Brand Neurosis
By Max Jakob Lusensky
How psychoanalytical insights works as the underpinning psychological engine in transforming products to symbols – needs to desires and people to consumers.
In order to make sense of the hypothesis presented in this paper, brands as constructed complexes and its pathological effect on culture, we first need to understand some more about ‘complex theory’ and the psychoanalytical concepts of Carl Gustav Jung. In 1902 when Jung was working in the psychiatric clinic of Zürich University, Burghölzli; he was experimenting with the “word association test”.
Jung wanted to understand how the mind works beyond the barrier of consciousness and in this test he used a list of stimuli words, read to a control person that answered spontaneously with the first word that came to mind. He then noted the patients’ responses, reaction times, type of emotional responses and defensive reactions. What he found was that certain stimulus words triggered particular unconscious emotional reactions that seemed to disturb consciousness; he came to refer to these as ‘complexes’.
Through the word association experiment Jung formed the theory that there are unconscious structures below the threshold of consciousness; that the building blocks of the psyche is constructed of a persons repressed memories, images, fantasies and thoughts, an area he would later refer to as the personal unconscious. “When stimulated, this network of associated material – made out of repressed memories, fantasies, images, thoughts - produces a disturbance in [1]consciousness.”[i] Constellating a complex is like ‘pressing a button’, an autonomous reaction starts, and the person is no longer in conscious control of their actions but caught in the complex. An insight bound to enthuse not only the field of psychology but also that of persuasion.
Later on in his career Jung added that behind every complex is an archetypal image, an innate and primitive core, an organizing pattern that is rooted in a deepest strata of the psyches ‘collective unconscious’; an impersonal field of psyche, that holds the psychic heritage of mankind and where instincts reign. “The archetype and the instinct being two sides of the same coin, the form the instincts assume.”[ii] The archetypes to Jung are not only constellated within the psyche of the individual through the process of projection[iii] but also make themselves presents in the collective, as an underlying “psychic force”. Embedded in a society’s dominant mythologies are underlying irrational forces that influences a culture.
Expanding Jung’s complex theory and its inbound archetypal core outside of the clinical room and into a cultural analysis demands careful consideration of the complexity inherent in all collective change processes. A psychological interpretation needs to be complemented with a hermeneutic approach. Taking into the analysis, the political, historical, social and economical discourse and relating each part of the analysis to the whole in order not to simplify the complexity of the studied phenomena. This said; analytical psychology and complex theory, when used right, can be useful tools in revealing the underlying irrational factors and motivational drivers often embedded in a cultural conflict. It can help add a deeper dimension that often lacks in the dominant rational explanation models of economy, sociology and politics today.
The what, why and how of Branding
Say the word ‘brand’ and many associate to a logotype of some multinational corporation, advertising and conspicuous marketing of consumer goods, something of relative importance in our own lives. The reality is different; brands and the discourse of branding affect all parts and everyone living in a consumer society. The process of ‘branding’ can be seen as the underlying psychological engine that fuels our economy. It functions as the ‘symbol system’ of todays dominating neo-liberal politics and increasingly globalized discourse. Brands are highly relevant when trying to understand cultural issues because they are “mirroring” the collective state of the psyche and often holds veiled information about the zeitgeist of our culture.
Etymologically “brand” derives from “Old Norse”, a Viking language spoken in Scandinavia until the 14th century and where “brandr” meant, “to burn”.[iv] Later in history the word came to identify the process of marking cattle, criminals and/or slaves using a hot iron. Still today branding is about burning but now the cattle are now the consumer and the marks are made psychologically. Brands today are not created in the world of matter but in our minds.
Speaking psychoanalytically, the brand is an ‘imago’, a representative psychological image, the associations, images and phantasies we have of a product, person or experience. But to give credit to those of you who still equal a brand with its logotype, it all started there. Branding has gone through a developmental process in its over a century long service for our economy and can be divided into the three era’s of ‘logos’, ‘eros’ and ‘mythos’.
The brand took it first stumbling steps in the Americas of the mid 19th century; a time when people still defined who they were by what they produced, not consumed. At this time a brand was just as simple as its logotype. The role it played in our economy was that of a signifier of quality, to differentiate a product of that of the competitors and to ‘burn’ the company name onto its products. Products in this era of ‘logos’ had no real identity because consumption was still mainly about needs, not desires.
