Psychoanalysis and Money

In a great book “Bears and Bulls”, the author, David Cohen, discusses psychoanalysis and money.

“Sigmund Freud is a crucial figure in trying to understand the psychology of profit. This is not because he was
fascinated by finance but because he kept finding it a block, an issue, a problem in the lives of some patients.

One of Freud’s early patients, Baroness von Lieben, had a ‘hysterical psychosis for the payment of old debts’,
debts incurred over thirty-three years which she often refused to pay. It is also interesting that in German, the
same word – Schuld – means both debt and guilt. She cannot have been incompetent, since she also managed
to stay out of gaol. It took Freud three years to cure her. Freud, who, as we saw in the introduction, had strong
family reasons to fear the love of money, which had landed his beloved Uncle Josef in jail, developed his ideas
about money in The Interpretation of Dreams and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

After the First World War, Germany suffered the most appalling inflation of modem times. Many of the first-
generation analysts were social critics and political reformers. Wilhelm Reich, for a time Freud’s favourite pupil,
joined the Communist Party and has the distinction of having his books burned by both Hitler and the American
government. Reich argued that capitalism was itself a form of mass neurosis. Alfred Adler, Sandor Ferenczi and
Karl Abraham all wrote about the psychological distortions money could cause.

In the 1960s, Erich Fromm wrote a cult book called To Have or To Be; in which he contrasted the immature, who
measured their worth in terms of money and possessions, with better-adjusted human beings who did not feel
that their worth depended on how much they had in the bank. One of Reich’s pupils, Ernest Bergler, developed
personality profiles of what he called ‘the great army of money neurotics’ .

It is striking that one can find no reputable analyst who had much good to say about the money motive. In ‘The
Hidden Faces of Money’ Smiley Blanton, an American therapist who hoped to make his readers learn to
appreciate money, was critically mauled by his peers. His ideas were scorned as ‘the nadir of psychoanalysis’

FREUD’S CRITIQUE OF MONEY AND HIS THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

A clear idea of Freud’s views comes from his writings about the tale of Midas. Midas was granted a wish and
wished that everything he touched would turn into gold. Midas, Freud argued, suffered from a grotesque money
complex. The greedy king’s life took a tragic turn. He found that he could not touch his wives or his children
because they too turned into gold. Obsession with money led to total isolation.

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In his approach, Freud was not just critical of myths. He sniped at Carl Jung, the man who for a long time was
seen as his natural successor, because Jung was too interested in money. Freud thought Jung a typical Swiss
obsessed with money (and Jung thought Freud a typical Jew obsessed with sex). Freud teased and warned Jung,
who had married a very rich wife and was financially secure, against his ‘money complex’.

Around 1909, Jung complained to Freud that he could not afford to hire a promising young man as his assistant
because it would cost too much. Instead the young man was sent to work as an assistant at a hospital near
Montreux. He was bitterly disappointed because he wanted to study with Jung. Freud told Jung that he was
letting his money complex get the better of him and, as he was financially secure, he really ought to employ the
man if he wanted to.

Jung probably knew nothing about the fate of Freud’s Uncle Josef and for some years, Jung felt defensive. He
explained to Freud that he was always conscious of money because it was a way of compensating for the fact
that he felt so inferior when he compared himself to Freud – a wily reply, of course, because it seemed to flatter
Freud enormously.

Acquiring money, Freud noted, was essentially an aggressive act because the rich have power over the poor.
Freud was familiar with Marx, who complained that money changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate and
virtue into vice. But while Freud admired Marx, Freud said that communism made impossible psychological
demands. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud mocked the idea that money could be abolished or that a society
could develop in which there was no private property. ‘I am able to see that the psychological premises on
which the system is based are an untenable illusion.’

The illusion was untenable, Freud believed, partly because responses to money and property stem from the
most basic experiences of the human baby – sucking and shitting. (To financial analysts, the following may
seem bizarre and, even possibly, distasteful. If you so react, remember that Viennese doctors threatened to
report Freud to the police because of his shocking ideas. Those doctors did not, however, become key influences
of the thinking of the twentieth century.)

