Unconscious for Sale : Advertising Psychoanalysis and the Public

Advertising has increasingly learned to rely on the unconscious, pervasively instilling its agenda and ultimately exploiting us by giving to us for free exactly what we most want: fictions.

In "Unconscious for Sale", psychoanalysts Doris-Louise Haineault and Jean-Yves Roy analyze the processes by which advertising succeeds in soliciting the participation of the buying public by selling itself, not the products it purports to represent.

Advertising, say Haineault and Roy, is a remarkably successful, if remarkably perverse, model for the fundamental operations of the human psyche.

How advertising shapes subjects, and how we respond to certain kinds of advertising, are shown to be calculated economic efforts to stimulate demand and, as a result, consumption. "Unconscious for Sale" is an insightful interpretation of advertisements and commercials that pays special attention to their methods of persuasion.

In its analysis of advertising, "Unconscious for Sale" paints a vivid, disturbing picture of our cultural unconscious.

Doris-Louise Haineault and Jean-Yves Roy are practising psychoanalysts in Montreal, Quebec. Kimball Lockhart has taught in the departments of French and Italian and humanities at the University of Minnesota.

This book is intended for those in communications, literary theory, philosophy.