Brandings adolescent years and the era of ‘eros’ started in the middle of the 1950’s with the shift from a traditional society of producers into the modern era of the consumer. The ‘consumption myth’ that we are still being told today; how supply is being driven by customer demand; that the market produce what the consumers wants, is built on a false premise. Supply outgrew demand somewhere around after the Second World War when an extreme makeover began in turning faceless goods into brands, and a society of producers into consumers.
The word ‘consume’ has its etymological heritage in 15th century French and the word “consumere”, "to use up, eat, waste”. A consumer was someone ”who squanders or wastes” and committed an “act of pillage, looting or plundering” and had overall a quite negative connotation (Example: the old word for tuberculosis was ”consumption”).[v] Economist Victor Lebow explained in a 1955 article the transformation needed: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate".[vi] The success of the emerging consumer society would lie not in its products but how well it moulded consumers with a specific set of psychological attributes.
Advertising in this era of ‘eros’ gradually changed from stressing product features through text-based copywriting to stressing the emotional gratification a purchase would leave you with (three marketing favourites still today: joy, health and security), through the use of imagery and sensory appeal and by stimulating our unconscious often hidden desires. Psychoanalytical theory had taught companies that people are not only rational but also irrational in their actions; often motivated by unconscious desires seeking pleasure and gratification. Desires which, “raison d'être is not to realize its goal or to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself endlessly as desire”.[vii] Companies in this time started investing more money in the design of imagos’ for their products. ‘Role-model identities’ of what people longed for to be, but sometimes lacked in themselves; now available with a price tag on the market.
Since then brands, branding and society moved on into the post-modern paradigm of today. What sociologist Zygmunt Baumann refers to as a globalized, individualized ‘liquid modernity’[viii] of digital communication technologies and with its secular side effects of a gradual deconstruction of communal values, traditions, religious and communal identity. The post-modern identity is seen as being individually constructed in a continuous reflexive and dynamic process with ones environment. Never fixed – always changing. The therapeutic project of self-hood, the search for ‘peak experiences’, becomes a life project for the secularized citizen.
The role for Brands in this new world of ‘mythos’ is no longer to simply infuse desire into goods but rather to construct the narratives, stories, mythologies and lifestyles that people seek in order to control and create meaning in their lives. They become puzzle pieces in the therapeutic puzzle of forming a post-modern identity, a shining persona, a branded self? Through this historical developmental process of ‘logos-eros-mythos’ brands have shifted their role from helping companies to identify their products to assist us as consumers to build our identity. Tightly compressed, this is the what, why and history of branding. We now got what is needed to start the analogy of brands as complexes and demonstrate the hypothesis that this post-modern dimension of ‘mythos’ might not lead to ‘brand utopia’ but rather to a contemporary consumer complex and brand neurosis.
Analysis: Brands as complexes
The argumentation for brands being constructed complexes is built on five observations made in a comparative study of the two fields analytical psychology (its’ ‘complex theory’) and branding. One: brands as well complexes are constructed psychic reality built on personal experiences. Two: their ‘glue’ is that of emotion. Three: they may disturb and override conscious thinking. Four: collectively constellated they can unite people around a common purpose. Five: when powerful; they often connect to an archetypal core. Let’s have a more detailed look at each of these observations.
1. Complexes/brands are constructed psychic reality
While Freuds’ view was that human instinct could be reduced to the sexual drive and the pleasure seeking life force of desire our libido, Jung equalled libido with psychic energy. In his studies of complexes he had seen that there were also other drives (such as hunger, safety, power, spirituality) that motivates human actions. He said that, first libido seeks the mothers body, “but when libido finds a spiritual idea or image it will go there”.[ix] The key insight here that marketers picked up on was that products could be re-constructed into pseudo-symbols that mirror, direct, carry and bind our libido and psychic energy.
Pseudo-symbols that we animate and give life, by imaginative projecting into them, what we unconsciously seek inside ourselves. Brands are carefully constructed symbols aimed to trigger our emotional reaction by offer imaginative solutions to our instinctual drives. Just as a complex they are constructed psychic energy formed out of experiences, not traumatic ones in our childhood, but by our repeated experiences and contact with the brand, through it’s advertising and market communication.
