Among the fables told by Aesop, the gifted Greek storyteller of ancient times (circa 620 BC) is the story of the farmer who found a goose that laid a golden egg each day. Initially jubilant at his good fortune, the farmer soon felt unable to wait 24 hours for the next egg to arrive. He imagined that the goose had hundreds of eggs inside her but was stingy in doling out the wealth. The farmer grew restless and wanted all the gold immediately. He cut the goose open but found no gold inside it. All that happened was the goose died and the farmer lost the daily nugget of riches that was assured to him. In this brief tale, Aesop elegantly addressed the co-existence of enormous hunger, impatience, inconsolability, a defective sense of empathy, and ingratitude towards one's benefactors. It is this constellation of descriptive and dynamic features that are subsumed under the rubric of greed.
The dictionary definition of greed is “excessive and reprehensible acquisitiveness.” The first qualifier, “excessive,” suggests acquisitiveness is to be termed greed only after it exceeds a certain threshold but does not specify what that threshold is and how and by whom it has been set up. The second qualifier, “reprehensible,” posits greed lacks dignity, is perhaps immoral, and something to be looked down upon but does not reveal why greed deserves such derision. Left in a phenomenological morass, we open our eyes wider and discover what we call “greed” is actually a complex set of affects, attitudes and fantasies lumped together.
The primary manifestation of greed is an excessive and unrelenting desire to acquire and possess goods. Its excessive nature is revealed by the fact that the quantity of goods desired far surpasses actual need as well as by its exaggerated quality when compared to the desires of others. Its unrelenting nature is revealed by the fact that the individual afflicted by it is momentarily pleased with the attainment of supplies and then becomes unsatisfied, empty and inconsolable. While out of proportion with reality, desires associated with greed are subjectively experienced as “needs.” And, since psychic needs, as opposed to wishes, do not carry the burden of intentionality, experiencing greedy desires as needs confers upon them an aura of justifiability. Thus, entitlement comes to be a third feature of greed, along with excessive desire and inconsolability.
The realms in which greed can manifest itself vary greatly. Food and money are the most prominent of these. Overeating that leaves one physically bloated but psychically unsatisfied is a telltale sign of greed. Similarly, an insatiable desire to amass wealth, regardless of its instinctual origins in oral acquisitiveness or, as Otto Fenichel declared, in anal retentiveness, gives evidence of greed as a character trait. Sex is another area where the operation of greed is frequently discernible.
Alongside the three primary features of greed, i.e., excessive desire, inconsolability, entitlement, exist certain other manifestations. Prominent among these are a constant sense of hurry, ingratitude, defects of empathy and corruption of superego functions. Hurrying is a frequent accompaniment of greed, since to be able to wait means tolerating less-than-full states of body and mind. Waiting for supplies also implies taking turns, sharing with others, and believing in a less than magical regeneration of goods. The greedy individual insists upon sustained fullness and cannot tolerate temporal gaps in the appearance of supplies; impatience is the twin sister of avarice.
Ingratitude is also a frequent accompaniment of greed. Called the “marble-hearted fiend” by Shakespeare, ingratitude is, in essence, a refusal to acknowledge that one has received goodness, love and material supplies from others. No amount of indulgence appears enough to the one incapable of gratitude. Inwardly measuring every favor against the “debt” owed to him due to childhood deprivation, such an individual remains thankless to his benefactors. Constant yearning for supplies leads to pushing others aside and losing contact with their needs and rights. This indifference to fellow human beings is most likely the reason greed is deemed “reprehensible.” Moreover, such defective empathy has a boomerang effect insofar as others gradually begin to avoid the greedy person. He or she loses the respect of family members and is ostracized. The resulting loneliness increases his insatiable need for love and materials goods.
Greed can be rendered unconscious by defensive operations of the ego due to moral condemnation from within and/or due to the need to safeguard a lofty self-image.
Salman Akhtar, M.D., is professor of psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; training and supervising analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia; author of 72 books, most recently, Sources of Suffering: Fear, Greed, Guilt, Deception, Betrayal, and Revenge (Karnac Books, 2014).
