Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

XV. Filthy Lucre

xv Filthy Lucre Aurum in stercore quaero. -VIRGIL 1 I. Rationality and Irrationality O NE OF THE great stumbling blocks in the way of a psychoanalytical approach to money is the close connection between money and rationality. We may concede to psychoanalysis legitimate concern with the irrational; but what is more rational than Homo economicus? Of course we know that man is never Homo economicus, and therefore we might permit psychoanalysis to investigate human deviations from that ideal norm. But the psychoanalytical theorems about money question the rationality of the norm itself, of which money is the center. The connection between money thinking and rational thinking is so deeply ingrained in our practical lives that it seems impossible to question it; our practical experience is articulated in one whole school of economic theorists who define economics as the "science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." The disposal of scarce means among competing ends-what could be more rational than that? At a more philosophic level, sociology (on this point most elaborately articulated by Simmel) correctly says that money re-, flects and promotes a style of thinking which is abstract, impersonal , objective, and quantitative, that is to say, the style of thinking of modern science-and what can be more rational than that? 2 That the instinct of psychoanalysis-for it too has instincts which it represses-makes it want to attack the rationality of prudential calculation and quantitative science is an indubitable Filthy Lucre 235 but not widely advertised fact. It is concealed by the use of a quite naIve and traditional (therefore unpsychoanalytical) notion of the "reality-principle" and "reality-thinking." Behind this naIve notion of "reality-thinking" is Freud's unquestioning (he could not question everything) attitude to science, that Comtian attitude which saw man passing through the stages of magic and religion till it finally arrives at the scientific stage, where he is at last mature-i.e., where he has abandoned the pleasure-principle, has adapted himself to reality, and has learned to direct his libido toward real objects in the outer world.3 Behind this scientistic pose of the psychoanalyst lies the repressed problem of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis itself. There is a connection between money and what may be called quantifying rationality, and the psychoanalytical theorems on money make no sense if not brought into relation with the psychoanalytical critique of quantifying rationality. This critique is an integral, though awkward, theme throughout Freud's writings; it can be stated in terms of the early libido theory or in terms of the later ego theory. Freudian theory derives character from repressed perverse sexual trends; the prudential calculating character (the ideal type of Homo economicus) is an anal character.4 There are equivocations in the psychoanalytical literature; but taken strictly, the Freudian theory of the anal character-like classical economic theoryhas no room for the concept of an excessively prudential calculating disposition. Prudential calculation as such is an anal trait; the theory of the anal character is a theory of what Max Weber called the capitalist spirit, and not just of deviant exaggerations such as the miser. Hence psychoanalysis cannot honestly limit itself simply to offering an explanation of some curious excrescences on the money economy (such as currency-hoarding, or even such a major fetish as the gold standard). If it is both honest and courageous, psychoanalysis must frankly offer a psychology of the capitalist spirit as a whole. And its psychology of the capitalist spirit contains Simmel's notion of the affinity between the capitalist spirit and scientistic rationality. Freud derives "the desire for knowledge" from anal sources, saying that "it Part Five: STUDIES IN ANALITY is at bottom an offshoot, sublimated and raised to the intellectual sphere, of the possessive instinct." 5 And Ferenczi, the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis (and therefore at times the most profound), in his discussion of mathematics, says, "Thinking is after all only a means of preventing a squandering through action," so that thinking is only a "special expression of the tendency to economize," and as such has "its origin in analeroticism ." 6 Freud's later theory of the ego consolidates the doctrine that there is a significant irrational factor in areas of human behavior which we normally regard as in the domain of reason and consciousness. The core of the later theory of the ego is...