2. The ‘glue’ behind a complex/brand is emotion
The glue behind the images that a stimulated complex activates are often strong repressed emotions. What makes a brand a brand and a complex a complex is the deep emotional connection to the individual. Mainstream brand building practice is a structured process of defining the ‘core identity’ and ‘brand personality’ of a product.[x] Strategically injecting goods with ‘pneuma’, spirit and desire and charging the product with the emotions and association that best reflect the desires of the target group (found out in beforehand focus groups or through consumer research, another psychoanalytical inspiration). The brand personality is thereafter ‘activated’ through package design, advertising, popular culture endorsements and positioned within the cultural discourse of the target group to enhance an emotional identification.
3. Complexes/brands override conscious thinking
Through the ‘word association experiment’ Jung learnt that complexes interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb consciousness. He described it as they disrupt the ego with affect, behave like independent being and influence actions like ‘pushing a button’. The search for the purchase button has since consumer society’s early days of been the holy quest for marketers. Already in 1960 psychoanalyst and motivational researcher Ernest Dichter had understood that “there are contexts in which emotions such as love, hate or jealousy will override consumers' economic decision rules based on deductive reasoning”. [xi] ‘Logos’ equals rational thinking and starts a conscious decision process of thinking – ‘eros’ stimulates or phantasies, stirs up emotions and images that often overrides our reason and leads to action. What would you chose in your role as a marketer?
4. Collectively constellated complexes/brands unite people
According to Jungian analyst Thomas Singer, “Intense collective emotion is the hallmark of an activated cultural complex…cultural complexes structure emotional experience… provide a simplistic certainty about the groups place in the world”.[xii] Since the 1980’s consumer marketing’s have been focused on creating ‘lifestyles’ for consumers, “where goods form the patterns of a life that is styled around brands… patterns that shape our taste, behaviours, action, preferences and beliefs”. Since the middle of the 1990’s and the explosion of Internet the focus has moved increasingly to creating ‘brand communities’ and ‘tribes’ that involves a “shared experience, the same emotion a common passion… a non-geographical community based on a set of structured relations between admirers of a brand… shared consciousness, rituals and traditions and a sense of moral responsibility…being different from other people.” [xiii] Speaking psychoanalytical: the focus in today’s marketing lies on constructing collective cultural consumer complexes that unite people around the brand. Are you an Apple or a PC?
5. Complexes/brands connects to an archetypal core
A brand just as a complex is according to Jung a nucleus with two parts, one emotional part rooted in the personal unconscious and one archetypal part, its primitive core and organizing principle, that resides in the deepest strata of the ‘collective unconsciousness’. Instinctual by nature we can only get access to the archetypes through their images. These are not and cannot be constructed but according to Jung make up the building blocks of human psyche and existence. In the paradigm of ‘mythos’ and as brands take on more human attributes, become personalities and no longer function only to help identify a product but to help consumers to identify themselves; brands turns to the archetypes.
Archetypes not logotypes are today at the core of the brand building process and by consciously and unconsciously coupling with their positive sides the company weave their identity, communication and personality around them. What is hoped for is an instinctual identification on an archetypal level with the consumer by linking to the attributes of the archetype that consumers most likely want to identity with, but perhaps cannot complete or manage in reality.
Three examples that each should be further studied. Sports giant Nike capitalizes on the archetype of the ‘Warrior’ using battle imagery in their overall communication in order to offer the sense of mastery for their customers. Apple.inc links to the archetype of the ‘magician’ and promises symbolic transcendence through technology and empowerment of the individual.[xiv] Starbucks Coffee couple with the archetype of the ‘Great Mother’ when embedding the customer in a multi-sensorial experience connecting to our deep sense of longing and search for community and home. (For a more extensive case study I have to refer to earlier case studies of Apple.inc and Starbucks Coffee, published by The Zurich Laboratory).
Meditation – A constructed unconsciousness?
Does these observations convince us that brands work as complexes? Some would still argue they are not, because they are not inside of us but in the external world; but wait a minute, inside of us is exactly what they are. Brands are constructed consciously in the external world but activated within our individual subjective psyches through the process of projection. Perhaps a better way to put this would be to say that brands are constructed to function as and to activate our complexes. (Keeping in mind that Jung said that a complex does not have to be negative in itself; it is the consequences that often are.)
