It is right to pause here to acknowledge that the psychological premises of these and other advertisements may owe something to Sigmund Freud, who was coincidentally at the height of his productivity and whose books, especially The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, were widely available in translation. Indeed, it is often argued that Freud's elucidation of the unconscious must have driven the new techniques of advertising over the 1910s and 1920s. This is a central contention, for instance, of the 2002 documentary series The Century of the Self, which gives great credit to Freud's nephew Edward Bernays of the Creel Committee for introducing appeals to the unconscious mind to product marketing.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 196