Freud developed a complicated and influential theory of psychosexual development. He argues that infants go
through oral, anal and genital phases between birth and the start of the latency period when they are about
seven years old. The phases are each named after the orifice which then gives the child the most pleasure.

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The baby’s first pleasure is sucking. He or she grabs for the breast. The breast provides food, comfort and
delight. Sucking is wonderful; the baby can never get enough of it. Some babies get fixated at this oral stage
but, normally, one-year-olds start to move on. They stop being quite so obsessed with their mouths, the breast
and the bottle, and start being obsessed with excretion. Society reinforces the obsession by telling us that
babies have to be toilet trained – that is almost their first job. Freud argues that pee and shit are the first
objects the baby produces.

Freud argues that certain infants find toilet training harder than others and that this might be due to biological
differences. Babies who find it difficult to learn to control their bowels invest anything anal with great
importance. They linger on the pot. When they are three or four, they often still wet or soil their beds. Faeces
have a real fascination for them. Some play with their faeces and smear them over toys and furniture. Their
faeces are them. Such children, Freud claims, have a high degree of anal eroticism.

Parents and nannies are often irritated by this, and pester and threaten their charges. Good children are clean.
Bad children are dirty. Often children hold out against the wishes of parents for a long time. I remember once
when my eldest son was four going) to visit friends. Their four-and-a-half-year-old was still put in nappies at
night. They were embarrassed by what they saw as his failure but they had tried everything. My son Nicholas
laughed at his friend when his parents put on the nightly nappy. Being made fun of apparently cured Nicholas’s
friend once and for all: he never needed a nappy again.

By the time they are six, most anal children know they are somehow in the wrong. Some become disgusted with
themselves. Freud argues that they fear the loss of control that not being toilet trained represents. They now
become ashamed and frightened of their dirtiness.

Sublimation and reaction formation are key concepts in psychoanalysis. These dirty children compensate for
their dirty selves by becoming obsessed with cleanliness. The best way to be clean is not to produce dirt. If they
do not shit, they cannot be dirty. Freud argues that these anal children now become anal retentives. They
become constipated and cannot ‘let go’. Some develop obsessive compulsive rituals such as constant handwash-
ing because they feel so unclean. They wash all the time because nothing can wash away the basic dirt.

This may all seem utterly remote from life in the City or on Wall Street. (I will not comment on the fact that a
famous ad for Allied Dunbar was set in a company toilet.) In fact, Freud found evidence from a surprising source

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that linked money and shit. He was fascinated by anthropology and well versed in fables, the Bible and other
myths. He notes that there is an extraordinary tendency for money to be equated with faeces. Gold has been
called the devil’s excrement; in some cultures shells which are used as items of value are called’ shit of the
sea’.

But the most powerful evidence psychoanalysts have to offer comes from looking at slang and ordinary
language. Freud observes that officials of the German Federal bank went by the name of Ducatscheisser which
means, literally, shitters of ducats. These ideas are supported by E. Bornemann, who found hundreds of
examples of German and English expressions that confirmed this link between money and defecation.18 In
German, the anus is referred to as a gold mine and the toilet is called the gold mill, the bank or even the stock
exchange. A chamber pot is called a piggy bank. In German slang toilet paper is referred to as securities, a
treasury bill or an invoice. Going to the toilet is called doing big business. Newcomers to the London Stock
Market in the nineteenth century were called ‘shit breeches’. A more respectable term was to call them ‘blue
buttons’. It may be that the newcomer undid his blue buttons to get out of his breeches … In his Dictionary of
Slang Eric Partridge points out that in Victorian times someone who cleaned out toilets was called a ‘goldfinder’.

Bornemann argues that some almost normal respectable uses reflect this unconscious connection. In German, if
you are in financial difficulties you are called constipated; your creditors are not satisfied. In modem English, we
call someone who is mean tight-arsed and, if your cash-flow crisis is suddenly and miraculously cured, you are
suddenly liquid again. Bornemann argues that rich men wallow in gold just as children wallow in dirt.

