Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Nature of Money: Authority, Regulation of Standards, and the Law of the Father

Abstract

What is money? Although we use it every day, and although it determines our lives to a very high degree, we do not actually know what it is. And 'we' here does not just denote us ordinary citizens who are unfamiliar with the basic principle of economics, but also the scientists and specialists who should know better. As the author of a recent study on monetary policy in late Roman antiquity notes, historians have long pointed out that has assumed 'a bewildering variety of forms' throughout history--'from cowrie shells to cigarettes'. (1) At the same time, economists like to emphasise that can 'perform several different functions: medium of exchange, measure of value, unit of account, store of wealth and means of payment'. (2) Taken together, these different forms and functions make up such a complicated picture that scientists who try to describe it can only agree to disagree: 'a precise definition of the term money has long eluded the consensus of economists, historians and anthropologists'. (3) In what follows I want to suggest that psychoanalysis might join this ongoing discussion about the nature of money. The passage from Freud's work most commonly quoted with regard to is to be found in On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism (1917). Here Freud sets out from the observation that 'in the products of the unconscious spontaneous ideas, fantasies and symptoms--the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable'. (4) Analysing the relations between these interchangeable concepts, Freud claims that a certain infantile 'interest in faeces' is later--in the life of the adult--'continued partly as interest in money'. (5) From that it has sometimes been concluded that the analogy between faeces and makes up for an actual psychoanalytic theory of money. In my opinion, however, this is a rather weak theory. It is notable that Freud does not contribute to explaining how comes into being, but rather he describes a certain perception and reaction on the side of a child which is suddenly confronted with the 'gift' (6) of money. If there is any value to such an observation, I suspect, it might be with regard to the notion of the gift. In fact, the analogy between faeces and the gift is what Freud seems to be most interested in. He is not primarily concerned with money, but rather with an anthropological theory of the gift, as explored at around the same time by--among others--Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don (1924). Leaving aside these anthropological theories of the gift, I instead want to approach the question of from a different psychoanalytical angle--one that was established by Jean-Joseph Goux. In his book Freud, Marx: economie et symbolique (1973), Goux compares Marx's genealogy of the form with Freud's genealogy of the Oedipus complex. As is well known, Marx's model distinguishes four stages in a process that leads to the form, but for Goux it is particularly important what happens on the final stage. Here, Marx claims, a 'particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is [...] socially identified, [...] becomes the commodity, or serves as money'. (7) And, as he goes on to explain, for no apparent reason it was the precious metal of gold which took over this 'social function' of playing 'within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent'. (8) According to Goux, this very function of general equivalent is also present in Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex with regard to the social role played by the father: 'The father is the general equivalent of subjects, in the same way that gold is the general equivalent of products'. (9) More recently, in his book Frivolite de la valeur (2000), Goux has continued to examine the connection between the rise of the Freudian father and the rise of the form. Setting out from a variety of observations--such as the Ancient Greek notion of nomisma, which refers back to the law (nomos), or Aristotle's comparison between and the judge--Goux emphasises that implies a principle of unity, of centrality and of authority. …