What does Money Promise You?

Money doesn’t satisfy us because money doesn’t satisfy small children. This is essentially what Freud believed, that money can be a substitution, but no more than that, a substitution for our original deeper satisfactions, such as being loved, caressed and held.

During a talk I listened to London a few years ago, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips described the encounter of a child psychotherapist’s first meeting with the father of a child who didn’t speak.  “Ask any price you want”, the father said.  “My son doesn’t talk.  So do whatever you want as long as you make him talk.  And then let’s not talk about it”. What is implicated here is of course an assumption of what money can do and that by applying as much of it as is necessary, the son will be healed. He will speak. One may also read that the father is handing over the responsibility of parenting, to a paid professional who is assumed to have the skills necessary to make the son speak.

If as this father implies, money can make a child speak, and presumably the more of it, the more the child will speak, what else might money do?  What else does money promise by the way of such bribes? Money has a central role in the human game of fantasy and promising futures.  Through money, we make our dreams.  Money lays out before us a tapestry of fantasy lives on offer. Money fills and makes for acceptable conversations with others.  We literally share our dreams.  Yet for many people, financial wealth brings its own problems. It breeds greed, rivalry, envy, competitiveness and often a wrenching sense that there is always someone who has more. The more we have, the more we want.  It is used by psychologically unavailable parents to substitute love and care. It is a cover for childhood wounds, the narcissistic injury of neglect, wrapped in a bandage of accumulated possesses and property, that say “look at me”. It promises that we are invincible, that nothing can hurt us if we have “enough”.  For a moment, that expensive dress makes us feel pretty.  Then within hours a voice in the back of our mind reminds us we have a 40 inch waist. Money promises and often fails.  It creates lonely partitions between what V.S. Naipaul called the traditional “temple-goer” generation in India and their “green card” absent offspring.  Money promises, but without a money-back guarantee. We trade time for money and postpone time now, for future time. With low self-esteem, money is a way of displaying I am winning at the game of life. 

Money may buy us the security of a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, but it is a limited when it comes to a broader definition of wealth. We chase it and defer other things, sometimes to the point where we forget what those other things are. We know that compulsive shopping and high spending is linked with depression. Excessively pursuing money at the expense of other things, hints at low self-esteem and possession by rather than of money.  Privileged children from wealthy families or in cosseted relationships rarely get to test their ability to function successfully and independently in the world.  They wrinkle and age like the rest of us, yet there is a sense that they haven’t got out from underneath something, perhaps their parents. The important human developmental challenges are held at bay, just as Peter Pan’s trajectory of growing up was incomplete.  Well intentioned parents, who say suffered the trauma of Partition, want a better life for their children, fewer challenges, that they don’t suffer the miseries of trying and failing, yet inevitably that often means missing out on the opportunities to test and discover our unique talents.   

The way in which money is played out in India as a ‘symptom’, a disguise for other deeper wish fulfilment, appears to be in the numerous family disputes and contested ownership of property. Undoubtedly, an exquisite aspect of the Indian extended family is the genuine respect for elders.  Indian families don’t generally outsource their elderly as we of the West often do. Yet what is striking, is the real challenges within many of the Bombay families to negotiate their disputes with one another. Every day, it seems there is a familial dispute debated in the press: contested property, fights over land and legacy.  Rarely a day passes in social Mumbai without some reference to someone’s family fight. In place of adult, logical negotiation, there appears to be a shocking willingness to exact revenge within the family and be the “winner”.  The roots of this, is might be envy and rivalry that is set up early-on in a child’s life. Rivalry tolerates no sharing. Children, who in the family system are pitched against one another, as I have heard in the consulting room here in Mumbai, were literally graded as young children as a “B”, compared to the other brother who gets a “C”.  These grades are not for their achievements, but for who they are as children. No doubt these are well intentioned parents hoping to spur their children to higher levels of achievement.  But the competition is externalised in a battle between siblings, rather than a competition with oneself, where the child is encouraged to ask, “Could I do better?”  What this clearly does, is establishes a rivalry and revenge dynamic that without some psychological curiosity, will continue through adulthood and deeper into the law courts.   

