How Money Talks

Money speaks in everyday life and in literature of our greed and our generosity, our pride and our humiliation and as it passes among us it shows our creativity and our ability to co-operate even while it can also lead us to fight to the death. This book is for psychological therapists and for the general reader interested in human nature. Money has mattered since the first human attempts to symbolise value and enable people to wait for the return on their own labours. Since the financial crisis of 2008 its impact at a macro as well as a micro level is inescapable. It has become a means of exchange, much like language and has opened up social mobility to factors other than birth.This book looks at the origin of money and its history but most of all, what attitudes to money tell us about the way we connect to each other. The book begins with a fictional narrative of a woman who finds her own way through anxieties and guilt about money to a state of greater understanding about what it has meant in her career and her relationship with her husband. The second half of the book is a discussion of the wider meaning of money through its history and its current trajectory, as demonstrated by money in psychological therapy. The symbolic meaning of money has been familiar since Freud showed the small child's delight in achieving control. Carl Jung showed the alchemist's search for gold and its parallel in the work of the therapist. Jacques Lacan has given us new ways of theorising money and its attraction through following the ways in which we distort and change the signifiers of our communication, both those that we seek to hide and those that are in full view.