I'd say the opposite: in order for its images to have their intended effect, advertising usually tries to convince people that their desire springs from their intact, authentic self. It sometimes enlists jealousy (though that's seldom the primary technique), but it won't play psychologist and tell people that they're
desiring products because of jealousy. One also finds meta-advertisements where the theme is that the other company is just trying to make you a conformist who
desires what your peers have, but
our company of course lets you
express your authentic self.
The
psychoanalytic and linguistic theories in question--like Lacan's,
which I guess is mainly what Mike may have been thinking of--critique this
integrated identity (and the ideologies surrounding it): not just the false identities proffered by advertisements, but the assumption that personality is a unified thing at all. In place of this identity they find a self that is always constituted partly by the other. At a minimum, they argue that through language and culture we are never separate from social relations. Though
Lacan's theory isn't primarily aimed at advertising or consumer
capitalism, it certainly has been used as a critique of these.
What an "authentic" self or desire would mean in the context of these
theories is a good question. I avoid this particular word, but
if we take any psychological theory like this seriously, it's bound to
raise some kind of question about how best to live or to cultivate
oneself.
I'm not sure that Lacan's "desire of the desire of the other" means a
"desire for what the other desires," though, which is how Mike has interpreted the phrase from the present discussion's title. But he does take jealousy
as one of the first ways that we see that an individual's desire and ego are bound up inextricably with other people. He also distinguishes between what he calls envy, in which the object is of no use to the person, and another jealousy with a different kind of psychological and ethical value.
N.B. Some American journalism during the so-called culture wars attacked
Lacan and other French poststructuralists as if they were nihilists who
denied that there was any meaning (Totroc's "relativism," maybe),
giving rise to a lot of talk about
"free play" of interpretation. If this were true, then of course such a
theory would be very congenial to consumer capitalism. But I would
claim emphatically that it was a willful misreading, and that ethics is
a motivating concern for this psychology.
It occurs to me to add a note about the word 'psychology.' People with degrees in this field might balk at calling Lacan a psychologist, since the methods and goals of contemporary psychology and Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis are not at all the same. I've followed this discussion in adopting a very general use of the word, though, since Mike referred directly (if not by name) to Lacan.
