Publicitatea ca lectură colectivă inconștientă
Publicity as Unconscious Collective Reading

Summary/Abstract: Jungian psychoanalysis draws a parallel between archetype and the concept of “collective representations”, the one through which Lévy-Bruhl designates the symbolical figures that populate the primitives’ world view and which were subsequently reactivated by Serge Moscovici under the name of “social representations”. Another famous psychoanalytical postulate, formulated by Lacan in the 60s according to which “the unconscious is structured like a language” seems to be confirmed by the most recent studies in social psychology. The classical theory accepted by the majority of the cognitivists which stipulated that language processing was achieved only in a conscious state is today dismantled by Ran R. Hassin and the team he coordinates: the processing of simple semantic structures, or even arithmetic ones, can also be achieved in unconscious state. As members of social groups, we possess “an innate matrix alphabet” through which we decode space and time by relating ourselves to the others and to our own self. Due to the evolution of mass media devices, the 20th century and the beginning of the current century contribute to the intensification of an authentic phenomenon of mergence in the collective imaginary: cinematography, fashion, television, politics, music, art, and last but not least, Publicity, as forms of „soft-power”, cease to belong to a certain group, thus almost instantaneously becoming legible at global scale; their intra and inter-semiotic translation makes them adaptable to all cultures, irreversibly shaping the collective mentality. Through persuasion techniques, the advertising strategies impose a daily “unconscious reading” on the consumer, promoting brands to the detriment of products, thus building an imaginary universe around brands as bearers of symbolic values.

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