Money, love & hate: contradiction and paradox in Psychoanalysis

[According to Freud (1913)] “Money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters- with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocricy (p. 131)” 

Ron English, "Ben Is on the Money"

Money is, Freud (1913) says, to be approached in the consulting room with the same matter- of-factness as sex, for while money has a narcissistic dimension being “in the first instance…a medium for self-preservation and for obtaining power…powerful sexual factors are [also] involved in the value set on it” (p.131). The way analysts address it ought then to serve psychotherapy. By speaking with frankness, Freud says, he furthers the educative project of psychoanalysis; he shows patients that “he himself has cast off false shame on these topics, by voluntarily telling them the price at which he values his time (p.131)” He speaks as a practical man of the word who must consider his material existence by charging for all time leased and regularly collecting his debts (pp.131-132). The arrangement of leasing one’s time, he observes, is “taken as a matter of course for teachers of music or languages in good society (p.126)” He desisted form taking patients without charge or extending courtesy to colleagues’ kin for three reasons. For one thing, free treatment stirs up resistances to, say, the erotic transference in young women and to the paternal transference in young men, who rebel against any “obligation to feel grateful” (p.132). For another, charging a fee preempts countertransferential resentment of patients’ selfishness and exploitativeness. Finally, he found it more respectable and ethically less objectionable to avoid the pretense to philanthropy customary in the medical profession and to acknowledge straightforwardly his interests and needs.

The only classical reference to the matter is Abraham’s (1921) certainly accurate diagnosis of severe anality in people who insist on paying not only analysts’ bills but even the smallest sums by check (p. 378).

Ferenzi (1914) augments this line of reasoning by assigning money a role in development; he argues that the adult attachment to money represents a socially useful reaction formation to repressed anal eroticism.

Fenichel (1938) suggests that anal-erogeneity is made use of, and strengthened, by a social system based on the accumulation of wealth and competitiveness.

The snowballing discussion of money has a history, part of which is cultural. Psychoanalysis’ last taboo fell during a period when a lot of other icons were being broken too, as simultaneously, the class position of professionals was subtly but permanantetly shifting. If the 1960s (the we decade) saw the blossoming of sexual expression and the 1970s (the me decade) of narcissism, then the 1980s (the greed decade) made the admission of the desire for money and the accumulation of wealth at least more common if not more socially acceptable. Helping professionals [though] are supposed to value money only for its ability to serve a modest standard of living. 

Psychoanalysts’ heightened interest in money, not to mention their greed, had, however, more than a decade behind it. It was in fact, a response to, and expression of, a long, slow slide in their socioeconomic fortunes. 

[After the 1960s] the middle class, from which traditionally have come most analysts and analysants, began to shrink, indeed to decline. The decline in middle class fortunes, coincided with a boom in the helping professions, which in turn further reduced professionals’ share of the pies. 

As psychoanalytic pockets slowly emptied, psychoanalytic journals began to fill up with articles on money. Several recent papers teach us a lot about the under recognized countertransferential effects of analysts’ economic dependence on their patients that these parlour times make visible. Yet analysts have been so uncomfortable with their own feelings of need and greed (Aron & Hirsch, 1992) that they have tended to treat money as a psychological problem for patients and merely a practical one for analysts. Indeed analysts’ dystonic relation to their own dependence may constitute the biggest single counter-resistance in regard to money. While not arguing that the uncertainty of earning a living in a capitalist society guaranteed the feeling of risk necessary to the analytic process, I insist that the anxiety money generates cannot be banished from the consulting room. On the contrary it is endemic to the particular sort of work analysts do. 

Analysts [share with others] a class called the “professional-managerial" class that came into being between 1870 and 1920. It entails what is crudely called mental labour but is better characterized as labor that combines intellect and drive with considerable, although, not total, autonomy and self-direction (Ehrenreich, 1989). 

Professional-managerial work is not only a livelihood. It is also a means of power and prestige a shaper of personal identity. Because it involves conceptualizing other people’s work and lives, it confers authority and influence. This kind of work renders the professional-managerial class an elite. But […] it is a highly anxious elite. For one thing, members of this class know that their power, privilege, and authority can make their clients envy, resent and hate them (and, analyst would add, idealise them). For another, they, like their clients, also sometimes suspect, even if secretly, that because they do not produce anything visible or tangible they do not actually do anything real; as such, not only does their work seem worthless, it also cannot match their own or their client’s idealization. Because their only capital so to speak, is as Enhrenreich writes “knowledge and skill, or at least the credentials imputing skill and knowledge”(p.15), their high status is insecurely founded. 

