To the analyst, one of the most important aspects of human relations is the way in which the common wealth of a community is allocated to each of the community members. Such allocation reveals the masochism, the morality, the hostility, and the independence of those concerned, as any analyst will tell who has discussed the matter of fee with an analysand. The student of matters such as monetary rewards, the economist, thinks of his subject not in these terms but according to theories of the determination of value of quality or labor and of price.

In this book the author reveals how economic theories from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall, though apparently constructed by the pure glimmering of reason alone, actually were concocted by fears and desires old as mankind and hidden in the unconscious. Convincingly the author correlates the interaction of the worker with the