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.”