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With the exception of Melanie Klein, psychoanalysts have not paid greed the attention that it deserves given its importance in human experience, a neglect that Salman Akhtar seeks to redress in this splendid volume, richer by far than its small size would suggest.
Dante consigned the greedy to the seventh circle of hell. Though it has a more benign use, “greed” is a term of opprobrium; it is, I would guess, one of the first moral concepts we learn: “Don't be greedy,” and “One is enough!” our mothers said. Greed was the other side of the equally early injunction to clean our plates: “Think of the starving Armenians” (the nationality changed with the generation). Greed, starvation, and waste. Greed and limits. Greed and the oral—a “voracious” love of books, a “hunger” for fame, a “craving” for clothes, a “thirst” for knowledge, an “appetite” for cruelty, being “starved” for affection. Greed and matter: food, then, fast on its heels, money, which hedges against starvation, and which can symbolically substitute for loss.
“One is enough.” What is “enough”? Enough for what? Measured how? What determines the limit, or the proper limit, of the object of greed? A defining characteristic is that it knows no limits, it is insatiable. In the background here lurk the ideas of scarcity and need, scarcity and justice: “Don't take more than your fair share!” Possessed by greed, we delude ourselves that want is need.
In the case of literal hunger, the idea of a limit is defined by the vague idea of what is necessary for health. We note, incidentally, that too much food is as bad as too little. Often we do things that are bad for us unintentionally, or inadvertently, and sometimes because what we consciously do means something else unconsciously: food as an appeasement to anxiety, as a replacement for love, or as a compensation.