Observations of children and clinical accounts of patients point the same way. The Hungarian analyst Sandor
Ferenczi suggests there is a clear line of development which links faeces and money. He argues that infants
often play with their own faeces in the pot. Toddlers like to play with dirt or with mud. In kindergarten, they
learn that playing with mud or in the mud is not allowed so they start to play with that acceptable mud
substitute, sand. Many child psychologists argue that when toddlers play with sand they are sublimating playing
with shit. Ferenczi claimed that the next stage up from sand is playing with pebbles and stones. In primitive
societies, stones are often marks of value. So Ferenczi shows a nice ladder from faeces to mud to sand to
stones. And the child who plays with stones becomes the adult who plays with coins. There is an almost surreal,
but poetic, logic to this.

In outline, then, this psychoanalytic theory is simple. Children with a high level of anal eroticism find it hard to
be toilet trained. They react against their childlish love of dirt and shit by becoming anally retentive. Later, they

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transfer the obsession and fixate not on hoarding faeces but on hoarding money. Just as they found it hard and
painful to shit, they now find it hard and painful to spend money. Both involve letting go. (I look forward to the
bank and building society advertising campaign which capitalizes on the saving-constipation connection.)

Freud’s adult patients reported dreams and experiences which confirmed the link – at least to Freud’s
satisfaction. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites a woman patient who dreamed she had found buried
treasure inside a rustic little shed which was much like an outdoor toilet. The same woman reported a dream in
which she wiped her little girl’s bum.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud tells a number of anecdotes in which patients who were
ambivalent about therapy somehow managed never to pay their analysts’ bills. Women patients were the worst.
After an hour on the couch, they would rise and seem to have left their purses behind. But this was not just
meanness, it was psychopathology. The women would have spent their session discussing intimate sexual
details. That was bad enough but to have to pay for the privilege was too much. Some talked of prostituting
themselves for the analyst. But prostitutes usually got laid and paid. Here they were being asked to pay for
talking dirty.

In another link between money and sex, Freud describes an old man who had just married a young bride. When
they reached the honeymoon hotel, the man had lost his wallet. If he had no money, they could not have a
bedroom and if they did not have a bedroom, the man need not risk finding out whether he could satisfy his
nubile young wife. The story had a sad end. The old man cabled Vienna for money. The hotel let them stay but
the old man did not get an erection. But all the stress gave him an excuse. He would have been able to get it up
if only he had had his wallet from the start.

Debt plays an interesting part in one of Freud’s most famous cases, that of the Wolf Man. The Wolf Man suffered
recurring fantasies that his anus was being gnawed by rats. Freud discovered that the Wolf Man’s father had
lost money at cards while a noncommissioned officer. A friend had lent him the money. Later the father became
well off by marrying a rich woman and tried to find the friend to repay the debt. The Wolf Man did not know if his
father ever found his benefactor. The Wolf Man became very concerned about this when he fell in debt to a
lieutenant.

At a crucial moment, the Wolf Man told Freud a dream in which he saw Freud’s daughter with two patches of
dung where her eyes should have been. The dream, Freud suggests, posed a key question. Should the Wolf Man

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remain faithful to the woman he loved despite her poverty or should he marry for money as his father had
done?

Analysts often had slightly too direct proof of the money-faeces link. Bornemann describes a number of patients
who farted loudly while they were on the couch, making the analyst pay through the nose for treating them.

Sandor Ferenczi discusses one patient who had an obsession with coins and from time to time swallowed them.
He would then retrieve the coin from his stools, polish it and announce that there was no better way of getting a
shine on a coin than to have them pass through your stomach and out again. Ferenczi also notes that he had
learned from his patients that many rich people are extremely’ economical in changing their under garments’ .

Freud’s pupil, Karl Abraham, discusses one case where a patient had a rich father. Papa trained his children not
to go to the toilet for as long as they could so that they could squeeze the last ounce of nourishment out of their

food. Food cost money. It was one’s duty to get the most out of your investment.”

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