The template for what is “normal” sharing and ways of negotiating with others is learned when we are children within the family, particularly with the primary care-giver, the mother.  The mother-child relationship is full of negotiating needs.  The mother wants to sleep the baby wants attention and so on.  According to attachment theory, the most scientific offshoot of psychoanalysis, “The ability to negotiate” is one of the four key components of intimacy (the others are the ability to 2. seek care, 3. give care and 4. be independent & autonomous).  When a child experiences productive negotiations, their right to have wishes and preferences, or not attacked when their wishes are different, the child is likely to develop a sense of security. Sadly, many people negotiate through lawyers or with their fists or by merely shouting and repeating their demands. 

Intimacy is about our deepest, innermost nature. It is about knowing what you are feeling.  The pursuit of money, just like the pursuit of the highest grading in the sibling dynamic for the approval and affection of care-givers, requires wearing a mask in a game of pretend and make-believe in order to gain that childish pleasure of feeling loved and cherished. Only through educating ourselves so that we actually know what we are feeling, can we make money work for us as a positive energy in our lives.  

More money doesn’t equal more life. Better conversations, words and deeds that tickle us, show that we are deeply cared for may just equal richer lives. Certainly, harmonious and intimate family relations are a sign not only of secure character, but of wealth that is childishly abundant. Elizabeth Kubler Ross interviewed 20,000 people in the days and hours before their death.  In her numerous books, she reported that all these dying people want the same thing, intimacy.  She once asked us, “Don’t tell me what you want to do, what money you want, tell me what you ache for.”

The Cosmopolitan Leader

To be cosmopolitan is to be willing to violate your own understanding. This is of course quite contrary to the civilizing mission of an imperialist version that we witness, say, at the roots of America’s claims of fundamental rights to global leadership.  To be cosmopolitan is not to say I will care for you, show you respect if you in return say become a Christian, or some other fundamentalist  version of “be like me, do as I say, then you will be acceptable”. The cosmopolitan citizen is inclined to be more troubled about themselves:  to ask, “Am I being sufficiently responsible towards the others I share this world with?” and “How can I make judgements about other people’s actions without disturbing and recognising my own cracked lenses and fractured perception of the world?”

I once wore a burka for the day.  It is a memorably sensual day.  To the world, I only revealed my greenish blue eyes and my hands. Everything else was covered. It was an experiment, an attempt at locating a momentary sense of “otherness”.  As I walked around, I realised that hidden, I could perhaps wear anything underneath my cloth screen, and found teasing myself, wondering what that might be. As to anyone who may be given the right to see beneath this veiled me, I imagined a profoundly intimate and sacred encounter,   a potent sense of literally and privately being unveiled.  It was through this experience that I gained a hint of what some Muslim friends feel, that the contemporary Western expectation to be made-up, dressed-up, revealing one’s body, is perhaps no less repressive (dare I say more oppressive?) than the wearing of a burka is so lazily interpreted.

Here in Bombay many faiths and cultures commingle, creating a profoundly secular ambience.  Yet none of us can entirely rid ourselves of dogma, the legacy of childhood injuries, or the influence of a skewed and dogmatic media. When I was looking for an apartment in Bombay, certain buildings were off limits.  “Only Parsi’s in this building”, said the real estate agent, “Sorry we can’t look at this place, it’s no foreigners”.  The intermingling is necessarily and invariably conditional.

As a foreigner, a foreign psychologist here, I am often asked to help build the international capability of leaders.  As one CEO put it, when he asked me to work with one of his senior guys, “He doesn’t travel well, he’s just not cosmopolitan”.  Of course the man he described is well travelled as his wallet bulging with “One World” and “Global Elite Club” airline cards suggests.  He is if you like, cosmopolitan in a banal and parochial sense: his travels in London, in New York, are in the ghetto.  He simply spends all of his time, wherever he is in the world, with other Indian friends from Bombay.  This ghettoising is the greatest challenge to a sense of global citizenship, a retreat into a form of “interior exile” as Salman Rushdie puts it.

