“Towards Systematic Developments of Psychoanalytic Theory in Interpretive Marketing and Consumer Research”*

Call for Papers – Special Issue: “Towards Systematic Developments of Psychoanalytic Theory in Interpretive Marketing and Consumer Research”*

Journal: International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM)
Publisher: Elsevier
Journal metrics: Impact Factor 7.5, CiteScore 13.7
Submission deadline: 30 October 2026

This special issue aims to systematise and deepen the use of psychoanalytic theory within interpretive marketing and consumer research (MCR). It invites work that treats unconscious desire, excess, and the “dark” aspects of consumer experience as central to understanding how consumer culture emerges, persists, and resists attempts at rationalisation or sustainability‑oriented change.

Why this issue matters

• Marketing and consumer culture have a long, often unacknowledged relationship with psychoanalytic ideas, from early motivational research to contemporary branding and advertising. Yet psychoanalysis has remained marginal and fragmented in mainstream MCR.

• The SI responds to recent calls (e.g., Cluley & Desmond, 2015; Cluley, 2018) to move beyond “justifying” psychoanalysis toward systematically developing it as a marketing theory that can account for irrational, compulsive, and transgressive consumption.

• By foregrounding unconscious desire, fantasy, and psychic registers (neurosis, perversion, psychosis), the SI opens space to rethink consumer subjectivity, policy, and ethics beyond dominant “rational‑agent” and “meaning‑making” framings.

Key themes and research directions

The guest editors outline three broad thematic clusters; submissions need not be empirical, but must be theoretically rigorous and grounded in psychoanalytic concepts (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Žižek, etc.).

1. Consumer subjectivity and unconscious desire

• How marketing and brands structure unconscious desire and fantasy in consumer culture.

• Theorising the relation among pleasure, enjoyment (jouissance), and desire in everyday consumption.

• How neurotic, perverted, and psychotic psychic registers underpin habitual, compulsive, or self‑sabotaging consumption patterns.

2. The ‘excessive’ and ‘dark’ in consumption

• How psychoanalytic theory recasts impulsive, self‑destructive, or transgressive consumption (e.g., substance‑fuelled raves, “death‑scrolling”, online social‑violence communities, rolling‑coal, compulsive buying).

• The role of fetishisation, commodified pain, and risk‑driven pleasures (e.g., extreme sports, “edgework”) in sustaining consumer identities and markets.

• Studying enjoyments in online outrage, consumption‑community aggression, and exclusionary practices.

3. Politics, policy, and emancipation

• How market‑mediated ideologies of inequality, gender, race, and class are unconsciously reproduced and enjoyed in consumer culture.

• The role of advocacy, policy, and marketing interventions that go beyond “raising awareness” to address unconscious barriers to more sustainable and equitable consumption.

• Psychoanalytic accounts of consumer resistance, emancipatory movements, and “de‑normalisation” of habitual consumption logics.

Guest editors

• Prof. Joel Hietanen, University of Helsinki, Finland

• Dr. Artti Kellokumpu, University of Helsinki, Finland

• Prof. Carl Rhodes, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Paper development workshop

• Workshop dates: 1–2 April 2026

• Location: Downtown campus, University of Helsinki, Finland

• Interested authors may submit an extended abstract (up to 500 words) by 20 March 2026 to joel.hietanen@helsinki.fi, highlighting how the project connects to the SI’s themes.

• Up to 20 submissions will be invited to present; attendance is optional and does not guarantee acceptance.

Submission details

• Submission platform: IJRM’s Editorial Manager:
  http://www.editorialmanager.com/ijrm

• When submitting, select article type “SI: Psychoanalysis”.

• Submission window: first processing from 8 December 2025; final deadline 30 October 2026.

• Manuscripts must follow the journal’s guide for authors and can include theoretical, empirical, or mixed‑method interpretive work.

This SI is ideal for interpretive marketing, consumer‑culture, and critical marketing scholars who wish to build systematic, psychoanalytically grounded frameworks for understanding the unconscious forces that sustain and sabotage consumer‑culture transformations.

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