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A by-now trite psychoanalytic saw asserts that it is easier for patients to speak about sex than money. This is no less true for many of us, their analysts. Blind spots, boundary violations, and ongoing enactments characterize many analyses in the context of the analyst working for a living and the patient paying her salary. Collusions of all kinds are fueled by the excitement and shame that money engenders in its ideational and affective links to various developmental substrates of character. The symbolic use of money bridges reality and fantasy with consistent persistence, and the fee is the one reminder, differently than the ending of the hour, of the analyst's reality as well as of the analysand's reality expectations.
One can safely assert that, for all analysts, the fee is an integral part of (counter) transferences to their patients; most analysts would readily acknowledge that the fee and its vicissitudes are frequently enmeshed in enactment. Ironically, it is perhaps this familiarity that helps account for the odd nature of the analytic literature on fees. The fee is mentioned routinely, almost automatically, in clinical narratives, thus making it near impossible to attempt a thorough review of its place in our literature. Although it is clear that the amount of the fee (reduced/full) is valuable information to include when presenting case material, there is a dearth of clinical pictures describing a set of actions, reactions, and enactments with the fee at center stage. Essentially, not enough time is spent considering the myriad ways in which the fee influences our clinical encounters, our theoretical biases, and our everyday assessment of ourselves and our work.
Money Talks importantly, interestingly, and intelligently helps fill the lacuna in our literature. It is timely and lively, in the way that all things universal are always au courant and vivid. This is a compilation of papers, each of which looks at the impact that analysts working for a living