Beyond the couch: Psychoanalytic consumer character readings into narcissism and denial

The contribution of psychoanalysis to marketing theory does not need to come from putting consumers on the couch. We show how psychoanalysis and marketing can be approached as character analysis using fiction, literature and popular culture through a psychoanalytic informed character reading of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s(1950 [1926]) The Great Gatsby and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s(1968 [1949]) Death of a Salesman. We examine the consumption desires and practices of these key protagonists to show how the psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and denial can be applied to explain their predicament. Our analysis emphasizes temporality, describing psychic time, its functioning with the ego-ideal and how consumption is implicated. We conclude that the seemingly distant domains of psychoanalysis, marketing and literature fiction offer an interesting synthesis that is able to provide insights for consumer theory, the contemporary consumer and the historical account of consumers of the past.