As the CEO and I explore what we actually mean by “To be cosmopolitan”, we play with the idea that it is a commitment of intention, to be loyal to a larger sense of “we” than merely one’s nation, one’s neighbourhood, one’s insular mind-set. It begs if you like, for some interior and lived state of global citizenship.  “Do you see any signs that he is curious about other cultures, beyond the banal things like trying pasta?” I ask the CEO.  At the heart of it, as many writers such as Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha remind us, there is a deeply moral dimension in cosmopolitanism, a moral attitude toward the world. It requires curiosity and the suspension of quick judgments.  “Not really”, replies the CEO.  “What about self-reflection?”  I ask, “Any signs, such as asking you for feedback, or pointing out ways he needs to develop?” Limply, he replies, “No, not really”.

To be cosmopolitan demands the difficult work of self-examination.  It calls for a commitment to distinguishing facts from cultural assumptions.  It asks us to assume friendship with that which may feel deeply foreign, disorientating and to open-up to the ‘other’. It is an orientation towards the world that requires the exhausting effort of thinking, to explore what is, what might be universal, as Mendieta puts it, which must be “rearticulated, defended, expanded and made concrete”.   It suggests the idea of the universal right and wrong, beyond the particular, must always be “held in suspension” to borrow Judith Butler’s words.  It must never be concrete.

In speech, cosmopolitanism requires a framing in language, a disclosure of one’s position, one’s particularist lense on affairs, therefore revealing, owning up to, and giving recognition that my view is not absolute and always conditional. Again, like the last blog, I am making a bid that liberation exists in the language we choose; language that only can only develop and expand through some sort of deep commitment to learning. It speaks of “The way I see it, is”, “From my perspective”, “I notice that I don’t see this in the way you do”. To be cosmopolitan is to use better words, and sentences that open up dialogue rather than shut it down. It is to invite dialogue; to have the self-confidence that one’s own perspective can be interrupted, even expanded in listening to the response of the other.

I have a reflexive aversion to degrading and hostile jokes about any nation.  Since the death of Bin Laden, I have heard insidious jokes in Bombay about people from Pakistan. What I notice, is that they are spewed up on unsuspecting listener like myself (no “would you like to hear a joke?”), by men (always) with the bursting hostility of an adolescent boy struggling with his sexuality.  They are invariably performed by the people who appear to have travelled far from their locality only externally with their “One World” airline card, but clearly without using any miles or effort to travel in the interior world of themselves. They are often accompanied by highly offensive jokes about women as merely body parts. To reiterate the jokes here would be in some sense to collude with degrading others.  They are I sense, noting my reaction, a passive aggressive invitation to a fight. Such jokes, according to Freud satisfy our aggressive impulses and provide the “pleasure of saving” much real thought.  Lazy, non-thought, is the absolute enemy of the cosmopolitan, as is any form of racism whatever shape or form it takes.

I ask the CEO, “How does your guy get along with women?”  “What’s that got to do with him being more cosmopolitan?” he asked.  “Isn’t the first ‘other’ a man encounters a woman?”  He is deafeningly quiet.  After some time he says, “He’s very abrupt, I suppose rude in fact. In fact, every woman in his team has left.   But you know it’s different in India”. “Then best keep him here,” I suggest, “I can’t see him travelling well at all”.    

Creativity & Boredom

Creative states are states of fantasy. We break with the comfortable allure of the tribe; produce mental jumps, reach to a point where rational thinking alone falters; where the brain has to give up a bit and something else, something far more riddle-some enters the essence of our being.

Imagine yourself sitting in the back of your car gazing at the passing events through the window. The Banyan tree reminds you of your first girlfriend’s hair. You notice a man arranging flowers on the wooden table of his stall is wearing trousers just like those worn on your graduation day. The three legged stray dogs are playfully fighting near the temple, as a man with a peculiarly large bottom walks his equally obese Labrador. They appear to be unhappy. Somehow you are reminded of your boss and that short English teacher at school and his sadistic cane. You toss away the niggling feeling that you are jealous of stray dogs. Meandering in your thoughts, you are “Free Associating”, to coin a psychoanalytic term, laying down random tracks, not so much, ‘x follows y, follows z’, more a detour that ‘x and y and x and ….’. What do you then do? Pick up your phone and distract yourself, or sit a little longer and get curious about what these creative associations might be hinting at? In short, do you allow yourself to pause?

