[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)”
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| 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
