A Note on The Anal Character Traits of The Capitalistic Instinct

In his illuminating paper entitled The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money, Ferenczi states: “After what has been communicated, however, it is already not improbable that the capitalistic interest, increasing in correlation with development, stands not only at the disposal of practical, egotistic aims-of the reality principle, therefore-but also that the delight in gold and in the possession of money represents the symbolic replacement of, and the reaction formation to, repressed anal-erotism, i.e., that it satisfies the pleasure principle. The capitalistic instinct thus contains, according to our concept, an egotistic and an anal-erotic component”.

This viewpoint is clearly illustrated ih a recent newspaper account of the death of a capitalist of international fame, in which the character traits are sketched with skill and profundity worthy of a Lytton Strachey. This account is the more valuable because the character traits which are here delineated agree in nearly every respect with the usual conception of the anal character as revealed by psychoanalytic investigation. They could not have been better described if they had been subjected to analysis. A summary of the principal features of this sketch will show the relationship between anal-erotism, the interest in making money, and the so-called capitalistic instinct.

He found a peculiar pleasure in confiding the size of his fortune and the details of his vast industrial enterprises to all who would listen. He was very careless in his dress and would go about in the clothes of a workingman as sort of a reaction-formation to his vast fortune. In addition to the child-like pleasure in talking about his possessions, he also showed other childhood traits, such as a passion for novelties and toys, and in addition the writer of the newspaper article states that his egotism was no less pronounced than his juvenility and his love of toys. Another almost completely unsublimated