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Most readers of this book review know David Tuckett as the former Editor in Chief of this Journal. But, in Minding The Markets, Professor Tuckett tells us he is trained in economics and sociology as well as psychoanalysis. As one reads on, Tuckett makes strategic references to Neil Smelser and Talcott Parsons, two true giants in the recent history of the social sciences. Smelser, in fact, is also a fully trained psychoanalyst. In so doing Tuckett places himself in a dauntingly demanding tradition of interdisciplinary research involving economics, sociology, and psychology so, when we read this book and become familiar with the theory of mind and thinking he has defined to explain the way financial markets work, we realize that he set the bar very high for himself, and has cleared it admirably.
The focus of this book is on understanding the financial crisis of 2008 although the study began in 2006. Thus, and fortuitously, I infer that this effort was not motivated by the self-conscious goal of preventing a future, catastrophic financial collapse. In a sense that gives the effort more credibility: it was not driven by what we clinicians might refer to as a grandiose rescue fantasy.
Tuckett's investigation is an effort to understand a human system in terms of the nuanced interplay of individual and collective conscious and unconscious motivations, and the conventions and rules governing and influencing the group behaviors of the community of financial professionals. He explains that standard economic theory rests on the work of Adam Smith, and the view that markets are efficient and self-correcting, because the people who