Money as Emotional Currency

The importance of money and our relationship to it is impossible to ignore in a decade defined by global economic crisis and financial instability. Integrating a psychoanalytic perspective with insights offered by economics, this book contributes to a debate that aims for a better understanding of money in its dual functioning – as an omnipresent component of our external reality, as well as powerful agent of our emotional responses.

The main argument proposed is that the intense and complex emotional charge that money can engender stems from the role that money has not so much in the external world, but in an internal economy ruled by phantasy, where every external transaction has an internal counterpart, whose impact is mysterious, deep and far-reaching.

The book explores the impact of the emotional undercurrent stirred by money from its beginnings in childhood to its consolidation into adult life, for individuals and society alike, and with an emphasis on ordinary development, rather than on pathology. Bringing together Freud’s seminal work with more recent applications of psychoanalytic thinking to financial markets, with Borges’ prose and Lacanian insights, this book crosses discipline and school boundaries with the aim of making new insights possible.