Overview

On the one hand, there is the consumer as victim, exploited by the forces of advertising, fashion and the mass market. On the other there is the consumer as rational agent, asserting needs and rights, paying a fair price for a good service. Absolutely incompatible, these contradictory images stand for twentieth-century psychology about the nature and determinants of human choice. Advertising agents draw on psychology to make consumers buy. But consumer culture in turn influences psychology and cultural consciousness. In even the purest' psychological descriptions of what people want the hidden consumer lurks, a fundamental mindset of values, leading towards particular choices in life or love. Shopping with Freud looks at some of the surprising ways in which the consumer subject appears in a range of writings - from literature to marketing to psychology. Rachel Bowlby writes about consumer culture, feminism, psychoanalysis and literature, examining the arguments and assumptions about the values of the consumer culture. Shopping will never be simple again...

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9780415060073

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`A fascinating and seductive book.' - The Guardian

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Rachel Bowlby

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