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Is there an instinctual drive to amass wealth? There appears to be no possible doubt about this. We meet this drive every day and in widely varying degrees in different people. It can assume pathological forms, for example, in the miser, who in order to become rich foregoes the satisfaction of other more rational needs, or in the person who strives to become wealthy in order to ward off a fear of impoverishment and the like. The drive has normal forms; indeed a person in whom it is completely lacking will in our society be considered abnormal. It manifests itself actively as acquisitiveness (with the fundamental aim of taking money away from another in order to have it oneself), as well as passively—with the essential purpose of being supported on an oral level by the strength of others, represented by money.
If we remind ourselves that Freud in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes1 has rightly said: 'Now what instincts and how many should be postulated? There is obviously a great opportunity here for arbitrary choice. No objection can be made to anyone's employing the concept of an instinct of play or of destruction, or that of a social instinct, when the subject demands it and the limitations of psychological analysis allow of it'; then there can be no doubt that we may call this tendency to accumulate wealth an instinct.
Doubt can, however, exist concerning the genuineness of this instinct. I continue the above quotation from Freud: 'Nevertheless, we should not neglect to ask whether such instinctual motives, which are in one direction so highly specialized, do not admit of further analysis in respect to their sources, so that only those primal instincts which are not to be resolved further could really lay claim to the name.'