Department, where he compiled a 532-page report titled “The Potentials of World Communism.” The historian H. Stuart Hughes, who claims to have received the equivalent of a second university education when he worked for the OSS under Marcuse, wrote, “It has seemed deliciously incongruous that at the end of the 1940s, with an official purge of real or suspected leftists in full swing, the State Department’s leading authority on Central Europe should have been a revolutionary socialist who hated the Cold War and all its works.”
¹⁷
Marcuse resigned in 1951, disenchanted with the virulent anticommunism of the McCarthy period, and returned to academia.

While teaching at Harvard University, Marcuse, then fifty-seven, published
Eros and Civilization
(1955), which took up where Reich left off in trying to fuse Freud and Marx—though, in a concession to the climate of more general political despair that permeated the mid-fifties, Marx isn’t mentioned by name anywhere in the book.
Eros and Civilization
points the way to the possibility of a utopian society free from sexual repression. If
Civilization and Its Discontents
, which stated that sexual repression was an eternal and indispensable part of culture, was Freud’s answer to the threat posed by Reich’s youthful radicalism, Marcuse’s book, whose title makes a glancing reference to Freud’s, was an ingenious attempt to twist Freud’s reactionary pessimism so that the revolutionary, liberationist Freud once again came to the fore.

Marcuse followed Paul Goodman in ripping into the neo-Freudians, including the Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, whom he accused of practicing a therapy based on the claim that true happiness was available in this society, which promoted conformism (Fromm would retaliate by calling Marcuse a nihilist). Like Goodman, Marcuse singled out Reich as the most significant figure of the left-wing Freudians, and he paid tribute to him as an intellectual predecessor. But he chided Reich for ignoring Freud’s idea of the death drive and the inevitability of repression. Marcuse also felt that Reich’s dogmatic insistence on the orgasm as a panacea for all social malaise marred his significant insights with “a sweeping primitivism” that foreshadowed “the wild and fantastic hobbies of his later years.”
¹⁸

Marcuse thought that some degree of repression was necessary if a society was to function, something Reich never seemed to fully accept, but Marcuse felt that capitalism demanded excessive libido sacrifices by its subjects. He distinguished between “basic repression,” required for any civilization, and “surplus repression” (alluding to Marx’s notion of “surplus value”), which he felt was historically contingent and a tax often way above the necessary requirements of civilization. A capitalist sex economy, Marcuse argued, employed surplus repression to concentrate the libido in the genitals, so as to leave the rest of the body free for exploitation as an instrument of labor. Marcuse believed that Reich, in idealizing the “genital character,” merely reinforced this “tyranny of the genital.” Like Fritz Perls, Marcuse looked to the perversions—which Freud defined as “the persistence into adult life of id impulses that have escaped repression”—to short-circuit Freud’s somber pessimism. “The perversions,” Marcuse argued, “express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order.”
¹⁹

Marcuse proposed a resexualization of the whole body. A liberated body, he hoped, would be a nonaggressive but disruptive force for social change, leading to a utopia founded on the “polymorphous perversity” of the child, for whom Freud thought the entire body was capable of erotic sensation. (Norman O. Brown, Marcuse’s colleague at OSS, proposed a similar vision in
Life Against Death
[1959].) In this new society, Marcuse envisaged work not as alienating but as in itself a form of sexual play.

Ironically, though he proposed a polymorphously perverse version of Reich’s “work democracy,” Marcuse was himself almost the opposite of a hedonist. “In terms of his sexual relationships, everything was very covert, very traditional,” said his stepson Osha Neumann, “Insofar as [he had] a carnal, genital, sexual drive, it was concealed.”
²⁰
After his wife died of cancer, Marcuse began an affair with the wife of his best friend, Franz Neumann, who had worked with him at the OSS. When Franz Neumann died in a car crash in 1954, the two married and, despite his brief affair with a graduate student, remained happily so. Osha Neumann remembered Marcuse’s telling him approvingly about how Thomas Mann used to wake up each morning, get dressed in a jacket and tie, and then write about characters consumed by passion, powers that Marcuse, too, seemed able to sublimate.