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The nature of money is mysterious, most of all for children, but also for adults. We see it as familiar stuff we can touch and use, and then suddenly, on October 19, 1987, a trillion dollars of our collective holdings went up in smoke.
Freud said that in the joke there was truth, and a contemporary joke reflects one current linguistic equivalent of money. The joke opens on the day, after many prayers, that the Lord answered Frank Purdue, the famous chicken entrepreneur. “Yes?” spake the Lord. Frank Purdue said, “Lord, I'll give $100 million dollars to charity if you'll change your prayer to ‘Give us this day our daily chicken.' But the Lord spake to him no more. The next day from His throne the Lord addressed the company of heaven. The Lord said, “My children, it is time to reconsider our Wonder Bread account.”
In the joke even the Lord is willing to consider the equivalence of money and two kinds of foodstuff, bread and chicken. What money means in terms relevant to the body has intrigued psychoanalysts since Freud, who saw money as symbolic feces and not as bread, as it is sometimes called by recent “hip” generations who have reserved the honorific slang term of “shit” for their drugs. Ferenczi, in his psychoanalytic classic on the ontogenesis (development in the individual) of the interest in money, traced a phylogenetic or evolutionary sequence of renunciations in childhood play. By a series of transformations, the anal-cloacal erotism of feces loved by the infant as a body product becomes a preoccupation with deodorized street mud, then with dehydrated sand, then with decolorized, hardened, smooth stones, buttons, and coins, which are finally the equivalent of deodorized, dehydrated, decolorized feces made to shine. This is to speak of money in a category of shiny possessable objects that would be of equal interest to simian species, although Ferenczi did not say this. The fact that money is dirty has been established by medical investigators Abrams and Waterman