Consequently, members of the professional-managerial class, like anyone in any class but the highest, fear the misfortunes that have overnight sent even middle-income people siding into homelessness and indignity, a fear that Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere (1964) liken to that of a children who imagine being orphaned or beggared as punishment for their unconscious aggression.[…] They fear losing their financial status, their elite position of authority, the work they love and their identity as moral beneficent persons. Rooted in the very work of professionals, then, this anxiety about felt fraudulence and looming loss is actually built into the role of analyst in a class-structured society. 

Like all social institutions, class has powerful unconscious resonance. In the most general sense, class refers to the material aspect of society and the way it divides and joins people along a ladder of economic and political power. By definition class is hierarchical; the relation between classes is determined by the economic and political superiority or inferiority to one another. The hierarchy of privileged organized by class, status distinctions, the unequal amounts of money people have-these trigger not only greed but envy, excite questions of self- esteem, invite oedipal competitions. 

The fault lines of class and other hierarchies show up systematically in transference and countertransference. When money is exchanged in a capitalist economy, both buyer and seller-patient and analyst-come to be like commodities or things to one another because they enter into relation with each other through the mediation of a third thing (money) that, simultaneously separates them. As money wedges them, so it estranges them from themselves, a distancing that creates anxiety in both (Amar, 1956, Marx, 1964, Meszaros, 1975). 

This theft of personal satisfaction you take in work and in your relationship to those with whom you work is alienation, the process by which your labour and its fruit become alien to you because of the very socioeconomic structure that lets them be.  As Masud Khan (1979) writes in the preface to Alienation in Perversions: “In the nineteenth century two persons dictated the destiny of the twentieth century, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Each diagnosed the sickness of the Western Judeo-Christian cultures: Marx in terms of the alienated person in society, Freud the person alienated form himself (p. 9). Elsewhere, Khan (1972) calls psychoanalysis the “inevitable result of a long sociological process of the evolution and alienation of the individual in the west. Freud’s genius, he declares, was to evaluate the situation and give it a new frame in which the alienated could find their symbolic, therapeutic speech and expression (p. 131) 

Extending Khan’s point, I think of psychoanalysis as the perfect therapy for a culture of alienation, for in it you pay a stranger to recover yourself. Paradoxically, psychotherapy that is bought and sold under conditions of alienation generates a “dis-ease” in both the person who pays the stranger and the stranger who is paid and that needs treatment too. Alienation then filters into transference and countertransference and the clinical process, by exploiting it, transcends it in a momentary, utopia and reparative fashion. 

 We sell our services to make our own living. Without money, then, there’s no psychoanalysis at all. But with it comes an unavoidable anxiety [which] creates the tacit prohibition on asking people how many hours they carry on what fees they charge unless you know them really well. The traditional ideology of the professional-managerial class is that they work for love, not money or power. To protect themselves from their anxiety about money and the alienation contextualizing it, psychoanalysts depict their pecuniary practices in ways that are at best confusing. The way analysts talk, behave and feel in relation to money is replete with uneasiness, and uneasiness that is the surface manifestation of a deep, psycho-cultural contradiction that cannot be thought, willed, or wished away, the contradiction between money and love.  

Money and love, the twin engines that make the world go round […] do not go together at all. Worse they negate, undo each other and their contradiction funds alienation. While money may be a matter of commerce, it is like any material object, social practice, or cultural symbols, simultaneously a matter of primitive passion. Freud knows this. He called money devil’s gold, an image he found in European folklore. The devil, say the tales, gives his overs a parting gift of gold, which upon his going, turns to excrement (Freud, 1908). Freud’s psychosexual interpretation of this extravagant and primal metaphor addressed what it means to consοrt with what he called “the repressed instinctual life”. For example, he noted how the image contrasts the most precious and the most worthless substance, money and feces, and considered how this contrast sublimates anal eroticism. The aspect of Freud’s interpretation that awaits elaboration, however,  is the relation between the gift and the act. What needs unraveling is the relation between the devil and lovers so that we may, in turn decipher the relation between money and love as well as the relation between those who exchange both and therefore the place of may in psychoanalysis.

The devil’s gold is a gift, not a payment. It is a gift given after passion is spent. But instead of honoring an encounter that, we must assume, was glorious, as glorious love is , this gift degrades it. Gold given to mark love becomes worse than nothing, degrades desire and lost illusions. Hopelessness. That capacity to make everything less than it is and so to make us doubt what it was we had in mind when we worked so hard to get it-that capacity, says Freud, is what money has. That’s why it’s the devil’s gold. 