Four common defenses deployed against greed are repression, reaction formation, splitting, and projective identification. By the use of repression, longings felt to be greedy are sent into psychic exile, but hints of greed continue to appear in parapraxes and dreams. Moreover, the individual who has repressed his own greed feels exquisitely uncomfortable at encountering the attitude in others and might even equate their healthy appetites with avarice. Reaction formation against greed can give rise to unrelenting generosity, which involves excessive and incessant giving to others.
Another distortion occurs when self-representations tinged with greed are held in abeyance via the mechanism of vertical splitting. As a result, the individual alternately acts out the contradictory attitudes of being greedy and being not greedy. He seems rational and well regulated in his appetites and then, to everyone's surprise, suddenly turns greedy. Sequestered avarice of this sort can also undergo projective identification and lead to the perception of others being greedy. When this happens, desires and demands of others are looked at with suspicion; even if those wishes are, in fact, realistic. At times, others (especially the spouse and children) are unconsciously manipulated to live out one's own repudiated greed. Scorn and contempt can then be directed at them. The deposition of one's greedy self-representation onto others can also result in uncanny empathy with their acquisitiveness and fear of being devoured by them.
…lurking behind the patient's inconsolable hunger is the void of desperation and feeling utterly unlovable.
All this impacts upon the clinical situation. Manifestations of the patient's greed can be crude or subtle and include struggles over payment of fees, sensitivity to the slightest lateness of the analyst, wishes for longer and more frequent sessions, and frequent contact-seeking between appointments (e.g., by phone, email). Malignant erotic transference, with its characteristic coercive quality, also is a manifestation of greed. To be sure, factors other than greed (e.g., mental pain, unbearable amounts of loneliness) can play an etiologic role in such developments but greed is often at their center. The same is true of the patient's hatred of the analyst's other patients; the analytic breast is not allowed to feed anyone else. Needless to say, the patient's greed extracts a heavy toll from the analyst's poise and patience. The risk of moral judgment becomes great under such circumstances. This risk can only be avoided if the analyst holds on to the awareness that lurking behind the patient's inconsolable hunger is the void of desperation and feeling utterly unlovable.
The hunger for more coupled with intense oral aggression makes internalization and retention of good objects (including the analyst) difficult. Prognosis is better for patients who are consciously aware of their greed and can even muster a bit of self-reflective humor about their malady. Prognosis is worse when the patient is oblivious to his greed and its destructive impact upon others. Analytic work in such cases has to continually oscillate between affirmative and interpretive interventions. On the former front, the analyst must empathize with and validate the patient's agony and desperation. On the latter front, the analyst must point out the sadomasochistic destructiveness in the patient's reducing his interventions to excrement: inert, offensive, and useless. Both maneuvers are ultimately aimed at helping the patient transform his greed into appetite. However, this work is not easy. The patient often misconstrues overtures of validation and alliance as throwing crumbs and mercilessly devalues the analyst's efforts. Silence is found unbearable and speaking useless. In such an environment, the potential for negative therapeutic reaction is great and the analyst might be better off focusing upon what did not happen in the course of the patient's development than what did.
It is also helpful to remember the patient is not alone in bringing the hues of greed into the clinical situation. The analyst contributes to it, too. An excessively austere style of intervening on the analyst's part can stoke the fires of greed in the patient. Such co-creation needs to be acknowledged, rectified, and then handled in an interpretative manner On a gross level, the analyst's greed becomes evident via an exorbitant fee, ostentatiously decorated office, overly-packed clinical schedule, and refusal to consider retirement even upon becoming old and infirm. Sadly, none of these attributes are rare among psychoanalysts and seem to have become more pervasive as analytic patients become scarce, insurance companies shirk reimbursements, and the monetary wellspring of academia dries up. On a subtler level, the analyst's greed is stirred up in response to the patient's seduction, the idealization of interpretive prowess, and from what I call “interpretive greed.” Dedicated to analytic work and idealizing of interpretation as the centerpiece of his clinical enterprise, the analyst might interpret excessively, too deeply or prematurely. The fact is the analyst has to make choices of not only what to address in a session but also of what to leave untouched. Such titration of dosage, timing and even the very offer of interpretation is what makes analytic work forever challenging. Adam Limentani's quip that “psychoanalysis is an art and for this reason it needs discipline” is pertinent in this context. The art consists of both interpreting and not interpreting. Interpretive appetite is good, analytic greed is not.