Money is significant in many relationships, including that of psychotherapy. Yet within analytic writing it is often neglected. The early writings of Freud and Ferenczi are somewhat limited in identifying its potential importance, compared perhaps with Winnicott's exploration of its transactional significance within an object relations framework. Perhaps surprisingly, the early philosophical writings of Karl Marx, as he struggled to understand the symbolic importance of money in terms of its power to represent alienation and objectification, indicate a possible way of developing further understanding. The paper illustrates some of these points with two clinical case discussions.