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Mrs Lesley Murdin, the current Chair of the Psychoanalytic Section of the Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling in the United Kingdom, has written an engaging, nuanced, clinically informed, and operationally useful exploration of the multivariate dimensions of money. In her introduction, Mrs Murdin tells us that the idea for the book stems from the recent and persistent global financial turmoil driven by greed, irresponsibility, moral laxity, and their many conscious and unconscious determinants. The first 82 pages of the book consist of a clinical case conducted by a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Margaret, and a patient, Alice. The case is fictional but informed by the actual clinical experiences of Mrs Murdin and others. To summarize the case of Alice briefly, she is in her mid-thirties, married to a man recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. She has no children and has just been promoted to the position of chief executive officer of a non-profit, human services program which regularly experiences financial vulnerability. She has multiple anxieties and insecurities including personal and professional financial concerns and issues, deriving from her childhood, her current private and marital life, and her job. She has never been in therapy and was referred by a friend to Margaret, an experienced psychoanalytic therapist.
The case as presented is a pleasure to read. One cares about the patient, the therapist, her techniques and the outcome of the therapeutic endeavor. It is what was once called a “page turner”. It provides details of the therapist's silences, minimalist interventions, transference and counter-transference behaviors, the handling of setting fees all provide subjects which are examined in depth in the later parts of the book. This examination is very rewarding in that as one reads the case, one is left wondering about many aspects of Margaret's (the therapist) clinical style. This is especially perturbing when, to varying degrees, it is not