This meta-discussion of external and internal, object and subject leads to the question of what constitutes psychic reality. Jung in the line of Descartes, Locke and Kant makes a distinction between the living subjective world of psyche and that of the material world of dead matter. A dualistic view of the world with a distinct border that only can be crossed in the subjective process of imaginative projection. James Hillman, founder of the archetypal school of psychology and a follower of Jung claims differently. He argues that the catastrophic world situation of today with natural disasters, famines and hyper-capitalism calls for this duality to be reworked. “For all the while that psychotherapy has succeeded in raising the consciousness of human subjectivity the world in which all subjectivities are set has fallen apart.”[xv] He argues that after psychotherapies initial focus on the individual psyche in the early 20th century it moved on to focus instead on the relationship between people (e.g. object relations, self-psychology); today it has a new role to play in healing the bleeding wound that makes up the split between the object and subject world.
Hillman proposes to pick up where Freud left and to start examining our own culture with a pathological eye. A return to Plato’s ‘Anima Mundi’ and a reality where all life is enchanted, where we see the soul-spark of life in spirit and matter. “Anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is… its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality.”[xvi] Going back to again go forward imagining a world that gives reality to psyche as something that exists within itself, also independently outside of the subject, ‘ensouled’ in the material in our external reality.
Sorry – I am digressing, but it’s worth speculating on how Hillman’s animistic vision of reality in a twisted way is adopted in the branded era of ‘mythos’. We have learnt that branding can be seen as a strategic process of giving life, identity and meaning to a dead commodity. The commercial process of how objects gets transformed into subjects, becomes ‘alive’ with ever more human attributes constructed on the ‘prima materia’ of emotion, complexes and archetypes.
No – I am not saying that branding represents a renaissance of the ‘Anima Mundi’, rather the contrary. Phantasmagoria? Perhaps our cultures one-sided focus on economic growth crave that this deep and often unconscious identification between brand and consumer take place?
We change lens and can now zoom out further; from this new perspective we can see how the didactics of branding unveils something that looks like a new field of consciousness in our external reality. A ‘constructed unconsciousness’, a psychologically colonized “reality” made up of all these intentionally constructed images, myths, complexes and desires. A clouded field of unconscious external reality, unconscious for the majority of us citizens, containing everything we search and dream for re-packaged, designed and sold back to us by the market. A fog seem to settle over our reality that in the name of never ending growth serves our desires and forms something that I liken to a contemporary consumer complex.
The Symptoms
When taking on the endeavour of labelling a collective as neurotic it makes sense to first carefully scrutinize your own underlying motivations and potential neuroses. “I am not in the least neurotic — touch wood!”[xvii], wrote Jung in his last personal correspondence to Freud before they separated mainly due to their differences of views in the origin of neurosis. Where Freud saw infantile unresolved sexual fantasies rooted in early childhood as the cause of a neurosis later in life; Jung sought his answers in the present, not necessarily limited to repressed sexuality, but often based in more existential matters and a lack of living a meaningful life.
He saw neurosis as a symptom of maladjustment, disunity with oneself, a dissociation activated by the complexes but also as an attempt of self-cure and healing of the psyche. Keeping these characteristics in mind let’s look closer at the symptoms of neurosis that our contemporary consumer culture shows.
“Breakdown extends to every component of civic life because civic life is constructed life“[xviii] says Hillman and it seems true that the “constructed unconscious” fantasies moulded by the branding paradigm have played a great part in this development, but it’s now time to get more specific.
As in all analysis we start by examining the symptoms of our patient, carefully one by one, before closing the hermeneutical circle and putting the pieces together into a whole. The most revealing symptoms our contemporary consumer culture shows of neurosis are those of fragmentation, disassociation and cognitive dissonance. The argumentation goes as follows; built into the branding didactic might be dynamics that actively contribute to and belligerently continue feeding the construction of a collective brand neurosis.
Fragmentation
Continual exposure to unresolved complexes causes an individuals ego to slowly dissolve in strength, and leave the neurotic patient with a sense of ‘falling a part’, a fragmented disintegrated state-of-consciousness that instigates anxiety. Branding is as shown a structured process of constructing, mirroring and thereby accentuating complexes in individuals within a collective. Contrary to earlier power techniques branding thrives on differences and heterogeneity. To consume brands means to introduce a difference in ones life – to be different (or as in the case of Apple, to ‘Think Different’).