In “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud teases and circles around our “involuntary ideas”, implying creativity as a kind of dream-state, a relaxation of the internal rational censor that controls the imagination. The brilliant psychoanalytic scholar, Jacqueline Rose describes that as a writer, she chooses her themes, from Peter Pan, to the Israel-Palestine conflict, “because I need to understand something and don't. It’s about going to a place of difficulty, feeling one's way around it, seeing if you can survive by creating some sort of order out of it".

Psychoanalysis is itself a form of freedom and creativity. It is a disturbance. It breaks the fixtures and fittings. It legitimizes looking out the window. The consulting room is a space to pause. Through words we represent ourselves and by listening to ourselves, we hear the stories of possibility and limitation we place on ourselves. Creative language - read poetic language - is always musical and rarely conditional. The language we use, our self- medicating stories, are simultaneously inside and outside ourselves. “Daddy, it’s raining up my nose”, says my friend’s daughter after her first taste of fizzy lemonade. Yet we adorn ourselves with ready-to-wear figures of speech, commonsensical platitudes as though obedience to clipped verbal conformity will protect us from something. Boredom comes where we are tired of our own words. We need a new narrative. What is it that is so dangerous if we loosen-up the words that rigidify ourselves? What disturbance may occur if we bring a little jazz into the story, loosen-up the mutterings about ourselves and our world? To be in a creative state is to redirect, to twist, to drift, to meander away from the absolute, the strictures of linguistic certainty.

What then happens if we dare seek out the dissenting voice that hovers in the landscape of inside and outside? Without listening to the hints, what might the three legged dogs be really playing with for example, we risk rigidifying our identity, “I am x but I am not y”, closing off, placing limits on ourselves and writing limited stories on what we experience. It’s a short autobiography that reads “Hindu, male, married, bored in a corporation”. If we dare to experiment with “having a whole wardrobe of identities”, as Amartya Sen puts it, we open possibilities for being less bored and a richer autobiography. A British woman at the Breach Candy Club, a former colonial club that once barred Indians interests me (read doesn’t bore me) with her experimentations in living. It is her second week in Mumbai when she goes to the morgue to see a body burned, “I want to know what I experience, how it affects me. I do all sorts of things to feel alive”. Leadership of our lives, or any endeavor requires creativity: leadership that gives hope, vitality, a sense of belonging and meaning. A half whispered concern I hear is the self-accusation by leaders that “I am a bit boring”. Being boring is living in language that is full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, the traffic of creative opportunities and new experiences faces a stop sign, a halt. Perhaps it is more apt to say that “I am boring myself, me, with the same words”, representing through my communication, a disregard in commitment to my own happiness, and well-being.

The difficulty I am drawn to, where I am willingly lose my bearings, is Partition; the partition with a capital “P”, that signifies the brutal division of India and the creation of Pakistan. I associate it with the everyday partitions we bear, albeit on an unbearable scale: the painful loses that come with divisions between people; the displacement from village to city that lives on, the odious lines we draw within ourselves between the prohibitive voices that pass for the truth and the daring thoughts that arise in moments of pondering. The partition of words we allow ourselves to use and those we make off-limits and keep us being bored.

How to even think about trauma and legacy of Partition, or to think about anything creatively through language and in language, poses a challenge and a threat. As lethal and transformative this division of a people was, it is profoundly difficult to speak, to write about, without disappearing in reductive and simplistic categories of victim and persecutor. Yet the same can be said of everyday ordinary living. How to speak of ourselves as more than the victimised by some force or other, be it government, the corporate structure of the business or the husband or wife that doesn’t show-up the way we want them too. We use them to stop entering a creative space, to prevent disturbing ourselves and holding the threat of failure at bay.

Opening up our language, noticing how speech distributes power, refusing to resist self-awareness by locking ourselves in corsets of words, contaminated by endless repetition of the same ways of communicating, we find ourselves making the risky manoeuvre of saying “and”, saying “but”. Psychoanalysis is then a maker of new sentences. Freud, of course, from his earliest writings associated creativity with mourning – adjustment to loss – a way of averting sorrows, boredom, and depression in a subtle, yet forceful determination to fight for the vibrancies of living. That is what it means to be creative. But we have to be willing to be disturbed. Surely it can’t be as bad as being bored.

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