Money can create all that we are and desire and, by the same token, destroy it.[…] By reducing everything to a common denominator, it robs everything and every person of individuality and thereby debases what it touches. That is one reason we like to separate it from love […]. Money erases all differences between things, levels all qualities, eliminates all particularity. Money reduces everything to its abstract capacity to be exchanged. 

We come to what happens when that most general of things, money, pays for that most personal of the experiences, the psychoanalytic journey.[…] As analysts we all know how rapidly our narcissism […] leads us to equate the loss of an hour with a bill we’’ have to find some other way to pay; how disjunctive, that is, contradictory , this thought is to the personal relation that we are also about to lose, with the feeling of loss that loos; and how dysphoric the hunch that our patients perceive these feelings. As patients, who of us has not not wondered just which of our analyst’s bills our own treatment services? Our thought that we are replaceable by some other patient with enough money to pay the fate for their own personal journey?  What’s so personal and particular then? 

When love turns to hate, it seems wise to move from Freud to Klein […]. 

The contradiction between money and love threatens to transform love into its seeming opposite; hate in turn threatens to annihilate relatedness altogether and analysts, not unlike infants, feel the paralysis of terror. Money incites hate, if only because there is never enough of it to go around. But according to Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere (1964) in Love, Hate and Reparation this twist of social fate resembles the vicissitudes of dependency that they see as the understructure of society, relatedness and love. […] Not only, she says [Riviere] does dependence become awful when external events deprive us of what we need. Such terror also inheres in love. […] What such loss feels like to the infant is what it unconsciously feels like to the adult: Your world “is out of control; a strike and an earthquake have happened…and this is because” you love and desire. Your “love may bring pain and devastation” to you and to those you love, but you “cannot control or eradicate” either your desire or your hate (p.9). Hate is a condition of love, as love is a condition of life. You must love to live, but loving also means hating.

This then is the paradox of my title, the paradox of love and hate to which Klein and later Winnicott and Guntrip, introduced us. […] The paradox of love and hate comes into being through the primal relationship; these passions take their shape and meaning from their passage through the emotional and structural net of intimacy in which they likewise participate. Love and hate, emerging together, become mutually meaningful in the context ffailure, when babies and mothering persons disappoint each other[…].  

The contradiction between money and love can be resolved only if we transform it into the paradox between love and hate. The devil’s gold turns love to shit only when you cannot love out the hate with the one you love. […]

Money along with its coordinates, space and time, belong conventionally to what has been labeled the analytic frame. […] “When there is a frame it surely serves to indicate that what’s inside the frame has to be interpreted in a different way from what’s outside it…thus the frame marks off an area within which what is perceived had to be taken symbolically, while what is outside the frame is taken literally” (Milner, 1957 p. 158) […] Because money while a constituent of the frame is also in the picture, it can be played with as symbol as well as literally exchanged. Thus, in bourgeois culture, as I have argued, a money relation is thought not to be a love relation. Money appears to negate love, producing hate that sighs contradiction. But the psychoanalytic situation is a case where money permits love, where for a moment, the culture can be upended, where you can love even where you would most expect to hate, where you would not get to love unless money were exchanged, where money in fact guarantees the possibility of love, and where, therefore, the contradiction between money and love, and the hate it generates becomes safe […]

Payment, in other words, grounds the possibility of genuinely new experience in the analysis as well as that of remembering, repeating and working through the past: the old happens with a newcomer who would never without money, have been known and whose job it is to interpret both the old and the new. Reciprocally, the money relation also unveils the countertransference, in the service of whose understanding analysts must be willing to confront, internally and, when indicated, interpretively both the discomforts and the pleasures of money’s powerful place in psychoanalysis.[…]

Psychoanalysis is not revolution, and it doesn’t make the contradiction between money and love go away. But for a brief, utopian moment, it permits transcendence. In the psychoanalytic contact, the contradiction between money and love, a relation between contraries can be transformed, finds a temporary reparative resolution in the paradox between love and hate, a relation between contraries that never changes.  The possibility of transformation distinguishes contradiction from paradox: contradiction bears resolution; paradox does not. Or rather as Ghent ‘91992) said, the only resolution of paradox is paradox itself, here to inhabit, without rushing to relieve, the tension between love and hate , a tension that also preserves the memory of the contradiction between money and love it resolves. 

Dimen M (2012) Money, love and hate: contradiction and paradox in Psychoanalysis. In L. Aron & A. Harris (Eds.) Relational Psychoanalysis, vol.4: Expansion of Theory (pp.1-29). London and New York: Rutledge