Melanie Klein, in her famous conceptualization of envy, did not devote the same level of attention to the phenomenon of greed. While envy may be more destructive, greed is arguably more basic to the human condition. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines greed as a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is actually needed. All of us, at some point in our personal lives, have encountered greedy people. Robert Waska, in several psychoanalytic papers, has described the subjective experiences of relentless craving and emptiness in patients who are consumed by greedy desires.
In the consulting room, a variety of patients with various forms of psychopathology can present with insatiable, problematic greed. They share a set of painful feelings associated with their inability to achieve satisfaction and a sense of desperation as they are perpetually overwhelmed by their desires. There is no single psychoanalytic formulation that can explain this common, complex human problem. Rather, each person's unique unconscious fantasies, defensive styles and core conflicts, patterns of object relations, attachment styles, and self-representations must be considered in order to arrive at an understanding of how and why greedy desires have become a central problem in their lives. A brief discussion of three different manifestations of greed will illustrate the range of psychodynamics that mediate overwhelming, insatiable desires.
In the classical analytic literature, early deprivation and/or an unsatisfactory resolution of the oral phase are implicated in causing a lifelong inability to achieve a sense of satisfaction. This leads to a constant craving for more—more money, more food, more clothing and more possessions. The developmental task of the oral stage is, largely, the person's ability to come to terms with the fact that he cannot have whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. Therefore, seen through the lens of classical theory, greed can be understood as an inadequately tamed expression of oral libido.
The fundamental conundrum of greed is that the emptiness and hunger that fuel greedy wishes are never satiated. After what is wished for has been acquired, the same emptiness and hunger now stimulate a fear of losing what has just been obtained. As a result, greedy patients are reluctant to share with others. They have trouble negotiating fairly, not just with professional colleagues but with friends and lovers. They may resent the analyst's fees, and indeed may resent spending money in general. The advent of self-psychology provided a new framework for understanding greed. Wealth and material possessions in our society represent power and success.
Therefore, patients who are narcissistically vulnerable due to their depleted self-representations often struggle with greedy desires. While they may superficially resemble patients who have difficulties with oral regression, the underlying dynamics and fantasies of narcissistically driven greed are different. Rather than coping with early physical and material deprivation, narcissistic patients are dealing with a flimsy sense of intrinsic worth as a person. They seek validation and admiration. Fine clothing, fancy cars and other accoutrements of material success are sought, not primarily for the intrinsic pleasure they provide but because they serve as representations of one's success, importance, and basic worth as a person. Patients with narcissistic problems are often also greedy in their quest for accomplishments and achievements in order to compensate for an inner sense of depletion and defectiveness. Therefore, they may be intensely driven for publications, awards, headlines or association with rich, powerful and famous people.
“Who is wealthy? The one who is satisfied with his portion.”
Psychoanalytic authors of various eras and theoretical orientations have described greed, normal and pathologic, in our desires for love and affection. Sigmund Freud recognized that our desires for love and affection can be greedy. In discussing his treatment of Dora, Freud described the sibling rivalry as a form of “greed for love” in the sense that the child resents having to share the affection and attention of his or her parents with other children in the family. Elizabeth Zetzel, in her well-known categorization of hysterics, described patients who are incapable of tolerating the fact the analyst has any relationships or meaningful connections with other people. In her opinion such patients are unanalyzable.
Nearly 50 years later, our sense of who can be helped with analytic treatment has greatly widened in scope. To the contrary, most analysts would now see greediness and possessiveness in love relationships as a major life problem serious enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment. When people cannot tolerate their lovers' friendships or attachments to their family of origin, this typically becomes a major source of distress for everyone involved. Both borderline and hysterical patients can be extremely greedy in their attempts to forge enduring connections to their love objects, in their real lives as well as with their analysts. Ronald Britton
Andrew B. Klafter, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Cincinnati. He serves on the teaching faculty of the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute and University of Cincinnati Residency Training Program. He resides in Cincinnati with his wife and four daughters.
distinguishes between the greedy love hysterical and borderline patients often express in the transference. In his view, hysterical patients demand the total devotion of the analyst and will not tolerate the possibility that the analyst has an erotic relationship with anyone else in the world; borderline patients demand a total, constant, unfaltering intersubjective merger and cannot tolerate any distractions or inconsistency in the analyst's attention or empathic understanding. This subtle difference is important for the analyst to understand as it signifies different forms of psychopathology calling for different types of interventions in treatment.
I will briefly describe an additional group of patients who, to my knowledge, has not been discussed in the psychoanalytic literature. I am referring to people who will not budge in any discussion or disagreement. They are greedy in that they refuse to ever concede a point, retract a position, rethink an opinion or acknowledge an opposing point of view may have merit. This includes individuals who are always more interested in winning a debate than enjoying a discussion or learning from someone with greater knowledge or a different perspective. When people are greedy about their opinions and beliefs, even minor decisions about where to eat or what movie to see may lead to bitterness and resentment. A discussion between parents about how to handle an issue in the family, where both parents are motivated to do what is best for their children, may easily transform into a nasty argument. In my experience, several very different personality types may express this type of greed, including obsessive-compulsive patients who fear losing control, narcissistically sensitive patients who are easily slighted, paranoid patients who feel attacked and cheated, as well as patients dealing with intense competitiveness and aggression.
Ultimately, patients with inordinate greed are suffering significantly in various aspects of their lives due to their inability to achieve a sense of peace or satisfaction. They need our understanding and deserve our professional expertise.