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Money permeates humanity. It is involved in personal, social, domestic, and global affairs. Sociopolitical movements are born out of financial woes. Economic issues trump educational, environmental, and even military concerns within the political landscape. Contradiction is the rule: alongside today's dire economic conditions is the growing opulence seen in entertainment and pop culture, with pseudocelebrities gratuitously displaying their presumptive wealth. Society exhibits a stark conflict-overtly denouncing such sumptuousness though idolatrizing the same “reprehensive” exhibitionism.
The conflict is mimicked by the relationship psychoanalysis has with money. Psychodynamic clinicians-as with our nonanalytic counterparts-engage in a paradoxical dance: keenly aware of yet apparently blind to money matters. Although psychoanalysis has commendably taken its talents outside the consulting room and into the social justice realm of which perceived economic grievances are a significant focus, experience-near therapeutic attention to finances remains relatively unexamined.
The dearth of attention to money is nothing new to psychoanalysis, with a mere smattering of historical scholarship devoted to the subject. Freud (1913/1958) touched on the vicissitudes of money, while Fenichel (1938) is credited with providing the first comprehensive psychoanalytic examination of money. Krueger's 1986 edited book The Last Taboo: Money as Symbol and Reality in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis is a “quiet classic”-brilliantly addressing the practical, interpersonal, and intrapsychic fiscal matters of both patients and analysts. However, Krueger's text has often been on the periphery of clinical training and has clearly lacked sufficient follow-up, both of which are idiomatic of the field's avoidance of money discussions.
Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (, Routledge) is a welcome and timely resource. Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman provide an edited text covering the broad domai