No, Sigmund Freud didn’t say: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
I imagine all academic disciplines have inside jokes. In the psychology/psychoanalysis world, the headline quote is often attributed to Freud as a way of connecting his theories about objects with his lifelong addiction to cigar smoking. Clever, but untrue.
But, that’s not to say that the witty line about Freud’s ideas about our attachments to objects are irrelevant. Far from it.
What did Freud have to say about how our favorite things become favorites?
Like everything else in his theory, Freud began his exploration of “object attachment” with human biology. He believed that human life’s fundamental driving force is “energy.”
Hard to argue with that.
Human metabolic systems convert the solar energy stored in plants and animals into the elements that fuel the body’s cells. TL;DR an animal’s body converts elements from the environment (oxygen, fat, carbohydrates and proteins) into energy, and emits byproducts (carbon dioxide, water, and heat), which enable the photosynthesis in plants that ultimately produces many of the elements that animals consume.
Heck of a system!
Now, Freud took that idea of “energy” and extended it to human psychological life. He theorized that the human psyche was comprised of three dynamic components: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. For the last hundred or so years, those three concepts have largely shaped the way Western thinkers have attempted to understand human psychology.
Many of us learned that Freud’s Id is the repository of the primal biological energic drives that we inherited from our animal ancestors; drives that govern survival (aggression) and reproduction (libido). In our animal ancestors, these drives and the behavioral impulses they produced were acted upon in circumstances governed only by power and guile; fight or flight. Freud termed the Id’s operational mechanism for satisfying these drives the “pleasure principle.” Basically: the Id wants what it wants…here and now!
As human animals’ biology and culture evolved, newcomers (i.e., infants) arrived in an environment that forced them to learn a set of external “when/when not” rules about satisfying their primal instincts. Place and time became critical factors in learning the best ways to successfully meet those needs in socially acceptable ways. The infant develops “tests” for shortening the delays getting those needs met that ultimately cohere into a “proto-strategy” for doing so. Think of that strategy as the seeds of an individual’s problem-solving style, their personality. This struggle between pleasure and constraint takes place (unconsciously) in the nascent Ego, whose operational mechanism Freud named “the reality principle”: postpone satisfying those needs until it’s safe enough to do so.
Cultural evolution led to increasingly complex environmental barriers that further governed the “when’s/when not’s” of impulse satisfaction. Children have to learn those rules first from their families, then from their wider communities. This takes time. From about age six through what we currently call adolescence, children learn the subtleties of the restrictions that their cultural environment places on satisfying impulses. They learn these rules (i.e., develop an internal version of the culture’s monitoring devices that we call “conscience”); to maximize successful need satisfaction, master your culture’s “moral principles.”
What does any of this have to do with My Favorite Things?
Freud theorized that we can meet primal needs by connecting with objects in symbolic ways that would simultaneously satisfy all three sets of operating principles. That is, an object could at once satisfy the pleasure principle (feel good), the reality principle (reinforce a strategy, an approach, a self-concept, that reliably leads to successful impulse satisfaction) and the moral principle (stay within acceptable cultural boundaries and reduce the anxiety that arises in the face of potential punishment.) The object that fulfills these principles becomes important. It might become a favorite.
Perfect! Individuals get their needs met, and civilization hums along in functional harmony!
Until it doesn’t.
Turns out some of us aren’t all that eager to play that “when/when not” game when it comes to satisfying impulses. Some of us want to satisfy them NOW and HERE and not have to wait for LATER and ELSEWHERE. But, those damned constraining reality and moral principles can make inopportune “when/when not” decisions pretty “expensive” (think: anything from “go to the principal’s office, now!” to “that’ll be six to twelve months in county jail.”)
So, we learn (sometimes painfully!) to constrain our impulses, often without even realizing we’re governing them. In Freudian terms, we “repress” them. That is, we aren’t consciously aware of the instinct management the Ego and Superego are imposing on the Id; if we were we’d experience a lot more anxiety (think of anxiety as pent-up energy) about the thoughts and impulses we’d experience.
Instead, Freud thought we could take that pent-up energy and invest it in things in the world: like people, objects, or ideas; even body parts. He called this process cathexis. The cathexed person, thing, or idea had now become kind of a symbolic container for the Id’s libidinal energy. The stronger the attachment to the cathexed “container,” the more energy it symbolically holds.
Following this model, our favorite things are those that contain the greatest levels of invested psychic energy. Know anybody who really, Really, REALLY LOVES THEIR CAR!? You know. Washes it and polishes it often, keeps the interior immaculate? Has one of those little rearview mirror pine fragrance doo-dads? A Freudian might say that this car has become an important symbolic outlet for fulfillment of the owner’s primal drives; an extension of the owner’s identity. The car contains a great deal of cathexed energy.
Of course, all of our objects are, to some degree or another, investments of energy; extensions of our identity. That’s especially true in today’s consumer environment, where brands constantly and repeatedly tell us who they are; who and what they are for; and what they mean in modern culture.
Take Apple, for example.
When Apple first appeared in the marketplace, IBM was the leading computer technology brand. IBM had been founded on a brand slogan that stressed its analytic capacity. Its slogan? THINK.
Apple founded a brand that stressed its creative capacity. Its slogan? THINK DIFFERENT.
Individual customers immediately had a choice of which object would best mesh with their strategy for symbolically fulfilling their primal needs, their personality.
Apple went further and sharply differentiated the two competitive brand personalities in an iconic series of ads that proclaimed: I’m A Mac, I’m A PC. The implicit question was: “Which one are you?”
So, while today there are still instances in which “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” more often than not, our objects are doing a lot more “work” for us than simply blowing smoke. Today, branded objects have become allies in our attempts to fulfill modern life’s continually evolving definition of “me” in a culture relentlessly changing at an unprecedented rate.
Knowing which objects are performing which jobs for us is one of the key takeaways from my forthcoming book, The Meaning of Branded Objects, Why Some Things Matter More Than Others, available now for pre-order.
Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.
Header image by Charles Etoroma on Unsplash.
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