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The contributors to this book do us a great favor in calling our attention to the topic of money that, too often, lies in the shadows of clinical and theoretical discussions. An exploration of the conscious and unconscious meanings of money, its effect on treatment, and on transferences and countertransferences, is at the heart of this work.
When money talks in this very good book, it talks with a distinctly geographical accent. The authors all (except one) practice in New York City, one of the most expensive places in the word in which to live and work. The anxiety over money is palpable in many of these essays: how much one needs and how patient fees satisfy that need. The editors in their introduction talk openly of the effect on them and on their patients of the recent economic recession in the United States. They write: “We have been struck, even astonished, by how often and deeply our patients have been talking about money, about the effects of the Great Recession …” (p. xv). Therapists, too, they write, are talking about and are preoccupied with money.
I was somewhat surprised by this report as very few of my patients have been speaking at any length about their financial situation or the monetary crisis. In surveying some of my Boston colleagues, they also reported that money and the economic downturn were not primary issues for their patients. Was what the editors reported a phenomenon unique to New York City, the home of Wall Street - this obsession with money, the classification of patients as richer or poorer, patients who pay on time and those who don't? I doubt it, but, certainly, there are regional and national differences with the way people talk and think (or don't) about their own and others' finances.
With all the riches this book offers, one cannot help but feel some of its limitations. While the intrapsychic meanings of money (and the fee) for patient and therapist are well explored, a complex investigation of the structure of society and its relat