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CHAPTER 1: CAPITALISM: GOOD CAPITALISM
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Freud speculated that this hostility to money had only increased since the Industrial
Revolution and the birth of a consumer society. The more the ŀnancial motive had
become prevalent in the world at large, the more the guardians of the spiritual side of
existence had retreated into a defensive position. They expected themselves – and
were expected by others – to keep at bay from the commercial arena in order to
vouchsafe their ‘purity’. The myth of the poor yet great artist was the particular hang-
up of the modern era – contrary to the evidence of previous centuries that had not
begrudged Leonardo da Vinci for his aggressive demands for payment or Titian for
amassing a fortune as large as that of a successful Venetian merchant.
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04/10/2017 Money and ‘Higher Things’ | The Book of Life
Freud cast his characteristically suspicious eye over our ŀnancial taboos, remarking,
‘Money will be treated by cultured people in the same manner as sexual matters, with
the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy.’ As a Jew, he couldn’t forget the
viciousness with which Christianity had traditionally ascribed an interest in money to
his own religion, projecting troubling desires onto a convenient scapegoat.
Freud sought an evolution in our ŀnancial attitudes. At a practical level, he wanted his
new profession – psychoanalysis – to enjoy respectability as a healing activity and at
the same time, wished for it to acquire an economic strength that would give it the
means to alter society on a large scale. He didn’t want psychoanalysis to remain a
hobby for diletantes. He sought for it to become one of the most important industries
of the 20th century (he was a notable admirer of the entrepreneurial spirit of Henry
Ford). He was therefore deliberately straightforward in requesting money from
clients, no less so than a lawyer or a hotelier – to the extent that if a client didn’t show
up, he had no compunction about pressing them to pay for the session nevertheless:
‘A certain hour of my available working day is appointed to each patient; it is his, and
he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it.’
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04/10/2017 Money and ‘Higher Things’ | The Book of Life
At the level of the unconscious, Freud saw parallels between our troubles around
money and around sex. Just as the sexual neurotic was, for Freud, someone who could
not accept the essential legitimacy of their own impulses, and hence disowned or
repressed them at great psychic cost to themselves, so the ŀnancial neurotic felt
compelled to degrade money while idealising the non-commercial realm, thereby
depriving the latter of strength and power. In both cases, health involved integration
and reconciliation: a robust acceptance that one might be sexual and civilised, or
ŀnancially-concerned and spiritually sophisticated. The mature person would not
insist that someone who oĽered them a service related to their higher needs had to do
so with blithe disregard to everything material – as their parent had appeared
(through infant eyes) to do in their earliest years. The ŀnancially evolved person could
accept in a sanguine spirit that the analyst might combine a capacity to care for them
with a due regard for their own interest. There was a madonna-whore dichotomy to be
overcome around money as well as around sex. The most valuable things could be
traded without being sullied.
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04/10/2017 Money and ‘Higher Things’ | The Book of Life
Freud did not succeed. Psychoanalysis remains a cottage industry. Most of its
practitioners, and many of its clients, continue to feel awkward around the
commercial aspects of the ŀeld. The nail-bar business generates, in the United States,
some ŀńy times more proŀt every year than psychoanalysis. But we can thank Freud
for putting his ŀnger on an unnecessary hang-up which matters because, stretching
across society, it diminishes the ambitions that are brought to commerce while
weakening the worldliness and competence of those committed to psychological
Ńourishing. As Freud understood, societal and individual health depends on the
development of a sanguine faith that what is most spiritually signiŀcant for us can
also, at no catastrophic cost, be subject to the disciplines and animal spirits of the
business world.
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