04/10/2017 Money and Higher Things | The Book of Life

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CHAPTER 1: CAPITALISM: GOOD CAPITALISM

Money and Higher Things

In his consulting room at Berggasse 19, in central Vienna, Sigmund Freud came to an
important realisation about money. The great majority of his clients were drawn from
the Austrian upper middle classes: they were civil servants, engineers, university
professors and business owners. Money was not typically a problem for them. Yet
when it came to paying for the hour-long sessions with him, they displayed repeated
resistance: they would claim to have forgotten their wallets and purses, they explained
of not having the right change (Freud always requested cash) or vowed to pay at a later,
constantly-deferred date. Beneath these local complaints, Freud sensed a larger, more
congenital problem: in his clients eyes, it was seemingly incorrect to be asked to hand
over payment for something as intimate as the time they had spent talking about their
desires, emotions and vulnerabilities.

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04/10/2017 Money and Higher Things | The Book of Life

This reluctance fascinated Freud, who came to see it as symptomatic of a ra of

society-wide neuroses around money. In a bid to trace these back to their origins, he
pointed out that we all emerge into the world in settings where we do not at rst
have to pay to be looked aer. Food, lodging and education along with the tenderest,
most nourishing kinds of love are given to us freely in our infancies. Only gradually are
we introduced to the complicated notion that a lot of what we need is henceforth
going to have to be bought. In certain areas, we accept this without trouble: we do not
begrudge the baker for asking us to pay for our bread or the plumber for sending us an
invoice for the washer. But we retain a background expectation that some things
should remain outside of commerce in particular, the things we associate with our
higher and most meaningful needs: the need for love, comfort, understanding,
consolation, guidance and friendship. The arts, the natural home of the higher things,
are a particular focus of our suspicions: so much so that it is customary to be
dismissive of an artist who is overly direct in asking for money or a serious thinker
whose books are conspicuously successful. We seem resistant to the notion that what
is dignied and meaningful could at the same time be marketed and sold on a
commercially protable basis.

Freud speculated that this hostility to money had only increased since the Industrial
Revolution and the birth of a consumer society. The more the nancial motive had
become prevalent in the world at large, the more the guardians of the spiritual side of
existence had retreated into a defensive position. They expected themselves and
were expected by others to keep at bay from the commercial arena in order to
vouchsafe their purity. The myth of the poor yet great artist was the particular hang-
up of the modern era contrary to the evidence of previous centuries that had not
begrudged Leonardo da Vinci for his aggressive demands for payment or Titian for
amassing a fortune as large as that of a successful Venetian merchant.

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Freud cast his characteristically suspicious eye over our nancial taboos, remarking,
Money will be treated by cultured people in the same manner as sexual matters, with
the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy. As a Jew, he couldnt forget the
viciousness with which Christianity had traditionally ascribed an interest in money to
his own religion, projecting troubling desires onto a convenient scapegoat.

Freud sought an evolution in our nancial attitudes. At a practical level, he wanted his
new profession psychoanalysis to enjoy respectability as a healing activity and at
the same time, wished for it to acquire an economic strength that would give it the
means to alter society on a large scale. He didnt want psychoanalysis to remain a
hobby for diletantes. He sought for it to become one of the most important industries
of the 20th century (he was a notable admirer of the entrepreneurial spirit of Henry
Ford). He was therefore deliberately straightforward in requesting money from
clients, no less so than a lawyer or a hotelier to the extent that if a client didnt show
up, he had no compunction about pressing them to pay for the session nevertheless:
A certain hour of my available working day is appointed to each patient; it is his, and
he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it.

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At the level of the unconscious, Freud saw parallels between our troubles around
money and around sex. Just as the sexual neurotic was, for Freud, someone who could
not accept the essential legitimacy of their own impulses, and hence disowned or
repressed them at great psychic cost to themselves, so the nancial neurotic felt
compelled to degrade money while idealising the non-commercial realm, thereby
depriving the latter of strength and power. In both cases, health involved integration
and reconciliation: a robust acceptance that one might be sexual and civilised, or
nancially-concerned and spiritually sophisticated. The mature person would not
insist that someone who oered them a service related to their higher needs had to do
so with blithe disregard to everything material as their parent had appeared
(through infant eyes) to do in their earliest years. The nancially evolved person could
accept in a sanguine spirit that the analyst might combine a capacity to care for them
with a due regard for their own interest. There was a madonna-whore dichotomy to be
overcome around money as well as around sex. The most valuable things could be
traded without being sullied.

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Freud did not succeed. Psychoanalysis remains a cottage industry. Most of its
practitioners, and many of its clients, continue to feel awkward around the
commercial aspects of the eld. The nail-bar business generates, in the United States,
some y times more prot every year than psychoanalysis. But we can thank Freud
for putting his nger on an unnecessary hang-up which matters because, stretching
across society, it diminishes the ambitions that are brought to commerce while
weakening the worldliness and competence of those committed to psychological
ourishing. As Freud understood, societal and individual health depends on the
development of a sanguine faith that what is most spiritually signicant for us can
also, at no catastrophic cost, be subject to the disciplines and animal spirits of the
business world.

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