The ‘liquid identity’ of the post-modern consumer shows many of the attributes assigned to a fragmented psyche. Never fixed, always changing, in a state of in-between being and wanting, caught in a neurotic tension of unsatisfied relentless desires. An uncomfortable state for the individual, but a profitable one for the market. The post-modern psyche wishes at every price to escape this feeling of disintegration, constantly seeking for a sense of identity, belonging, mastery and selfhood. The consequence becomes an endless narcissistic preoccupation with social identity and ‘self’, unconsciously projected in the reflexive meeting with ‘the other’: brands, social media and communication technology. Socially constructing an identity through a narrative of experiences and consumption, building a shining mask of ‘persona’ we form our false branded self.
In the process of globalization as traditional institutions, religions and authorities loose more of their power, the market place takes on this therapeutic role; “brands seems to have taken the symbolical place left empty by the retreat of the divine”. [xix] To escape this fragmentation people anxiously search for a sense of community and belonging. Adapting to a certain lifestyle, building an identity within a brand community, and becoming part of a ‘tribe’ could temporary relieve the tension. Holding hands over national borders, united by our brand complexes and our belief in consumption.
Disassociation
“If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality”, wrote George Orwell in his book ‘1984’. [xx] Disassociation is “an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning”.[xxi] Brands seems to in the last half-century been cautiously constructed to lead our libido astray through a process of stimulating and mirroring our unconscious complexes and instinctual desires. Through selling an image of reality, the products ‘imago’, we were promised an emotional gratification that has not yet been satisfied, other than illusory.
From a cultural and historical perspective branding seems to be a practise that feeds on altering our state of reality, advocating delusion by fantasy images and myths, stirring up desires and stimulating complexes. Fostering a culture of irrationality where the answers to our most precious and intimate needs for love, meaning and identity become projected on their surfaces. Keeping consumers running in the same spot, in the spinning wheel of desire, what Schopenhauer referred to as the “wheel of Ixion”[xxii] – endlessly creating new desires. The effect of this is what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard described as a ‘hyper-reality’, “where the sign, image and symbol becomes more real than reality”.[xxiii]
Cognitive dissonance
Brands are paradoxical by nature. On the one hand they offer a road to paradise, Utopia: “an absent presence, an unreal reality, a kind of nostalgic elsewhere”[xxiv] by promoting the emancipatory values of freedom, self-expression and liberation (eros and mythos, remember?). On the other hand they are practical (logos), if not banal, their offering has to be partly practical, reasonable and easily compared to other products in the same product category in order to generate brand loyalty and repeated purchases. Always promising a better tomorrow and the chance of improvement, but only by taking action now, again and again; as a new improved product always has to replace the now old obsolete one.
This inner contradiction of brands has been likened to what George Orwell defined as a ‘doublethink’ approach. “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in ones mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”[xxv]
This paradoxical nature of brands, the offering of two simultaneously contradictory offerings, seen as a collective phenomenon stimulates what in psychological terms is referred to as ‘cognitive distortions’. Defined as “exaggerated and irrational thoughts”[xxvi] it is a term often used together with ‘cognitive dissonance’, “a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously”[xxvii], in other words: doublethinking.
The theory of cognitive dissonance was originally introduced by social psychologist Leon Festiger in his 1956 classical book ‘When prophecy fails’. [xxviii] The research material of his book was taken from a field study he did with his colleagues, secretly infiltrating an American UFO-cult that had prophesised the end of the world. The reason for choosing the bizarre object of study was that he wanted to try his theory; if cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations of a group or an individual. Festinger and his colleagues saw this as a case that was would much likely cause the arousal of a strong cognitive dissonance when the cults prophesy failed (something that quite naturally also was the result).
Festinger drew the conclusion that individuals have a ‘motivational drive’ to relieve dissonance, an insight the some cognitive oriented schools of therapy today picked up on. Encouraging people to alter their own thoughts and offering techniques of treating symptoms, they see as a disturbance in the individual’s own psyche. It should be quite clear that we, given our theory of brands as constructed complexes with a doublethink approach, take a radically different stand.
We see that the didactics of branding has inbuilt some of the very reasons that seems to stimulate cognitive dissonance in our consumer culture by repeatedly disconfirming expectations and only offering temporary and imaginable gratification to real very pressing needs in our culture. Therefore treatments of such disturbances directed on the individual risk being contra-productive, trying to adapt healthy individuals into a culture that is showing severe signs of neurosis.
