Normative standards of affluence may function as a seductive ideal. Normative standards of affluence reflect a fantasy of material comfort that the ordinarily successful person possesses that enables him or her to live a happy life. Failing to live up to this standard evokes feelings of longing, resentment, envy, and shame. Yet attaining normative standards of affluence may be severely disillusioning. One discovers that in the compulsive pursuit of normative standards of affluence many other values may have been sadly sacrificed, leading to a sense of self-betrayal. This dynamic may be enacted in the analytic situation as bourgeois bohemian patients are treated by bourgeois bohemian analysts.