Ernest Dichter's fur coat models: Fashioning a therapeutic culture.

Discussions of the rise of therapeutic culture have tended toward the abstract, in part due to a focus on theory. This article looks at the case of Ernest Dichter's motivational research, particularly a study conducted on fur coats in the late 1950s, to locate this broader cultural shift more materially. Motivational research was a broad project of study that aimed to uncover unconscious consumer desires using the tools of psychology and psychoanalysis. This project materialized culture first through the pen‐and‐paper projective test created for the study, which sorted styles of fur into different classifications of womanhood, and second through the fur coats themselves, which were granted by Dichter a psychological agency of their own in their relationship with middle‐class women. Through this study, Dichter observed a shift in Americans' understanding of the self, a movement away from meeting physiological needs to addressing their inner lives; changing economic conditions had granted more income and free time with which to look inward, and Americans wanted consumer goods to aid in such self‐discovery. Dichter suggested that the fur industry capitalize on this change by emphasizing the versatility of fur and the role of objects more generally in fostering creative self‐expression. The advertising office was where theory was put into practice. In that way, it is a uniquely generative though often overlooked space from which to look into the rise of the therapeutic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]