Diagnosis: Brand neurosis
It is time for us to close the hermeneutic circle. We have learnt that brands can be likened to complexes; constructed fields of psychic energy and emotion, irrationally overriding consciousness; when archetypally linked uniting people collectively. We have discussed the borders of psychic reality and argued that branding as a historical process might fashion a ‘constructed unconsciousness’. A clouded constructed field of external psychic reality, unconscious for the majority of us as citizens, containing everything we dream and search for re-packaged, designed and sold back to us. Standing on firm soil – having scrutinized our own intentions – we felt confident to present our hypothesis, that built into the branding didactic seems to be dynamics that actively contribute to and aggressively continue feed the construction of a collective consumer complex, a ‘brand neurosis’. An assertive claim we have tried to testify by carefully inspecting the most observable symptoms our contemporary consumer psyche shows, that of fragmentation, disassociation and cognitive dissonance.
At this stage a bit of humbleness would not hurt. What we presented is merely a hypothesis. The symptoms depicted in our analysis are not only due to the process of branding and the influence of brands in our consumer culture. No – these are merely partial explanations of the phenomena. Before a more vigorous theory could be presented further studies would be needed taking into consideration macro-factors from the social, economical and political field combined with more empirical research and data.
Now, the million dollar question is – what can we do about all of this? We agreed earlier that brands does not really exist but in our own minds, that they are psychological constructions. Just as religion and the church lost power when it lost its symbolical significance in peoples lives, brands will lose theirs as more people become conscious of it’s partly illusory undertakings. A part of this work is individual, to separate our own neurosis from that of the collective.
But more importantly, by demystifying – de:branding – lifting the veil and exposing some of brandings techniques and potential destructive didactics we start where all change must begin, by making what is unconsciousness conscious. Today our consumer culture might be trapped in a brand neurosis, but what is worse, is if we leave it untreated and let it metabolize, we might stand face to face with a psychosis. An abnormal condition of the mind and a collective that looses all contact with reality. Is it not our task to use all tools at hands in impeding such a brand psychosis?
For more on the same topic, get your copy of Brandpsycho - Four essay's on debranding.
END NOTES
[i] M. Stein, Map of the soul, 1998, P. 39
[ii] C.G. Jung, Collected works 8, par 415-435
[iii] An automatic process whereby contents of one’s own unconscious are perceived to be in others. For a more detailed explanation see: http://www.nyaap.org/jung-lexicon/p
[iv] Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=brand, Retrieved on 20 Feb 2012
[v] Online Etymology Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=consumer&allowed_in_frame=0, Retrieved on 20 Feb 2012
[vi] V. Lebow, Price competition in 1955, Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955, p. 7
[vii] S. Žižek, 1997: 39.
[viii] Zygmunt Baumann, Liquid Modernity, 2000
[ix] M. Stein, Map of the soul’, 1998, P. 83
[x] D. Aaker, Dimensions of brand personality, Journal of marketing research 34, 1997, P. 347-357
[xi] E. Dichter, Strategy of desire, 1960
[xii] T. Singer, S. Kimbles, The cultural complex: contemporary Jungian perspectives on psyche and society, 2004, P. 6
[xiii] Cova, B and Cova, V Tribal aspects of postmodern consumption: the case of French in-line roller skaters, Journal of consumer behavior 1, 1: 67-76
[xiv] J. Lusensky, Have you bitten the magic Apple? ISAP 2011
[xv] J. Hillman, The thoughts of the heart and the soul of the world, 1981, P.96
[xvi] J. Hillman, The thoughts of the heart and the soul of the world, 1981, P.101
[xvii] A. Valiunas, Psychologys Magician, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/psychologys-magician P. 106-107, Retrieved on 21 Nov 2011
[xviii] J. Hillman, The thoughts of the heart and the soul of the world, 1981, P.96
[xix] B. Heilbrunn, Cultural branding between Utopia and A-topia, Brand Culture, 2006, P.104
[xx] G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, part 1, chapter 3, P. 32
[xxi] P.F Dell, J.A Neil, Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond, 2009, p. xix-xxi
[xxii] A. Schopenhauer, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/, Retrieved on 20 Nov 2011
[xxiii] J. Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, in Media and Cultural Studies, 1994
[xxiv] B. Heilbrunn, Cultural branding between Utopia and A-topia, Brand Culture, 2006 P.106
[xxv] G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, part 1, chapter 3, P. 32
[xxvi] T. Beck. Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, 1975
[xxvii] L. Festinger, A theory of cognitive dissonance, 1957
[xxviii] L. Festinger, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, 1956